How Finding Love Can Actually Help Your Career

Despite all the progress women have made in the past 50 years, it can still feel like we only have two options upon graduation from school: We can be the girl who marries her sweetheart and settles down in the suburbs, or we can be the girl who puts love on the back-burner in favor of her career.

But most millennials want to find love and have a fulfilling career. Isn’t it possible to have both? Have we not progressed enough as a society to live in a world where our love and career can happily coexist?

Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that they actually can. In fact, having a committed partner can actually help your career.

In the book Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel Heller cite multiple studies that combat what our culture seems to tell us about being career-savvy and romantically involved.

In fact, the authors go as far to say that being in a relationship actually helps our career in the long run. Why? It turns out that the more emotionally connected you are with someone, the more likely you are to take risks and be independent.

Although this sounds contradictory, let’s put it into a relatable context. If you have a supportive partner who you feel completely comfortable with, you can feel confident in your decision to take some alone time or move across the country for an amazing job offer.

Not only that, but having a healthy relationship should push you to new heights within your career. Having a cheerleader behind all of your endeavors can help you to realize your true potential and see yourself from an external viewpoint. Not to mention that even if you spectacularly fail in your risky decision, you know you’ll have somebody to run home to and fall back on.

Of course, this all goes out the window if you happen to be dating someone who’s not worthy of you. There’s an old saying that your money won’t be there to kiss you good night at 60 — but neither will the fuccboi you wasted two years stressing over back in your 20s. Picking the right person and the right career, and you’ll be fine.

As empowered females, it’s easy to tell ourselves that we don’t need a partner to complete us — that we can be happy with ourselves, our career, and our friends. This is definitely true, but it doesn’t mean you have to cut out love completely in order to find yourself. While traditional gender roles tell us that we can either be a career woman or a housewife, this is 2016. And we’re thinking that we’re going to have our cake and eat it too.

Gimme More Dating

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