Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is a journalist and the wife of Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, she writes at Inc.com:
No one, as far as I know, breaks out divorce statistics for entrepreneurs, but I’d wager they’re higher than the U.S. average. Fortunately, my husband and I are not among that number. The demands of Gary’s business have created periods of distance and suffocating tension between us.
But our marriage has survived the occasional stony silence and slammed door. Still, given the pressures on entrepreneurs and their families, it could easily have been otherwise.
Common causes of divorce include financial strain, neglect, lack of communication, and divergent goals. Postmortems on the remains of entrepreneurs’ marriages can turn up all four in abundance.
Other professions keep people away from home and preoccupy their thoughts, but they don’t produce the toxic cocktail of resentment and anxiety created by putting the family’s security constantly at risk.
Then there’s that green-eyed minx, Jealousy. How often have you heard an entrepreneur describe her company as her “passion”? How often have you heard one say the same thing about her spouse?
More fundamentally, people start companies to do their own things, while marriage is about doing things together.
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