Real Talk Love Therapy: EP 2- Career vs Relationships... Can You Really Only Have One Or The Other?-- Featuring Becky Harris
For this week's episode, since Eli and I are super hustlers out here grinding non-stop, but both in long term relationships with partners that have more of a 9-5 energy (and thus more time to focus on the relationship), we decided to tackle the age old question of whether or not it's possible to realistically manage a successful career, and a successful relationship at the same time, or if you really do have to choose one or the other.
We had a very special guest this time to help us pull apart this age-old dilemma…
Boss Queen Becky Harris is a veteran BuzzFeed video producer responsible for creating classic hits such as What It Felt Like To Lose My Hair From Alopecia, This Is What Happens When You Replace Women In Everyday Situations With Men, This Man Changed His Name From José To Joe And Immediately Got More Job Interviews, Day In The Life: A Man Vs A Woman, and When You Physically Can't Have Sex to name a few. I highly suggest checking them all out when you have a moment!
So as you can see from Becky's video background, she is the Queen of all things that have to do with love, relationships, and feelings.
But being the fierce Boss Queen that she is, and having just gotten out of a 5 year relationship, Becky is wresting with the idea of whether or not it makes sense to date seriously any time soon since having a successful career is really important to her, and her last relationship really made her feel like she had to choose being good at one or the other.
So she decided to stop by the Real Talk Love Therapy couch with me (Daysha) and Eli to get some opinions.
And seeing that it's Eli and I, you know she definitely left with a lot of them LOL.
Conversation Highlights:
Daysha was Becky's intern at one point, and Eli was Daysha's intern at one point while at BuzzFeed. Talk about coming full circle.
Becky thought she found the love/career sweet spot by having her significant other (who also happened to be an actor) appear in a lot of her videos so that she could feel like she was spending time with him.
Eli claimed that he was jaded AF being the child of divorced parents, and Becky hit him with the #realtalk, and said "I know." LOL. #ComingForTheJugular
“You’re the character that we hope arcs in act III.”
Becky is "very single," and all about being about herself, but genuinely scared that she might have to choose one or the other (career or relationship) in the future because of her last relationship.
Daysha wants to believe that you can have it all, but it's about carving out what matters most to you right now.
Eli believes that self-fulfillment, and going after your passions should trump having a significant other.
Becky wants to believe that a plausible case can be made for one's ability to have both, but also can't help but feel that, realistically, it's just not possible.
“I fear that when you become really happy in a relationship, you no longer have that hunger [to go after what you want].”
Eli notices that he tends to date women that have a 9-5, work-to-live mentality, and is curious about what it would be like to date someone with a similar hustler's spirit.
Becky brings up how hard it could potentially be to be a hustler dating a hustler because when you might be going through a rough patch, and your hustling partner is going through a good patch, this could arouse feelings of envy, as well as making you feel lonely because your partner might be unavailable when you need comfort. So she believes that there is an understandable reason why hustlers end up with 9-5ers, but wonders if there is true longevity in such a pair?
Daysha struggles with the guilt she feels knowing that she doesn't have a ton of time in her week to devote to her partner as she is building Yes Queen and preparing for grad school in the fall, as well as her drastically different outlook on love vs career from her teenage years when she felt like a failure for graduating high school as student body president, and not as someone's girlfriend.
“I think I’m challenging so many things that had been ingrained in me since I was a kid, that I thought would make me happy, and that I’ve [recently] come up against, and I’m realizing don’t make me any happier.”
So what's your thoughts? Do you think it's actually possible to manage having a successful career and relationship at the same time? Or will it always be one or the other?