“Do you think we should get a work divorce?” I asked Cody, furiously scribbling in my notebook about a client meeting.
“What do you mean?” he said as he flushed and looked up at me. “Honey, we literally just got the LLC paperwork filed with the IRS. We can’t quit now.”
It was April 2025, and Cody and I were still living out of suitcases after moving to Lisbon.
Both of us had recently been let go from our previous jobs within days of each other. In a fit of sweat and panic, we decided to really make a go of being entrepreneurs of our own micro-marketing agency. I’d bring nearly 15 years of experience in content and brand development and strategy, and he’d bring his project management skills, as well as manage the business’s finances. We’d be an unstoppable CMO/COO team.
It didn’t take long for the cracks to show.
I wondered if we would work well together
I had my doubts about working together from the outset; Cody knew this.
When we had full-time corporate jobs in the US, we’d run to each other to complain about things that would happen at work, as partners do. Something awkward happened in a meeting? I’d spill the tea to Cody at dinner. Weird conversation with a boss? We’d chuckle about it on the weekend.
At the end of the day, we were each other’s safe space. We would delight in what was happening in each other’s professional worlds without the pressure of needing to be part of it.
I loved that balance. We kept work at work, and when work was over, it was all about us.
When we decided to move to Lisbon and start fresh, it was as partners who had built a decade-long marriage on a foundation of sharing everything but work.
We started building our business anyway
When we found ourselves jobless mere weeks after moving our entire lives across an ocean, we decided to bet on ourselves.
Most companies in the US wouldn’t hire us in another country, so we set up our LLC and website. We then started letting close folks know we were available for hire.
We looked like a real business to the public, but inside, we were operating like fish flapping about on the forest floor.
This man, who before could read my every thought and finish my sentences, now didn’t know how to handle all the requests we were getting. I hadn’t a clue how to do taxes in two countries, and looked at him blankly whenever he asked me anything to do with numbers.
After 10 years, we knew our way around conflict as a couple. But owning our own business had us biting our tongues. Honestly, we hadn’t a clue how to work together.
But we eventually found that the tools we’d used in our marriage actually work for building a business together. Primarily: communication — about what we needed, about the tasks we hated doing that the other person was better at, about the burdens we didn’t want to name that we needed help with.
Once we figured out how to leverage each other’s strengths in the business, as we did in our relationship, things really began to click.
Not giving up gave us a new spark
My husband and I were comfortable American DINKS: a dual-income, no-kid couple who’d worked for nearly a decade to climb into tech, allocating nearly 3k a month to pay off six-figure student-loan debt for our degrees. We’d take those salaries, invest as our financial planner advised, allocate a hefty percentage to local orgs, and, of course, travel.
But we’d still close our laptops at the end of the day and immediately grab our smaller screens, for two to three hours spent passively glancing at a larger screen after dinner.
Today, we’re aware we’ll never see those salaries again. I’m not a “director” of anything. He’s not a “manager” of anyone. Instead, we’re entrepreneurs. We’re making less than half of what we made before, and even if we wanted to re-enter the search for full-time jobs in our fields, the job security we thought we had is no more. Layoffs have seemingly decimated the industries we previously worked in.
But what we get instead of those salaries is peace of mind in a new country as we create a deeper quality of life, plus the pleasure of seeing one another blossom into entirely new professional people, together.
Today, Cody and I have had 10 consecutive months of record revenue. Today, I serve as a fractional CMO for (two!) brands, and we both support four more on retainer and build brands for solopreneurs, too. We take every Friday off. We work from pubs in London and cafés in Paris.
Most importantly, we’ve learned to never let the pressures of work dull the shine of a hard-fought, beautiful marriage that we’ve been investing in from the very beginning. He’s the only coworker I’ve ever loved, and I’m so proud of us.
