Marriage not feeling great? Your work and wealth are about to suffer. Here's how & why.

We tend to view marriage and personal life as a very separate entity to your professional life. But this is an utter fallacy - because really, when it comes to performance, there is no division between public/private. Your marriage absolutely impacts your business, and vice versa. 

So if you’re a high performing founder or corporate executive, you want to make sure your marriage is working out for you - otherwise you might experience some negative unexpected consequences. 

Here are 5 reasons why a struggling marriage can sabotage your work - especially if you’re a high-achieving professional:

Reduced cognitive performance and focus

If your home life is tense and uncomfortable - maybe you dread going home to your spouse, feel like you’re walking on eggshells, or find yourself stressed in arguments all the time - you can bet that this is eroding your performance at work. That’s because emotional conflict activates the brain’s limbic system, pulling focus away from the prefrontal cortex, which is your decision-making and executive function center.

Heck, one study from the Journal of Neuroscience shows that even low-level interpersonal stress reduces working memory performance by up to 38%. Can you imagine? That’s a HUGE decrease in memory performance from just minor relational stress. So if your marriage is on the rocks, we can only imagine how much your memory decreases by.

Also, chronic conflict has been linked to increased cortisol and sleep disruption, both of which impair focus and productivity.

When your brain is busy ruminating on last night’s argument, it’s obviously not focused on closing the deal, spotting risk, or making the next right move. It’s distracted, so…go figure. It’s not good.

Team morale goes down

As a founder, exec, or decision-maker, your emotional tone sets the standard for the rest of the team. If your personal life is in disarray, your leadership presence will absolutely take a hit, even if you don’t realize it.

A Harvard Business Review study on emotional contagion found that leaders’ emotional states directly impact team performance, morale, and output. Which makes sense - humans attune to each other, and if you’re the leader, you can bet that the rest of the team are attuning to you.

This means that subtle withdrawal, short temper, or distraction often leads to what’s called “executive disengagement”, where others start picking up on inconsistencies in your presence and capacity to follow through with things.

Your team may not know what’s wrong. But they will feel that something is off. That’s how trust issues start - they sense that you’re off, you’re not showing up like normal, they’ll feel your anxiety, and then panic starts to set in. This is going to negatively impact your team’s performance.

Finances will drain

When connection breaks down at home, your unconscious compensation behaviors will spike. This looks like overspending, risky investments, impulsive decisions, or unnecessary business expansion to “outrun” the discomfort. Humans are great at avoiding discomfort, and the discomfort of home life is no exception. 

A 2023 study by Credit Karma found that 43% of high-earning professionals admitted to emotionally-driven spending when under relationship stress. And those that weren’t over spending were often doing something else - over drinking, over eating, and so on.

Divorce, if it happens, can cut your net worth by up to 70%, if not more - and that’s more than just the legal fees, but from poor financial choices made in the lead-up. Plus the separation of assets, navigating spousal support, and the rest of the hell that ensues divorce situations.

Unfortunately, high-functioners who tend to be more on the avoidant side of things will often unconsciously try to fix emotional misalignment with financial things. It doesn’t work. And it’s expensive. Society might call it a ‘mid life crisis’ but honestly, it’s much more than that.

Your self-esteem will go down

If you're losing confidence in your marriage at home, your confidence in other areas will also go down. You may still “function,” sure, but beneath the surface, your instincts will become harder to trust.

The American Psychological Association links relationship instability to declines in self-trust and decisiveness, especially in individuals with high control needs. Which makes total sense. When you no longer trust your emotional judgment, because you’re miserable in your marriage and keep running into conflict with your spouse, it makes sense that this bleeds into business decisions, hiring, partnerships, and long-term planning.

You can’t trust yourself anymore because the decisions you’re making aren’t good ones…and so the feelings get worse and worse, until your self esteem is in tatters. It is MUCH harder to date healthily or build a business from this place.

You’ll become more emotionally isolated

When you're emotionally isolated at home, feeling misunderstood, lonely, unsupported and so on - you're more likely to start isolating yourself at work too. That feeling carries with you from the bedroom all the way through to the boardroom. This means you’ll start operating in a vacuum professionally too, with much less delegation, fewer second opinions, more solo decision-making and so on. You’ll be isolated over all - which is bad for business.

Research from McKinsey & Company found that CEOs in high-conflict relationships are 2x more likely to avoid vulnerability-based collaboration. This has huge ramifications on your bottom line; it leads to higher error rates, blind spots, and risk accumulating, especially in volatile industries where speed and making fast decisions collaboratively matter.

Being isolated and alone is terrible for business - just as it is for your marriage.

This is just a handful of points.

We haven’t even covered the fact that a miserable marriage means your health and immune system will suffer, so your capacity to work will be lower, too. Or your reputational damage, if you’re a high profile executive. 

You need to have a healthy, happy, secure marriage if you want to really thrive in business - or at least, have that stable foundation to really prosper. 

So my friends, if this feels uncomfortably familiar, the issue is a common one -and one that won’t go away on its own. Because without targeted, private support, it compounds and just gets worse. Your marriage won’t fix itself.

So message me. 

I specialize in helping executives like yourself fix their marriages or get the clarity they need to exit it, safely and carefully, if that’s what’s required. I have a proprietary methodology to help you with this in a step by step, structured, private way. 

So message me today to learn more about how I can help you, and if it makes sense, we can jump on a call to meet and discuss your options.