ABSTRACT
Job-seeking is difficult for anyone who takes his or her work seriously. People take their work seriously for different reasons, and job-seeking means different things to people with different orientations toward their work. A dual-worker couple may be composed of a spouse who views his/her work as a profession and a spouse who views his/her work as just a job. Dual-worker couples vary in terms of whether both spouses enter the job market at the same or at different times, and in terms of whether spouses are at similar or different career stages. Couple responses to the simulated incidents seem consistent with their actual job-seeking behavior. Couples might want to follow an egalitarian strategy but found themselves with only one job offer, usually for the male. It is rare for couples to acknowledge that they have chosen to give the wife’s career precedence because deferring to one’s wife’s career conflicts with traditional views of acceptable masculine behavior.
