Hi everyone and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Sarah and I'm not joined this week by my usual co-host Helen because this is one of our special guest episodes and I'm delighted to welcome Jennifer Petrolieri. How did I do? Very well.

Okay, I've practiced that, everybody listening about five times because I was so worried about getting it wrong. I now feel like that's it. I feel so much more relaxed.

I've said it once and I don't really need to say your surname again.

And Jennifer has a book out called Couples That Work, How to Thrive in Love and at Work,

which I have to say, having immersed myself in this over the last three or four weeks,

the real risk with this podcast is it becomes

relationship counselling. So I'm going to try really hard to actually ask Jennifer lots of

questions and make sure this is relevant for all of us, not literally for me and my partner, Tom.

So a little bit of context about Jennifer. So we both went to university in the same place in

Nottingham. Amazing. And we were talking about Jennifer now lives actually over in France, just south of Paris,

where she's a teacher in Siyadh, doing lots of management programs, women in leadership

programs.

And you've actually worked across multiple continents in loads of different places.

So as much as this book is about lots of different couples, you've almost experienced

this for yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, part of a working couple and being all over the place. So yeah,

can strongly identify with the people in the research. And so your research is really extensive.

So six years, over 100 couples, kind of really in depth. Let's start with what do we mean by a dual

career couple? Because I think

that's almost, it's not a phrase I think people will use every day. So it's kind of good to

get the definition and for people listening to think, oh, is that me? Is that not me? Is that

everyone? Essentially, it's a couple in which both partners are created to their careers and

...