by Jo Piazza
Everyone I told about my layoff said pretty much the same thing: “You’re going to get a bigger job right away, a better job.” Bigger and better meaning more money and more hours. I’d nod politely at them because they said it out of kindness and confidence in me. But no offers came in, and the truth was there weren’t enough hours in a week for something bigger.
Nick wanted me to take a beat and think, really think, about what I wanted to do next.
“I’m a little thrilled about your layoff,” he said and then backtracked. “For you. I’m thrilled for you in the long run. How much longer can you run on empty? I’d love to see you work less, relax, take bike rides, and learn to enjoy your life outside work a little more. Find something where you can have a better work/life balance.” What the hell did that mean?
When it came to the concept of work/life balance, I had few good role models. Most of my friends dedicated their own lives to their careers, at least until they burned out. Many times, to the detriment of my health and past relationships, I’d worn my busyness and work title like badges of honor, believing if I didn’t keep straining for that brass ring I’d be a failure.
As I sat around the house in my pajamas refreshing LinkedIn to see who looked at my profile, I Googled things like “work AND happiness AND fulfilled.” Google’s answer was the Netherlands.
Like Denmark, the Netherlands is a place that consistently ranks among the top five happiest countries in the world and where couples claim some of the most satisfying long-term relationships. The New York Times once reported that the “Dutch as a nation emerge close to the top of the world happiness rankings established by Ruut Veenhoven, professor of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 signals greatest life satisfaction, the Dutch score 7.5—beating 6.5 for the French and 6.2 for the Japanese. They also defeat Americans with 6.4, the British with 7.1, and the Italians and Spanish who each total 6.9.”
I’d also heard from my Dutch friends that one of the causes of this elevated level of happiness was that Dutch women give zero fucks about other people thinking they have it all. They don’t let their careers dictate their relationships or their family life. The majority of Dutch women, married or not, choose to work part-time in order to have more time for their marriage, their children, their hobbies, and their personal well-being. In 2011 nearly 75 percent of working Dutch women were employed part-time. Many of my Americans girlfriends scoffed at this. They’d never dream of working part-time. They’d call that giving up, or worse, failure. But, Dutch women call the decision liberating and they don’t see their choice as bucking the feminist system.
“Every woman in Holland can do whatever she wants with her life,” fifty-two-year-old Marie-Louise van Haeren explained in an interview with Maclean’s magazine about how Dutch women got to be among the happiest people in the world.
Van Haeren described an idyllic existence filled with choices, where she rides her bike to work three days a week. She and almost all of her friends work part-time their entire careers in order “to have time to do things that matter to me, live the way I want. To stay mentally and physically healthy and happy….Maybe this will turn out to be the fourth wave of feminism. Women protect the possibility that one day we’ll wake up to realize that life is not all about acquiring more material wealth, power, status. Many Dutch women that I know want to stay sane, happy, relaxed.”
It’s worth pointing out that the Netherlands has a strong government safety net in place that helps to make things like health care, retirement, and child care more affordable. That makes it much easier for women to choose to work part-time. Many women in the United States still have no choice but to work at least one job, sometimes more, just to pay their bills, feed their families, and keep a roof over their heads.
But there are also plenty of women and men in the States who choose to allow our careers to dictate our lives—where we live, how we live, how often we see our spouse, how often we see our kids, and even how we define ourselves. This often happens after we’ve reached a certain level of career achievement or as a result of having been born with a certain level of privilege. Among my own friends, you were considered a failure if you didn’t try to “have it all.”
Because of our jobs we often come home late at night, moody and irritable. Because of our jobs we don’t have enough time to work out or eat well, leading to chronic and costly health problems down the road. Because of our jobs we often live thousands of miles from our families and supportive communities.
The best decisions for our careers will often trump the best outcome for our marriages.
What if it didn’t have to be that way? What if we could find space in our lives for ourselves, our marriages, and our careers?
Nick was pleased the moment we arrived in Amsterdam.
“I’m going to take you on a little date. It will be rainy, but it’ll be nice. We could live here, Squeak. It’s a very civilized country.” Of course, Nick is wildly optimistic that we could live anywhere together, while I believe that if we permanently left New York or San Francisco we would die.
“They bike everywhere. Look at all those wind turbines. And the train system is excellent.”
My first steps inside the city of Amsterdam brought me face to face with study-abroad stoners stumbling out of the city’s many coffee shops (places to smoke weed that have nothing to do with coffee) and drunken hordes of men with beer bellies and bald heads screaming in the streets during their stag parties. I narrowly dodged a drunken bachelor Brit wearing a red thong bikini before he puked Heineken into the gutter, his mates cheering him on and filming him for posterity.
“You want sexy time?” a strange Turkish man said to lure us into a sex show where he promised topless women would do elaborate and confusing things with bananas. After our thirteen-hour overnight flight from San Francisco I couldn’t imagine that I looked like the kind of person in search of sexy time, but what do I know?
“No, thanks! We’re heading to the Anne Frank Museum,” Nick said with polite cheer.
I did like Amsterdam. It was like Paris but smaller, cooler, and less pretentious. Once we’d escaped the main tourist zone for the classically Dutch streets farther from the train station, the ones with the impossible-to-pronounce names that all sounded like warm, delicious pastries, I couldn’t help but begin to buy into the promise of Dutch happiness. Nick and I took great pleasure in sounding out all of the words, with their excess of vowels and silent consonants. I liked that the walls were free from graffiti and that the city was clean—immaculate, in fact—save for that chap who vomited in the gutter. But even he was really polite about it.
Small signs of gender equality appear all over the city. The yellow “child crossing” signs on the street have a photo of a man holding a child’s hand rather than a woman. All of the bathrooms, even the ones in very small restaurants, have a box of free tampons in them. If that doesn’t scream, We respect your equality and womanhood, I don’t know what does. A popular T-shirt shop was selling out of a shirt emblazoned with the words “He offered her the world. She said she had her own.” Waiters handed me the check as often as they handed it to Nick.
Dutch women may not be the breadwinners, but they are often the decision makers in their relationships. Equality is less of a battle in Holland, where it is ingrained in the culture, than in the States. Women’s rights are well established here, participation in the labor force is high, and there is a legal system in place to give women equal opportunities. It’s a system that breeds independent women who are less dependent on the institution of marriage. But beneath the fierce independence is an even fiercer love of family and a sense of practicality focused on keeping the family unit strong. As in Denmark, there’s a different value attached to the marriage contract in Holland than in a lot of countries, particularly in America. It’s common for the Dutch to live together and have kids well before they actually get married. Like the Danish, they rarely thro
w a huge wedding or any kind of large to-do. When people do get married, they don’t do it out of any sense of obligation. It’s a very conscious decision, since it’s as acceptable to cohabitate for twenty or thirty years without the pressure to make anything legally binding.
“We’d have a boat if we lived here,” Nick said, bouncing up and down on his heels as we strolled along the canals. “A party boat with a grill and a bar, or—oooooo!—a houseboat. We could live on a boat.” Dutch houseboats come in all shapes and sizes—tiny green and red ones no larger than a tugboat and elaborate floating mansions with sleek modern lines. Amsterdam’s canals are storybook wonderful, like moats, really, winding around the four-hundred-year-old townhouses that lean at precarious angles from age and sinking soil. More bikes than cars cruised the streets. But these weren’t the hard-core road bikers I’d grown used to in San Francisco. Dutch bikes are heavy and tall, allowing you to sit perfectly straight and poised. Dutch women look stunning while riding them, their long blond hair streaming behind them.
“They’re all wearing sensible shoes.” Nick admired the ladies commuting to and from work. “And see how lovely they look.”
I rolled my eyes. “I can ride my bike in high heels,” I said, which was partially true.
They do look lovely, though, and confident. And happy.
“Dutch women are terrifying,” Alice, one of Nick’s female colleagues who lives in the Netherlands, warned while we were out drinking blond beers in a bar along the Amstel River. Alice is half Dutch and half British and lives outside of Amsterdam in the nearby city of Haarlem. “I’m part Dutch so I can tell you that. They’re bossy and determined and fiercely independent.” They sounded like my kind of ladies.
And Nick’s too. “I’m not intimidated at all,” he said about the strong-minded Dutch women, ordering a second beer from a particularly bossy lady bartender. “I like assertive women. I want a woman who tells me how it is!” The bartender smirked.
I asked Alice if Dutch women’s fierceness carried over into the workplace. She paused for a second to consider the question. Alice had a career as a very successful executive at a Dutch company.
“There aren’t as many women executives here as there could be. I’d like to see more,” she said. “But most women here value their life outside of work much more than they value a title or getting ahead in the workplace.” Alice shrugged. She was divorced with two kids. “It’s nice that women here can make that choice. But I worry that we aren’t encouraging ambition enough.”
Alice never once asked me what I did for work. We spent the rest of the night talking about my recent foray into planting seasonal vegetables, the upcoming American election, and whether hot yoga was better than regular yoga.
This was very different from the cocktail-party conversations I’d been having back home. Right before we left for Amsterdam, Nick and I attended an event for his company, where I learned that not having a job felt weird and even alienating in San Francisco.
“What do you do?” people asked me politely, since that is the first thing everyone asks you at an American party. I stumbled. I’d always relished talking about my fancy job. Now I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m in between jobs, doing some writing, fixing up the house,” I said in a small voice. Nick introduced me to one of the public-relations executives he worked with. She was a lot like the PR girls I knew back in New York, dressed entirely in black, with straight, shiny hair and a confident swagger. She was interested in planning a honeymoon to Africa, so I told her we could maybe have lunch and talk about it. She threw her head back and let out a cackle.
“Ha. Ha. You think I have time for lunch. Oh God, I never have time for lunch.” I suddenly felt very sad for a woman who didn’t have time for lunch. I remembered being that woman.
Spend a night out in the Netherlands, swing by a canal-side bar or a dinner party, and start talking to the Dutch. No one will ask you what you do. I don’t think anyone asked me about my job the entire time I was in Holland, unless I was the one to bring it up first.
“The Dutch attach a slightly different value to their careers and money than British and American people. They are slightly less materialistic. They put much more of an emphasis on family and quality time, and they’ll ask you about those things at parties. They don’t care how you make money,” Ben Coates, the author of the book Why the Dutch Are Different, told me. His book was selling like crazy when I arrived in Amsterdam, and I couldn’t help but pluck one off the towering piles of them in the WHSmith in the Schiphol airport. Coates is originally from the UK, but he fell in love with a Dutch girl and never left.
When I mentioned to one Dutch woman that I used to work six days a week at my last job, and sometimes a few extra hours on Sunday, she looked at me with horror, her un-Botoxed brow furrowing in disbelief. “You Americans love talking about how busy you are with work. Does it make you feel important?” She said this without malice, with genuine curiosity. I’d grown used to the Dutch bluntness from the moment the woman who stamped my passport at the airport remarked that I was prettier as a blonde. “When do you have time to see your husband?” Then she added with greater gravitas, “Or do yoga?”
“They think we’re crazy,” I said to Nick later that night. Despite the fact that neither of us was particularly interested in smoking weed, curiosity had gotten the better of us and we’d decided to try smoking a legal joint in one of the city’s coffee shops. Being a naturally anxious person, I was particular about which of the coffee shops we gave our business to. My ground rules were that it had to be clean, have nice lighting, have no photographs or paintings of Bob Marley on the walls, and not be decorated in the manner of an Eastern European youth hostel.
“Don’t you think we’re a little crazy?” Nick said, looking down at the menu, which offered five-euro individual joints and a seven-euro space cake. “Seventy-five percent of your stress and our arguments start because of something to do with work. Don’t you think it makes more sense to actually create a work/life balance instead of just talking about it all the time?”
We smoked about half a joint, decided we might be too old for this shit, and walked back to our Airbnb rental, which was really an attic, up two flights of steep and narrow stairs that were really ladders. Our attic was so cold at night we had to curl into each other under two comforters to stay warm. I moved as close to Nick as humanly possible. The two of us talked about the concept of work/life balance for the next couple of hours, coming to the conclusion that Americans blather on a great deal about the topic but rarely take concrete actions to find better balance. We write and read articles about it, we buy books to help us try to rearrange our too-busy schedules, we fill our Sundays with dread and unhappiness over the prospect of Monday morning. But we rarely choose to do anything that actually solves the problem.
We agreed on the fact that both of us too often prioritized our jobs over our marriage.
The next day I chatted with a Dutch friend of a friend named Marieke. She’s been married for fifteen years and has two beautiful daughters. When her girls were young, she and her husband figured out a system where they both worked four days a week.
“It was the most fantastic way of living. It allowed us to prioritize both our family and ourselves,” Marieke told me. “Dutch men don’t worry that if they aren’t working for five days a week they aren’t a good man. It is totally okay. In fact, it is better than okay. We know it’s better for us to enjoy our lives. We may earn less money, but we figure that out and the rewards are much greater. We don’t define ourselves by our jobs. We define ourselves by our relationships and what we do to feel fulfilled.”
Now that her girls are a little bit older, Marieke works three and a half days a week and her husband works five, since his current job is less flexible.
“Now that I work less, I am the manager in the house. I oversee a lot of the housework and the children, but we still share most of those things. He is still doing much of the grocery shop
ping and the housecleaning. I picked my husband because he doesn’t see men and women as any different. Together we will raise our girls as independent feminist women, and for me feminism means making the right choices for yourself and your family.”
My best friend, Jackie, surprised me with her response to the Dutch. Jackie is one of the most ambitious women I know, a lawyer who was climbing the ranks of a prestigious law school when she was pregnant with her third child. A couple months shy of her due date, she asked her boss if they could work out an arrangement that would allow her to work from home a couple of days a week following her (very short) maternity leave.
“My boss made me feel bad for even asking,” Jackie said. She quit on the spot. At eight months pregnant she launched her own legal recruiting business so she’d have the flexibility to work more convenient hours.
“I think I’d like Holland!” Jackie texted me while I was in Amsterdam. “We’ve been force-fed this notion that feminists work and achieve and impress other people with their job titles and accomplishments. Why can’t feminism mean I have the freedom to prioritize what I want without the judgment of other (ambitious) ladies? What is ambition anyway? Can’t I be ambitious with my kids and my marriage?”
I have another set of American friends who have gone a different direction in terms of careers and made it work for them. When she got pregnant she was a rising star in tech and he was in a corporate job he hated. He quit and stayed home to take care of the baby and work on a business plan for his start-up. About two years later, her company started going under and he got a great job offer. They traded places and career ambitions. She took care of their toddler and worked on a book. They’ve been going back and forth ever since, allowing one spouse time to follow a dream or take care of the family, while the other brings home a regular paycheck. I’ve heard this referred to as the stock and bond approach to the marital division of labor. One spouse has to be the bond, the one without risk, with a dependable payout. If that’s the case, the other can be the stock, focusing on something that could pay off big in the long-term. Of course it’s only fair if the partners keep switching who is the stock and who is the bond.
