The Investment Banking Marriage, When the Deal Flow Never Stops and Your Relationship Pays the Bill

What the strain is and isn’t, what one study found, and where support can start.

The paper crown on the plate

Cathy is an illustrative composite, not a real client or a real banker. She’s 49, and she’s a managing director in mergers and acquisitions. It’s 11:47 on a Wednesday night, and she’s standing at the kitchen island in her work clothes, still holding her bag. The kitchen smells faintly of the salmon her husband made for dinner. The dishwasher is half loaded. Two place settings are still on the table, one for her and one for her seven-year-old daughter, who waited at that table for forty minutes before her husband walked her up to bed at 8:30.

On her daughter’s plate is a crown folded out of yellow construction paper. There’s a lopsided star drawn on the front in marker.

Her husband is at the sink, rinsing a pan more slowly than any pan needs rinsing. He said “hey” when she came in. He hasn’t turned around since. Cathy’s phone is face-down on the counter. It buzzed three minutes ago, and she knows without looking that it’s the associate on her deal, who’s still up turning comments on the draft.

I built a life where my daughter makes me a crown and waits forty minutes for me, she thinks. And I’m going to pick up that phone in about two minutes anyway.

She doesn’t pick it up yet. She doesn’t say anything yet either. She stands there with the crown in one hand and her bag still on her shoulder, trying to work out which conversation she’s allowed to have at midnight.

If some part of that scene is familiar, this guide is for you. It’s for women whose work runs on deal timelines and who are noticing that the job and the marriage keep asking for the same hours. It’s also for the people who love them. It covers what that strain is and isn’t, what it can look like, what one published study of work and marriage can and can’t tell you, how expectations about work, care and pay can shape a couple’s choices, and what support can look like when the work isn’t going to slow down.

A quick note on where I’m coming from. I’m a licensed therapist, and I also work as an executive coach. This article is general education. It isn’t therapy, coaching or individualized advice, and Cathy and the other example in this guide are illustrations, not people.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

What this strain is, and what it isn’t

“Investment banking marriage” is a descriptive phrase, not a clinical category, and this guide uses it that way. What it points to, for many couples in deal-heavy careers, is something ordinary and old: two important parts of life asking for the same limited time and attention, over and over, with no end date on the calendar.

That definition matters because of what it leaves out. It doesn’t say anyone is broken. It doesn’t say the marriage is failing. It names a tension between roles, and that’s a very different starting point from “something is wrong with us”.

It also doesn’t make the strain small. A tension that shows up every week for years can wear a groove in a relationship. What I want to do in this guide is describe that groove honestly, without turning it into a syndrome, and without pretending it’s nothing.

If you’re earlier in a banking career and wondering what the hours are doing to you, not only to your marriage, my guide to investment banking burnout looks at that side of it.

What it can look like in a deal-heavy job

Every couple is different, and not every couple in a deal-heavy career feels this. But when this strain is present, it often shows up in a handful of recognizable ways. None of these examples establishes a diagnosis, and you don’t need to see all of them in your own house for this to be worth thinking about.

• Plans dissolve without warning. A dinner, a school play or a weekend away gets canceled because a deal moved, and it happens often enough that nobody fully believes a plan until it’s over.
• The phone is always a third presence. Even on a quiet night, one of you is half listening for the buzz, and the other one can tell.
• One partner carries the home. Pickups, dinners, the dentist, the broken dishwasher. The person with the more predictable schedule absorbs them, sometimes by agreement and sometimes by default.
• You can’t tell which week you’ll get. A deal can go quiet for two weeks and then take over a month. It’s hard to plan a marriage around a calendar neither of you controls.
• The quiet after a deal isn’t always a relief. When a deal closes, there can be a flat, tired stretch where you’re home but not really back yet, and the conversations you postponed don’t feel easy to start.

Think of it like a household running on two clocks. One clock is the family’s: dinner at 6:30, bedtime at 8:30, Saturday morning. The other is the deal’s, and it doesn’t care what time it is at home. In Cathy’s house, most weeks, the family clock is the one that gets reset.

Some of this is simply the shape of the job. Some of it may connect to older patterns, too, such as a long habit of being the one who keeps going no matter what, or of treating other people’s needs as the thing that can wait. My piece on whether a career is ruining a marriage looks at that question from the other direction.

What one study of work and marriage found

You may have read that banking marriages are especially likely to fail. This guide doesn’t make that claim, because it isn’t something the research here can show. What there is, instead, is research on workload and marriage in general, and one study is useful precisely because it’s clear about what it found and what it didn’t.

Justin A. Lavner, PhD, a clinical psychologist who is now a professor at the University of Georgia, and Malissa A. Clark, PhD, a University of Georgia psychology professor who studies overwork and work-family dynamics, published a 2017 analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behavior. It followed young heterosexual couples, recruited through Los Angeles County marriage licenses from 1993 and 1994, all in their first marriage, checking in with them over the first four years. The study measured workload as a sense of having too many demands or feeling very busy.

Here’s what they reported. When one partner’s workload was higher, the other partner’s marital satisfaction tended to decline more by the next check-in. The researchers call that crossover. When they looked for a corresponding link between a person’s own workload and a change in their own satisfaction, they didn’t find one in this sample. They also didn’t find evidence that the crossover pattern varied by gender or by whether the couple had children.

The limits matter just as much. The study didn’t measure hours worked or how people felt about their jobs, and it didn’t test why the pattern appeared. These were young newlyweds three decades ago, not bankers and not couples at midlife. It shows an association, not proof that workload causes a marriage to change.

So I’d hold it lightly. The association suggests paying attention to a partner’s experience as well as your own; it doesn’t mean the busier person’s satisfaction stayed steady. The study also doesn’t tell us who in a couple is home more, and in many couples both people carry heavy workloads. For Cathy, the practical point is simpler: the man at the sink is having his own experience of this marriage, and it’s worth asking about, even on nights when nobody says a word.

If you’re a mother on a deal team, my piece on motherhood and the banking calendar takes up the parenting side of this more fully.

A Saturday in the tile showroom

Brittney is a second illustrative composite. She’s 40, and she’s a vice president in acquisition finance at a bank. It’s 10:40 on a Saturday morning in a tile showroom, and she and her husband are standing in front of a wall of sample boards for the bathroom they’ve been planning to redo for two years. He’s holding two squares of tile side by side, a matte white and a pale green with a slightly uneven glaze, and he’s asking which one she likes.

He’s been waiting for this Saturday for a month. He booked the contractor’s walkthrough for Tuesday so they’d have to decide today.

Her phone buzzes. It’s the lender’s counsel, calling about a term they thought was settled on Thursday. She looks at the screen, then at him.

“Take it,” he says. He sets the green one down on the display shelf, a little harder than he needs to. “I’ll pick.”

She takes the call in the corner by the grout samples. It runs twenty-five minutes. When she comes back, he’s in the car in the parking lot with the engine running, and there’s an order slip on the dashboard. She gets into the passenger seat. She doesn’t look at which tile he chose. She starts typing a text to him, even though he’s right beside her, and then she deletes it.

He said “I’ll pick” like it was a favor, she thinks. It didn’t sound like a favor.

The “supportive husband” story

“He’s so supportive.” You may have said it yourself. Often it’s true, and it’s said with real gratitude. He made the salmon. He did bedtime. He’s picking the tile.

That story can also cover something up, for both people. When the arrangement is “you go, I’ve got the home”, it’s easy for the person who’s home more to become the one who handles everything and asks for nothing. And it’s easy for the person who’s away more to stop noticing what that costs, because the costs don’t come with a calendar invite.

What often gets lost first isn’t the logistics. The logistics can run beautifully. What gets lost is closeness.

You can run a very efficient household and still drift in that sense. A couple can split the logistics perfectly and still stop knowing what the other person is worried about, hoping for or quietly resentful of.

For Brittney, the tile isn’t the problem. The tile is where it showed. The question underneath “which finish do you want?” was closer to “are you here for this part of our life?” and the call answered it before she could.

None of this makes either person the villain. He may be tired and lonely in a way he hasn’t said out loud. She may be carrying guilt she doesn’t have room to feel until the deal closes. Both can be true in the same kitchen, or the same showroom, at the same time.

If the marriage feels like a strong partnership on paper and a strain in practice, my piece on the success paradox in relationships looks at why a thriving career and a struggling marriage so often travel together.

Both/And: he said he’d hold down the home, and the holding has a cost

Many couples in deal-heavy careers made a version of the same deal early on. One of you would chase the work. The other would hold down the home. It was made in good faith, often with real relief on both sides.

Cathy’s husband made that promise. He’s kept it. The salmon, the bedtime, the forty minutes at the table with a seven-year-old and a paper crown: that’s what keeping it looks like.

And the keeping may be costing something. Cathy can feel it in the slow pan at the sink, and in the “hey” that didn’t turn into a conversation.

Both/And means you don’t have to pick one of those. You can be deeply grateful for what he’s carrying and still see that the carrying is wearing on him. You can love your work and still not want it to be the thing that decides every Wednesday night. You can believe the arrangement was the right one and still want to renegotiate it.

That last one can be hard to allow, especially for driven women who pride themselves on keeping their word. It can feel like admitting the plan failed, or like asking for something you agreed not to need. It isn’t. Arrangements that made sense at 32, before kids or before the promotion, are allowed to be revisited at 49.

For Brittney, Both/And might sound like this: she really did need to take that call, and he really did get left holding the tile. Both of those are real. Neither one cancels the other out.

The Systemic Lens: some of this was built into the job

So far this guide has looked mostly at what happens inside one marriage. That’s only half of it. Couples in finance are making their choices inside jobs that were designed with particular expectations about time, and those expectations shape the marriage before anyone says a word at the sink.

Harvard economist Claudia Goldin was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for advancing understanding of women’s labor market outcomes. In her Nobel lecture, she describes some jobs as “greedy”. In these jobs, pay rises disproportionately with long hours, intense hours, or being available at particular times, rather than growing evenly with each hour worked.

Goldin’s point is about incentives. In the scenario she models, a couple with caregiving responsibilities would give up a lot of income if both took flexible jobs, and can’t easily cover care if both take the greedy one. So the incentives favor one partner specializing in the less flexible, better-paid work and the other taking more flexible work, and the greedier the job, the stronger that pull. For many highly educated couples with children, she describes one partner as “on-call-at-the-office” and the other as “on-call-at-home”. In most different-sex couples, she notes, the woman takes the more flexible job.

Her work is about pay, flexibility and how couples divide jobs. It isn’t a study of marriages in banking, and it doesn’t measure how those marriages feel or how often any particular arrangement shows up in finance. But it offers a way to see why an arrangement like the one in Cathy’s house can feel so fixed. If her job works the way Goldin describes greedy jobs, part of what it pays for is her being reachable at 11:47 p.m. Cathy’s house is an illustration that reverses the gendered pattern Goldin describes: she’s the one on call at the office, and he’s the one on call at home.

What this lens offers is a different question. Not “Why can’t I make this work?” but “Which part of this is ours to work on, and which part belongs to the way the job is designed?” Both are real. The first you can bring into a conversation at home. The second you might bring into a conversation about your role, your team or what you want the next five years to look like.

If you’re weighing whether to step back from deal work entirely, my guide to leaving private equity or investment banking looks at what that transition can stir up. For the money side of the rhythm, my piece on the bonus cycle looks at how the compensation calendar can shape a household.

What support can look like when the deals won’t stop

A lot of couples wait for a quiet quarter to deal with this. The quiet quarter doesn’t always come. It helps to know there’s work you can do in the middle of a live deal, and that it doesn’t have to be dramatic.

Some couples start with small things they can actually keep:

• Name the week before it happens. “This is a signing week, and I’m going to be mostly gone” lands differently on a Sunday night than it does as a text at 7:15 on Wednesday.
• Protect one small, real thing. Not a date night that gets canceled. Something that fits in a hard week, like ten minutes together before the phone comes back out.
• Ask how it’s feeling for them. Your partner’s experience of the marriage may not match yours. It’s worth asking how things feel on their side, and then listening without defending the schedule.
• Say the true thing when there’s room. “I hate that I missed the crown” is a better start than a plan to never miss anything again.

These suggestions assume you can disagree with each other without fear. If conversations about schedules tend to end with you feeling afraid, controlled or punished, that’s a different situation. Joint conversations or couples work may not be the right first step. Talking with an individual clinician first is a safer place to start.

When talking isn’t enough, there are two broad kinds of professional support. Individual therapy is a place to work on your side of it: the guilt, the exhaustion, the older patterns, and what you want to do next. Couples therapy is a different setup. The APA Dictionary of Psychology describes it as “therapy in which both partners in a committed relationship are treated at the same time by the same therapist or therapists”. Some people do both, with different clinicians.

If you’re looking for either, the National Institute of Mental Health suggests several routes, including a primary care provider, who can do an initial screening and refer you, and your insurance company, which can tell you which local providers your plan covers. NIMH also suggests preparing a few questions, such as what experience a provider has treating someone with your issue and how they usually treat it. A few more can matter here:

• What’s your training and experience with relationship concerns? Ask this whether you’re looking for individual or couples work.
• Do you work with couples, or would you refer us to someone who does? Not every therapist does both, and it’s a normal question to ask.
• How do you handle scheduling around unpredictable work? Ask about session times, telehealth and the cancellation policy before a deal week makes it urgent.
• What are the fees, and how do you work with insurance? It’s easier to ask on the first call than after a month of sessions.

For more on the pressures that come with working in finance, my complete guide to therapy for women in finance and the Women in Finance resource hub are good next stops.

Still at the island

It’s almost midnight now. Cathy has set the crown on the counter, and her phone is still face-down beside it. Her husband has finished the pan. Brittney still hasn’t looked at the order slip on the dashboard, and she hasn’t said the thing she deleted. Neither of them has decided yet what to say.

That’s a real place to be. You don’t have to fix the marriage tonight. You can start taking it seriously before you decide whether the job or the arrangement at home needs to change. That might begin with one honest sentence, one question about how it’s been for your partner, or one call to find someone to talk with.

What I hope you’ll keep is this: the deal calendar doesn’t have to be the only calendar in your house that counts.

Warmly,
Annie.