Knitch Magazine

There are many reasons why a husband and wife should not work together. Researchers in 1984 identified six of them:

1. strife caused by restricted job mobility;
2. excessive demands on each spouse's time and energy;
3. inability to separate professional and personal problems;
4. role conflicts;
5. spouse competitiveness;
6. bringing home work-related problems.*

I can add a seventh:

7. you don’t look so hot in a bright orange jumpsuit.

Yes, working together can at its best draw a couple closer together and at worst put you in a witness box where you’re swearing you didn’t know the crossbow was loaded.

When I entered the yarn business a few years ago to work with my husband I was surprised to discover how many married couples form business partnerships. Everywhere I looked I saw shop-owners, yarn manufacturers and distributing companies run by wife and husband teams. I thought this was unusual because most married couples I know say they’d rather have their eyes pierced with Blackthorn knitting needles than be together 24 hours a day…every day…for the rest of their lives.

Alex and have almost always worked together, so it was no big deal for me to quit my job in Corporate America to join him at Yarnmarket. We met on the job, we married on the job, we followed each other around from job to job to job, and we were so used to working together that we pretty much treated each other no better or no worse than any other colleague. In other words, we learned to ignore one another entirely while we went about doing whatever it was we wanted to do.

We were so completely dispassionate, so devoid of intimacy in our business dealings with one another that most people didn’t even realize we were married. (Of course, we made up for it when we got home. The kids used to roll their eyes and complain, “You two are just like teenagers!”)

On one particularly memorable occasion, many years ago, a co-worker came into my office for a discussion. As he spoke to me, I could see his eyes darting back-and-forth from me to a photo of Alex I kept on my desk. Over and over again, he looked at me and then at the picture. Deb. Alex. Deb. Alex. Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. He furrowed his brow and blurted out accusingly, “Are you dating Alex?”

“No, I’m not,” I calmly assured him. “I’ve been married to him for fourteen years.”

Now, I’ve got to admit that as much as we enjoy working together, we do have our occasional little run-ins. This is expected, and we don’t consider it any big deal…even if the staff are mortified to hear me say to him in calm, measured words, “You don’t like this brochure? You don’t like it?! Fine! I’m leaving you -- and I’m taking the Marketing Department with me!”

His immediate response of, “Good! Take the IT department with you, too!” guarantees that I’m not going anywhere. If you’ve ever worked with an IT department, you don’t have to wonder why.

It occurred to me that there are so many couples working together in the yarn industry that they must have found a way to get along at the office without killing each other at home…or vice versa. So I asked around to see how others make it work.

At Artyarns, Iris Schreier and her husband, Elliot (pictured right), say their biggest challenge is juggling the multitude of tasks involved in running a business. How do they manage working together without plotting one another’s demise?

“The best way to prevent our killing one another is to stay very separate. We each have our own responsibilities,” she says.

In all my discussions with couples, that seemed to be the most important “happiness factor.” You have very separate areas of responsibility. He does his thing; you do yours. But what if you don’t agree with a decision your dearly beloved has made?

“Elliot generally makes the final decision when we disagree on something,” says Iris. “And then I generally can get him to see my way at a later time, and have him change his mind as long as he thinks it was his decision.”

This is a tactic I try to use with Alex…except I could probably use a lesson in subtlety.

“Why’d you use yellow yarn in this ad?” Alex might ask.

“You told me to,” I lie.

“I did not,” he insists.

“Yes, you did!” I lie even more boldly. “I came into your office last Tuesday and you were busy going over a spreadsheet and I said, ‘What yarn should I use?’ and you said, ‘Yellow,” and I said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want.”

Alex can’t remember the conversation, and I can tell by the look on his face that he’s almost convinced…even though he’s pretty certain he wouldn’t choose yellow for an ad. Perhaps, he thinks, he was so busy he simply doesn’t recall.

“Okay...,” he mutters, reluctantly giving in to what he thinks must have been his previous decision.

Wallowing in my victory, I get carried away.

“And when I was leaving your office you told me to go shopping for some new clothes because you love me more than life itself and you want me to have an entirely new wardrobe,” I inform him, "from Paris."

It’s about at this point that I’m forced to sheepishly ask our photographer to please re-shoot the yarn in blue.

I asked Iris how she handles similar situations. What happens when she doesn’t convince Elliot of the great idea he never had?

“Cook dinner for yourself tonight, honey.”

Ahh…a woman after my own heart.

I know Iris is kidding because I’ve seen her and Elliot work together in their office, at trade shows, and we’ve even spent time with them sight-seeing in Europe. They’re just like Alex and me: madly in love after many years together, and so devoted to one another that a business disagreement doesn’t impact their personal relationship.

The same is true for Joanne Cole and her husband, Art, who have been married for over 40 years. They had separate careers before Joanne started representing yarn companies.

“It’s very different from the days in which we both had ‘day jobs,’” Joanne says. “I do like having Art with me to visit shops. While I work with the shop owner, he looks around and checks out what’s changed since the last visit. He’s very good at identifying yarns which haven’t moved. I then work with the shop owner to find the right project to boost the yarn out of the shop and into the hands of a happy customer!”

It’s a great combination. Joanne is catching up with the shop owner while Art is on a reconnaissance mission.

“I sit with the shop owner since I knit and have lots of projects to suggest with our vendors’ yarns. Art does what he calls ‘Sherpa Duty’ and brings the yarn cases and books from the car as needed. It can really speed up a shop visit.”

Having seen Joanne with her big, heavy cases of new yarns, I know how much Art’s help would be appreciated. She travels many, many miles each season visiting all the shops in her expansive mid-West territory.

“When we’re on the road, I’m either in the shop, focusing on the sales meeting with the shop owner, or I’m in the passenger seat as Art drives and I get to knit. Some of my best knitting time happens while Art drives.”

“Hmmm…” I wonder. “Who’s doing the navigating?”

When Alex and I travel, I’ve got map on my lap while I frantically search for street signs. It’s not a job I enjoy, but I do it even though I swear I aged fifteen years last September as I navigated him from the center of Paris to a highway at the outskirts of the city. Even now as I think about it, my palms begin to sweat and I get a nervous twitch.

I asked Joanne how she gets away with knitting in the car.

“Our navigation system, ‘Lynn,’ gives Art directions to the next shop. No map reading is needed, and I can serenely concentrate on my knitting.”

Ahh…that’s the life. Like me, Joanne has done her fair share of traveling alone on business, and she knows it isn’t much fun.

“If I’m alone, I’ll go to a local grocery store and buy food from the deli department. If I’m with Art, we have a nice dinner together,” she says. “It sure is nice to have someone to eat dinner with while I’m on the road.”

In my case, it’s the breakfast benefit I appreciate most. In the morning, while I’m trying unsuccessfully to hide my wrinkles with the newest anti-aging foundation that was invented in the past week, Alex goes to get me a cup of tea and whatever sweet breakfast treat he can forage.

I think that might be the greatest benefit of working together: when you travel on business with your husband, each trip feels like a mini-vacation.

“Both of us like good food,” Joanne says. “We enjoy finding good things to eat and places to eat them. Up north in Michigan there are all sorts of regional specialties – thimbleberry jam, whitefish, and other goodies. It’s fun to look around in places we wouldn’t otherwise go to, and find the local attractions. The regional food and meeting the local people is something we both enjoy and wouldn’t have a chance to do if we were simply tourists on vacation.”

Iris and Elliott rarely take more than a day or so extra on their business trips, but when they do they have a wonderful time exploring the riverfront of Cologne or the Tuscan countryside.

Alex and I do the same. On one trip to the Handerbeit trade show in Germany, we rented a car so we could visit the nearby town where Alex was born. He hadn’t been there since his infancy, so our business trip gave us the opportunity to explore his roots.

We grow closer together through shared experiences, which is important for every marriage.

Even though we might encounter role conflicts, we occasionally drag home our work-related problems, and we sometimes have a tough time separating professional and personal problems, I’d say there are a lot of advantages to being married to your job…or, at least, to your business partner or boss.

You feel the same sense of achievement when something goes right. You understand when the other one has a bad day. You share a common interest and common goals. And, sometimes, you even share an IP provider.

“We both travel with our laptops for our separate businesses,” Joanne says. “Hotels with a single LAN plug are not fun.”

Like Alex and I, who frequently butt heads over connectivity, Art and Joanne confess, “We don’t share computer access nicely.”

Yes, it’s fun to work and live together. Fun to travel on business. But there are those occasions when what stands between you, your husband and eternal bliss is a hotel with WIFI connections.

*Joe A. Cox, Kris K. Moore, Philip M. Van Auken; Working Couples in Small Business, Journal of Small Business Management, Vol. 22, 1984