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The deeper issue is not that successful women inevitably end up with partners who under-function. It is more uncomfortable than that. Their competence may be propping up a relationship arrangement built for a version of you that no longer exists. Maybe they entered this relationship before the promotion, the business, the children, the financial independence or the confidence to name what you actually need. Their responsibilities, economic power changed and sense of yours

The woman who accepted responsibility for particular household tasks at 35 may be a director, partner, founder or CEO at 50. Children who once needed practical care may now be adults requiring different forms of support. Parents who were previously independent may need increasing assistance, businesses may have expanded and relationships may have changed, yet the original distribution of responsibility can remain remarkably resistant to renegotiation.

A woman can spend twenty years building expertise inside an institution whose priorities shift in twenty weeks. Much of what she has accumulated, reputation, relationships, credibility, influence does not automatically travel with her when that institution changes course. The title, the email database, the platform, the programme. These belong to the employer, not to her. The same risk applies to founders and consultants who are, in effect, concentrated in a single client, fu

Consider the executive who has known for six months that a member of her leadership team is no longer right for the role. Nothing catastrophic happens, so she compensates. She checks their work more closely, quietly corrects mistakes, steps into conversations they should be handling and gradually redesigns her own workload around a decision she has not made. The organisation continues to function, but at an invisible cost to her time, attention and leadership capacity.

A woman wakes at 2:47am because she is hot. She throws off the duvet. Twenty minutes later she is cold. Her mind starts running through tomorrow’s presentation, her mother’s hospital appointment, the unresolved conversation with a direct report, the invoice she forgot to approve and whether those palpitations she experienced yesterday are something she ought to mention to her GP. Eventually she sleeps. At 5:45am, the alarm goes off. By 8:30 she is dressed, composed and lea