"I thought I knew you." Have you ever heard that before? If you're a die-hard entrepreneur, you probably have...more than once.

A while back, I received a sad letter from a reader. My correspondent was the wife of an entrepreneur who had been slogging away for six years at a start-up that she called a "money pit" and "marriage destroyer." She confessed that she hated her husband's business--more specifically that she hated what it was doing to him. "He becomes so criticizing and antagonistic when he is stressed, and lately it's been a lot," she wrote. "This is not the easygoing and very supportive man I married!"

I am no stranger to spousal laments. But what struck me about this note was the reader's assertion that entrepreneurship had actually changed her husband's character and temperament. I had taken it for granted that the person who goes into a business is also the person who comes out of it--maybe richer, maybe poorer, certainly battle scarred, but fundamentally the same. That was certainly true of my husband, Gary, who after three decades leading Stonyfield Farm is very much the energetic, idealistic, cynicism-free man I married.

Curious, I started reading about personality change. And I learned a few things, among them that the brain is not static. Rather, it is constantly rewired by our environments and by deep emotions. Entrepreneurship frequently evokes profound psychic responses: Elation and depression can succeed each other so rapidly as to induce emotional whiplash. In addition, entrepreneurs often suffer from intense and enduring anxiety. These emotions, and their dread companion, fear, can shrink human experience and any expansive sense of possibility. It takes extraordinary character and resilience to live with that every day and remain unaffected.

At least as powerful a force as fear is love. In his book 6 Secrets to Startup Success, business consultant John Bradberry contends that entrepreneurs literally fall in love with their companies and that such powerful emotion can alter personalities. If that sounds strange, try reading Much Ado About Nothing and Othello and mentally subbing in a start-up sports marketing agency for Beatrice and Desdemona. You begin to understand the transformative effects of company love, for good or for ill.

In some instances, entrepreneurship doesn't change people so much as reveal their true selves. Entrepreneurs learn by accumulating new knowledge and skills, Bradberry told me, but they also grow, by "stripping away accretions and misperceptions about who they really are." He explained that people who respond to adversity by getting in touch with their existing strengths create "a positive cycle of success and confidence and feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment." Unfortunately, some get in touch with their existing weaknesses. Beaten down by repeated disappointments, they are unable to hide the anger, petulance, despair, or other sour traits they had once suppressed.

Many people I spoke to for this column confessed that launching a company had, for whatever reason, made them less tolerant and more competitive, rigid, demanding, and critical. One woman told me that business building had turned her into an egotist and provoked unprecedented anxiety that led her to abuse alcohol for the first time. Another entrepreneur told me her entire outlook on life changed after a few employees cheated and lied to her. "I was once a trusting, loving, and giving individual," said Tammie Umbel, CEO of Shea Terra Organics, a natural skin care company based in Sterling, Virginia. "I see life more like a business now and carefully size up anyone I meet. I trust no one."

Not all entrepreneurs are sufficiently self-aware to notice the new face in the mirror. But the people who care about them cannot ignore the changes. Spouses whose mates became disagreeable, short tempered, hypercritical, or uncommunicative described family dynamics as a game of dodge ball, with everyone scurrying to avoid the entrepreneur's unpredictable temper. "My husband's moods are up and down depending on what happened in the business that day," one woman told me. "It affects the kids, too. My seventh grader is sensitive and doesn't want to rock the boat. I don't know if he'd be as quiet and withdrawn if my husband wasn't often like that, too."

A New Jersey woman told me that after her husband lost his business, he also lost his sense of humor, became disconnected emotionally, and withdrew from the family. The household has "no joy, no whimsy" in it, she said. She is close to asking for a divorce.

I would hazard that adverse personality effects are especially apparent in those who have long cherished the idea of entrepreneurship as salvation, the thing they were meant to do and finally would do that would lift them above the discontents of their normal lives. "My real life starts when my business starts," they assure themselves. The business starts. The business stumbles. What is left for them to dream about?

Fortunately, there is a sunny side to this particular street, at least for those lucky folks who thrive on pressure. The stress of daily life-and-death decision making is as likely to be confidence enhancing as debilitating. Starting a company makes some people more dynamic, focused, and creative. That, too, affects domestic relationships. No, this is not the man you married. This guy's better.

Such felicitous changes were especially striking for Gloria Sharrar, who after 36 years of marriage thought she knew everything about her husband. That's because she had been exposed only to the Dave Sharrar who worked for someone else. After a layoff, Gloria and Dave founded City­Park­ing, in Richmond, Virginia, and Dave began displaying levels of energy and motivation that were new to him. "I feel like I rediscovered Dave," ­Gloria told me. "I asked him, 'Were you always like this, and I just never noticed?'" The business has caused "a profound conversion" in their relationship, Gloria said. "It's increased my respect for him and made us a better couple."

Similarly, entrepreneurship revealed the warmer side of Larry Yatch. As a former Navy SEAL, Yatch had been trained to avoid personal interactions: to stand back, observe, and assess. Since he and his wife, Anne, started Sealed Mindset, a firearms and personal-safety training company in Minneapolis, Larry has become more fully engaged with those around him. "Being in business taught him about human relations," Anne said. "It's helped Larry develop as a human being."

These new-and-improved entrepreneurs aren't just easier to live with. They may also reinvigorate the romance in their marriages. "The change makes him so much more attractive to me," said Anne. Or as another spouse confided about her husband's newfound dynamism: "It's sexy as hell."

You can't tell in advance how starting a company will change someone's personality or whether it will have any effect at all. That is just one more unknown in the seemingly endless procession that comes with the territory. But though most founders fully appreciate the financial risks they are assuming, they routinely underestimate the risks to their emotional well-being and the health of their relationships. Just as they are obliged to detect and correct cash-flow or sales problems in their companies, they must also acknowledge and arrest their own slides into a psychic abyss.

One influential branch of entrepreneurial studies, dubbed effectuation, has coined the term affordable loss to describe what a founder is willing to risk and what he is willing to lose. The one thing he can never afford to lose is himself.

Why do so many female entrepreneurs find it hard to get a date?

Wendi Goldsmith, the CEO of Bioengineering Group, in Salem, Massachusetts, didn't get a single bite when she tried online dating after her divorce in 2003. Then she made one change to her profile, and the responses streamed in.

The one change? She stopped referring to herself as an entrepreneur.

It is conventional wisdom that gender stereotypes impede women who are trying to raise money or tap industry networks. Female entrepreneurs are often unfairly perceived as less serious, less aggressive, more likely to put family before business. But in the years I've been talking to entrepreneurs, I've discovered an opposite and equally insidious stereotype that is battering women's romantic prospects. The same woman who can't persuade a VC she's tough enough to build a business can't persuade a guy she's sweet enough to build a relationship.

I have heard the same story countless times from single female CEOs. Typically, women view men who exhibit the classic entrepreneurial traits of grit, tenacity, strength, and leadership as desirable partners. Men, by contrast, may view women with those traits as bossy or suspect they will have trouble compromising or settling into domestic bliss. "I've had people describe me as a professional shark," one female entrepreneur told me. "You can imagine how a man doesn't want to think that's who he's climbing into bed with."

We've come a long way from those Mad Men days when the only "career gals" were secretaries and stewardesses who served men in the workplace, then quit for the chance to serve them at home. The genders are approaching parity in many professions, and 21st-century men seem to desire equality in their relationships as well. But sustaining an equal relationship with an entrepreneur is tough. Entrepreneurs refuse to conform to expectations, are comfortable making unilateral decisions, and reflexively put their needs--or the needs of their companies, which amounts to the same thing--first. Men have a nose for a potential power imbalance. If one does crop up during the relationship, they don't want to be caught on the wrong side of it.

And because archetypes are, by definition, embedded in our psyches and in the culture, some men are still put off by women who call the shots. The problem isn't isolated to the older generation. Women in their 20s have also bemoaned the situation. One such woman is Heather Saffer, owner of Dollop Gourmet Frosting in Penfield, New York. "Although men say they like the idea of a driven, ambitious woman, they don't necessarily know how to handle her independent nature, intensity, and attentiveness toward her business," said Heather, who is 29. "Men I date like the novelty initially but eventually tell me they can't imagine a life with someone like me."

Of course, there are plenty of female entrepreneurs in satisfying relationships and right-thinking men who love them. (One or two women told me their profession actually helped by draining the dating pool of all but serious prospects.) Such couples are to be congratulated on their happiness. And I won't be surprised if I receive indignant letters from a few in response to this column. But I do suspect that they are the exception rather than the rule.

Wendi Goldsmith's experience is more typical of what I've been hearing. After striking out with an online dating profile that described her as a "geologist and entrepreneur," she changed the wording to just "geologist," and her batting average improved significantly. "Men want the warm, fuzzy woman and not the one they think wields a hatchet," Wendi told me. "Many men are uncomfortable with, intimidated by, and ill equipped to handle a powerful woman. People assume that those with power aren't necessarily nice, and women are supposed to be nice."

Wendi didn't end up with any of the men she dated through that site. Instead, she married Brian Balukonis, whom she'd met through an engineering association 15 years earlier. During those years they had rarely discussed business, and Brian had no idea when they started dating how successful and demanding Wendi's company had become. That ignorance turned out to be fortuitous. "If I had known she was a successful entrepreneur, I would have been a little intimidated and unsure about pursuing her romantically," Brian told me.

"Ideally, someone gets to know you as a person before you wear the scarlet letter of an entrepreneur," Wendi said.

Of course, accomplished women in any profession risk a similar response. But female entrepreneurs point out key differences between themselves and their peers in other high-powered pursuits. For one thing, traditionally employed women often have predictable schedules. Even a surgeon or a senator can frequently wrangle free evenings or weekends. Not so the entrepreneur, who is the first responder to any company crisis and the last to turn off the office lights. In addition, a woman in a corporate environment who answers to a boss may simply be less scary to men. As one female CEO put it, "Just the word CEO is more intimidating than HR manager at XCorp."

A more critical difference is the expectation--in men's minds, at least--that conventionally employed girlfriends or wives can walk away from their jobs, or at least cut back their hours, if the relationship or family life demands it. Ironically, the same concern over women's priorities that hurts them with investors also hurts them with romantic partners. Investors worry that female entrepreneurs will sacrifice their businesses for their personal lives. Prospective boyfriends worry they will make the opposite choice.

Sometimes a man grows impatient with a woman's preoccupations because he discounts the value of her business. "When a guy owns a business, people think he's Mark Zuckerberg," says Nancy A. Shenker, CEO of theONswitch, a marketing strategy firm in Yonkers, New York. "A woman says she owns her own business, and people think she's stringing beads in her basement."

So what do they do, these women looking for love with that scarlet letter E emblazoned on their chests? Sadly, some feel compelled to act the part they think a prospective partner desires. Feeling guilty that their leisure time is so limited, they let their dates call the shots about where to go and what to do. They don't arrive at dinner crowing because they nailed an account or buzzing about expansion opportunities. As one female CEO put it, "Entrepreneurs can be intimidating, and I don't want to intimidate. In order to date, one needs to keep the true self hidden."

Others refuse to make such compromises. They don't consider entrepreneurship to be a preexisting condition, something for which they should be penalized. Rather, it is something for which they deserve respect. In these women's view, their ambitions, their busyness, the magnitude of their challenges, and the number of people who depend on them position them to raise their own romantic standards. In the dating game, they demand partners who both want to and are able to keep up. "We have a construct in our culture, that someone needs to be the boss," says Carissa Reiniger, founder and CEO of Silver Lining, a software company based in New York City. "Maybe in business that's so, but not in a good relationship. I want my equal."

Perhaps the best advice for single entrepreneurs is to treat dating like starting a company. Cast a wide net when seeking opportunities. Be willing to negotiate, but never sacrifice your core principles. And hope you find a customer who truly appreciates all you have to offer.

Is there a start-up in your family's future? Here's the conversation you need to have, pronto.

Venture capitalists and angel investors have something like subpoena power. They can command entrepreneurs to appear before them and answer hard questions about their fledgling businesses. How can this idea possibly scale? Why doesn't anyone on your team have an industry background? Why should I believe you are capable of taking this on? The experience is squirm inducing but productive. When founders have good answers, it inspires confidence. When founders flounder, it reveals holes in their plans.

The entrepreneur's most important investors are her immediate family. No one will sacrifice more to assist her success or be more affected by the outcome. But how many spouses subject aspiring entrepreneurs to a good grilling before welcoming a start-up into their lives? I'm talking about questions that require detailed, concrete responses. Questions that can't be fobbed off with, "I'll always make time for you and the kids" and "I think we'll both know when it's time to pull back." Questions that--though not intended to crush the dream--may unearth mines that explode unrealistic assumptions.

My husband launched his company, Stonyfield Farm, before we met, so I never had the chance to challenge him on the thorniest issues. That was unfortunate, because a serious discussion in which I laid out all my doubts and questions would have done much to allay my anxieties. Not incidentally, it would also have increased my enthusiasm for his venture. And I might have felt less resentment when things I didn't realize could go wrong started going wrong with depressing regularity.

I have compiled some of the questions I wish I had asked Gary before I made the decision to climb into the barrel with him and head over the falls. If you are the spouse of an aspiring entrepreneur, I urge you to read them, add your own, then sit your spouse down for a little talk.

Financial Issues

1. Why do you want to do this? I know it's something you are passionate about, and that's great. But it's not enough--at least, not enough for me. I need to believe you are also committed to creating something that will support our family financially.

2. How vulnerable are the family's assets? Do you plan to dip into savings, use the house for collateral, raid retirement accounts? What will it mean for us financially when the bank requires your signature on a company loan? All those options make me pretty nervous, but some are scarier than others. Can we agree on what will be off limits?

3. If something happens to you, will I be on the hook for anything? What will happen to the company's assets? I would like our family to be protected. What insurance will you have? Key man? Life? Disability? Medical?

4. Assuming the business becomes profitable one of these days, what will you do with the cash? I know you'll need to plow some of it back into the company. But I think at least a portion should go toward the family's bottom line.

5. How long will we have to scrimp? I can deal with fewer evenings out and vacations that don't involve hopping on an airplane. But I don't think the roof can survive another winter's worth of New Hampshire snow. And it would be nice to begin even a modest attempt to plump up the kids' college funds. How will we fare if achieving profitability takes much longer than you project?

6. What if you never achieve profitability? What if the business limps along for years, skirting failure and chewing up more of our resources? Can we establish a cut-bait number, an amount of financial loss that we agree is our limit? At the very least, we should agree to consult at regular intervals about whether to stay in the game.

Personal Issues

1. How will my life change? If we can't live comfortably for a long while on my income or our savings, should I consider ways to bring in more cash? Because the business will be all consuming for you, will I be solely responsible for the children and the home? Can we come up with ways in advance to help relieve the pressure on me?

2. Would you like me to help out with the business in any way? If so, and if I'm game, what would you like my role to be? Partner? Employee? Or just filling in where necessary? How will we relate to each other in the office and in front of the staff? Will you treat me like everyone else? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but let's figure it out so I don't end up resenting you and the employees don't end up resenting me.

3. Will we ever see you again? I understand this business will consume you for a long time. I'm not unrealistic enough to believe we can achieve work-life balance. But I would like us to set aside some family time that is sacred and nonnegotiable. I'm flexible: dinner at home three times a week, two weekends a month devoted to us--whatever works. I'm looking for a concrete commitment that you will put on the calendar and stick to.

4. Are you up for this? Do you think you have the stamina to go the full 12 rounds? You'll need both physical and psychological endurance. Do you think you're prepared to handle the inevitable setbacks?

5. What are the opportunity costs? If you didn't take on this launch, what would our lives look like? Are there attractive alternatives for how you could spend your time and our family's resources?

Endgame Issues

1. What is your exit strategy? Is your goal to build value and cash out or to stay in until you are long in the tooth? Do you see this as a legacy for the children?

2. What's Plan B? Today you are enthusiastic and full of optimism. But failure is, in fact, an option. Do you know what you will do if you lose the business?

And Serial Entrepreneurs

1. What will be different this time? Your last business caused us a ton of stress. How will you make things easier for us with this company?

2. Is it really, truly your last start-up? Or can I expect you to be raising seed capital in the afterlife?

After finishing this list, I showed it to Gary and asked whether he thought hashing out such issues in advance would have made a difference in our lives. He agreed the exercise would have been good for both of us and maybe even for the business. But as he read over my questions—almost 30 years after the fact—he surmised that such a conversation might not have provided the bedrock of certainty I craved. His answers, he told me, would probably have varied day to day, depending on his mood, how much sleep he had had, or whether he had managed to snag a desirable investor. He would have answered truthfully. But, in fact, his replies would have been mostly guesswork.

So, have the talk, negotiate some terms, and air the concerns before they become grievances. But understand that truthful replies are not necessarily accurate ones. And while you're grilling the entrepreneur, ask yourself this question:

Am I committed enough to this person to put up with whatever crazy, unanticipated, impossible-to-iron-out-in-advance stuff happens along the way?

For me, the answer has always been yes.

Two-business households are the worst--except when they are they best.

Hollywood loves power couples. Over the years, we've seen movies about married lawyers (Adam's Rib), married scientists (Outbreak), and married professional killers (Mr. & Mrs. Smith). But I can't think of any movies about married entrepreneurs. That's a missed opportunity, because the potential for both drama and comedy is legion.

In real life, entrepreneurs do end up together, for a variety of reasons. Some meet after they've already started their companies--at trade shows or chamber of commerce events or CEO networking groups. Others agree to take turns starting businesses after they marry, the way some spouses take turns attending graduate school. Occasionally, a nonentrepreneur marries an entrepreneur and then wants to try what his spouse is doing, because, man, that looks like fun. But however they get there, two spouses running two companies doubles the chaos. Or more than doubles it: The absence of one adult able to maintain a semblance of normalcy introduces a multiplier effect.

The chief sources of stress are (of course) money and time. Entrepreneurship requires households to put up cash before they start earning it. It's an investment that works best--sometimes only--if one family member shores up the dam with a regular paycheck and health benefits. The schedules of conventionally employed spouses are usually more predictable than those of entrepreneurs, which is critical when there are children in the mix. Employed spouses also get paid vacations. That means one adult is not working a full-court press 52 weeks a year, so a little pressure is being released somewhere.

When one spouse owns a company, that business competes with the family for resources. When both spouses own companies, his business may compete with her business, and both businesses compete with the family. If both spouses' companies go through difficult stretches at the same time, they are like twins in the womb: One may be fed at the expense of the other. With win-win not an option, the couple must negotiate who loses more. Which spouse will skip a paycheck? Which will dip into savings? Who will have to lay off an employee?

Because most marriages are founded on an ideal of parity, spouses may be tempted to share the sacrifice, as they vowed to share pretty much everything in that innocent moment standing before the altar. Or the entrepreneur who is in less dire straits may want to help her flailing spouse, even if she can't really afford to do so. But the mathematics of family survival don't work that way.

So, for practical reasons, many two-entrepreneur families choose which company to favor based on the relative contribution of each to the family's income. That's the understanding in the Flynn household. Lisa Flynn is founder of ChildLight Yoga and Yoga 4 Classrooms, New Hampshire-based companies that teach yoga and mindfulness to children. Her husband, John Flynn, runs Great Works Properties, a property and golf-course management company. John's business brings in most of the cash, so "if push came to shove," said Lisa, "his business would take precedence. But that's tough for me to admit out loud."

The problem with such arrangements is they tend to perpetuate inequities. How likely is it that two businesses, even with comparable ambitions and resources, will progress along exactly the same trajectories? If a couple's two companies have lopsided revenue, that can force uncomfortable--and sometimes premature--discussions about their respective viability. Such discussions get ugly when one spouse calls into question the other's seriousness, even if it's only in comparison to his own. The leap from "which company is healthier" to "which company is worthier" is both dangerous and easy to make. Suddenly, it's my growth company versus your lifestyle company. Or worse, my business versus your hobby.

The same calculus comes into play with schedules. It's easier to decide which spouse forgoes a sales trip or works the weekend when there is a primary family business and a secondary family business. But when spouses don't agree which is which, bad feelings are inevitable. If there are kids, then the prospect of running two start-ups while raising a family becomes like riding a unicycle on a high wire while juggling lit torches. I know people do it. But if I had to watch them, I'd keep my hands over my eyes and peek through my fingers.

Some dual-company couples don't compete for resources--they just compete. Lisa Landry owns the New Hampshire-based marketing firm Savvy Workshop. Her husband, Joe Landry, is founder of Build Savvy, a construction firm. "At the end of the day, we have to show each other our numbers," said Lisa. "Sometimes, when Joe's business is doing great and mine isn't, I get jealous. I even try to beat him at Monopoly."

Or the entrepreneur whose company is doing better is tempted to offer advice to his struggling spouse. Such counsel may be appreciated or insufferable, depending on the spirit in which it is given. Mason Arnold is founder of Greenling, an organic-food delivery service based in Austin. His wife, Mylie Arnold, owns a large dance studio. Mason described how the couple de-fanged the tension that arose when they gave each other business advice. "Most of the time, Mylie just wants to be heard, not to have me fix her business problem," he said. "So I just listen." Now, when either spouse wants to make a concrete suggestion, he or she asks for permission and has to be comfortable getting "no, thanks" for an answer.

In the ideal dual-company marriage, relative size and success are unimpor­tant. Adrienne Cornelsen runs Insite Interactive, a Dallas-based company that designs websites and mobile applications. Adrienne's business is much larger than Evolving Texas, the civil-engineering firm owned by her husband, John Cornelsen. But that may change: The Cornelsens expect that at some point, Evolving will surpass Insite in sales. Whichever business is bigger, the spouses respect each other's contributions equally. "We have a 'times-four' rule in our household," Adrienne said. "My company's revenues are four times his, so when he gets a contract for $25,000, we are as thrilled as if I got awarded a $100,000 contract. Entrepreneurs have to celebrate every win."

I was surprised by how many two-company couples I spoke to are as content as the Cornelsens. I had expected to hear more tales of overwhelming stress and exhaustion, compounded by a lack of emotional succor. In my experience, entrepreneurs need someone who is less stressed--or at least differently stressed--to whom they can confide their troubles. I had assumed entrepreneur spouses would be like two overflowing vessels futilely trying to pour their excess anxiety into each other.

What I failed to account for was the deep satisfaction bred by affinity. Simply put, married entrepreneurs get each other. As my husband, Gary, built his business, I often felt as if I were watching a foreign film without subtitles. I had no idea why he did what he did; his thinking was so different from mine, it seemed incomprehensible. By contrast, when a company-owning husband fumes over losing a sale, his company-owning wife understands why he finds the experience so galling. Resentments that can build in families that shelter only one entrepreneur tend to fizzle in dual-entrepreneur families.

In many cases, married entrepreneurs share advice and strategize as equals. They form a CEO networking group of two. But even those who keep each other's companies at arm's length respect their spouses' grit and resilience. Yes, two risk-loving, overworking, superambitious adults in one marriage are a lot. But two optimistic, never-say-die adults are propitious for a happy future. "Our attitude toward our personal lives is the same one we have in business: Don't give in to the challenges," said Adrienne Cornelsen. "We just find the solution--whether our goal is to take an exotic trip or buy a house that right now seems unattainable. Our way of thinking lets us choose an exceptional life."

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? It's tough to stay confident when your spouse loses faith in your business.

Someone should develop a kind of general anesthesia for spouses of entrepreneurs. They could descend into merciful oblivion during the excruciating company-building process and regain consciousness only after the enterprise had achieved sustainable profits or been deep-sixed. The entrepreneur would be spared a lot of agony as well. Nothing hurts like disappointing a loved one who may have prepared for a long, hard road but not the Trans-Siberian Highway.

The journey is easier when the entrepreneur manages his spouse's expectations. But hopped up on optimism and in thrall to his bold idea, he forgets that it's better to underpromise and overdeliver. Before launch, he sits down with his spouse to review the business plan: "I'll draw down on savings, use the house for collateral to secure an SBA loan, and won't take a salary for a while, but my most conservative estimates show me breaking even in two years, and after that, we're looking at double-digit growth until I figure out the best time to sell."

Benchmarks come. Benchmarks go. And so the question--at once solicitous and reproachful--inevitably arises: "Honey, why haven't you made it yet?" Often the question is not verbalized but instead surrounds the couple like smog, polluting their every interaction.

Entrepreneurs are among the few types of people who get to define success on their own terms. (So do artists, but a lot of them are starving too.) By announcing those terms, the entrepreneur makes an implicit promise. And the people listening--not just the spouse but also children, parents, siblings, and friends invested and not--believe in that promise because they think the entrepreneur is in control. After all, don't people start companies to control their destinies?

When success comes gradually, the believers get impatient. In 2007, Loren Brill founded Sweet Loren's, a New York City company that manufactures all-natural frozen cookie dough. Friends and relatives pepper her with questions: Why aren't you more profitable? Why can't I buy your products in California? "So many amazing little things happen every month, but people are not wowed by it, because we haven't gone nationwide and haven't been on Oprah yet," Loren said. "They don't understand what it takes to build a brand."

"I think one enters entrepreneurship believing that you'll make it, and it will take less time than you think," said Fred Newcombe, founder of PJC Ecological Land Care, a Massachusetts manufacturer of organic fertilizer. "So as we get going, we tend to market to ourselves. Who else hears that marketing? Our spouse, family, and friends."

Entrepreneurs create approximate timelines to manage the risk of a business launch. But those measures are mere reference points against which to track the company's progress. In unpredictable circumstances--the only kind of circumstances that exist for start-ups--creating milestones is less science than art, and less art than crapshoot.

Unmet milestones can be psychological land mines, because though success is relative, relatives don't always recognize success. When the company fails to pay out or scale up at the rate anticipated, family morale erodes. Facing the doubts of his nearest and dearest, the entrepreneur may discount those things he has managed to accomplish and start to wonder whether he isn't a bit of a failure after all. More often, he dusts himself off and shifts strategy, which almost always requires more cash. He believes that success will redeem the plan retroactively.

His wife is not so sure. Even spouses who understand that setting milestones is a somewhat futile exercise can't help fixating on outcomes rather than on process and possibility. Encountering incremental failures, they view the company as failing.

I asked Wendi Goldsmith, CEO of Bioengineering Group, a Massachusetts firm devoted to ecosystem restoration, whether the initial reassurance that milestones provide to spouses is worth the eventual disillusionment. "Entrepreneurs fake it till they make it, even when we start out with a detailed plan," Wendi said. "You can't have a legitimate discussion with yourself--let alone your spouse--about what you are getting into. It's just words, not a profound understanding. I'm not saying don't have the conversation. I'm just saying you should both recognize the futility of it."

That's little comfort for spouses waiting for the bacon to be brought home. And so entrepreneurs use various tactics to keep judgment at bay. I spoke with one CEO who regularly showed his wife customer testimonials praising his financially shaky service company. After promising to look for a job before pulling from savings to support the company, he withdrew $10,000 from their account. Attempts to butter her up with appreciation and assurances that he "heard" her concerns didn't wash. "She knows when I'm trying to work her over," he told me. "Her response was, 'Don't pull that bullshit life-coaching stuff on me. Just give it to me straight.' "

Sometimes the deception is mutual. Neither spouse nor entrepreneur wants a relationship in which one judges the other, so they live a rose-colored lie. I spoke with a woman, herself a company owner, who pretended to swallow the upbeat reports of her husband, the co-founder of a technology company. She explained their dynamic: "I didn't want to admit that I wasn't being fed the truth. It felt like there was a thin veneer. You could punch a hole in it pretty quickly by asking questions. I didn't want to embarrass him, and I didn't want to know that things might be rotten at the core." She called their arrangement "an uneasy truce"--a truce that dissolved with the marriage.

Ideally, the question "Why haven't you made it yet?" is posed not as an accusation but rather as a challenge to recalibrate and rethink. The spouse isn't tapping his foot with impatience but extending a hand. If the spouse is familiar with the company or with business in general, he can help the entrepreneur create new, more realistic milestones and address pressing concerns. At the very least, he reminds the entrepreneur that she isn't in this alone.

Gia Machlin already had two successful start-ups under her belt when she launched EcoPlum, a green shopping-reward site based in New York City. So she had reason to be confident. But not as confident as she was. "I didn't have a good plan for growing EcoPlum," she said. "I thought the stars would align." Her husband, Corey Sclar, who works in private equity, had cheered on Gia's earlier ventures. When his wife fell behind on her numbers with EcoPlum, he didn't become judgmental but rather initiated frank conversations about next steps.

In the course of those discussions, Gia realized that her resistance to outside investment and the resulting performance of her cash-starved company were unfair to Corey. So she relaunched the business and prepared to take on investors. "Entrepreneurs think of outside forces that limit or guide them as impediments, and they chafe at any restraint," Gia said. "But being answerable to Corey made me recalibrate in a way that made both my business and my marriage stronger."

And, of course, many doubting spouses aren't concerned exclusively with finances. Business plans don't include projections of when the entrepreneur's migraines and insomnia will disappear. Corey Sclar is not alone when he reports worrying more about his wife than about her company. "Usually Gia's trying to get 3,000 things done in a day," said Corey. "She's so overwhelmed and stressed. Sometimes I say to her: 'Are you happy? Is this really what you want to do?' "

For the entrepreneur's spouse, it can be hard not to see employees as rivals.

In the farmhouse that my husband and I shared with his business, Stonyfield Farm, the line between those who lived and those who merely worked there was as gray as our New Hampshire granite. I was on familiar—and sometimes friendly—terms with many of the employees who shared our family's bathrooms and kitchen. I even baby-sat occasionally for workers on the night shift.

Half a dozen years later, the company relocated to a facility an hour's drive from the farm. After my day-to-day interaction with staff ended, I found my visits to the new office disquieting. There, Gary was chief of an entire little world, cheerfully at home among colleagues with whom he—not I—shared inside jokes, celebrations, and dramas both business and personal. They had built up a reservoir of stories and references about which I knew next to nothing.

I would hazard that most spouses are grateful to those patient, trusting souls who strap themselves in for the entrepreneur's wild ride. But at times, we are also jealous. The entrepreneur spends endless hours away from home working on his company—and generally, he is not alone. His partners and employees are with him, traveling to conferences, sweating over sales presentations into the wee hours. They take turns wheedling the pizza guy to make one more delivery even though the joint is officially closed and know which bars stay open until 2 a.m. so they can unwind together when the pressure's finally off. They can practically read one another's minds. That's not hard, because mostly they're thinking about the same stuff.

The entrepreneur, having dragged himself home at last, tries to recall which of his daughter's friends is sleeping over and muster appropriate concern that the dishwasher is broken. But it's obvious that he is itching to phone the marketing director he left an hour ago to discuss a brilliant idea he had while turning into the driveway. The spouse wonders: Who is this person's real family? Where do his head and heart truly live?

Of course, traditionally employed people also form strong connections with colleagues. We've all heard about office husbands and office wives. But I think the connection is deeper for entrepreneurs, who handpick their staffs and feel beholden to the folks—their people—who are making it all possible. The intensity of the company-building experience, with its wild swings of fortune and consequent emotional responses, deepens and enriches those bonds.

It wouldn't be so bad if entrepreneurs and co-workers bonded over work and nothing else. But sometimes, the founder who spends all day solving business problems can't stop himself from trying to solve employees' personal problems as well. The spouse feels she is competing for the entrepreneur's time and attention not only with the company but also with Steve and Joe and Sue.

George Naddaff, CEO of UFood Grill and founder of Boston Chicken, told me about his early career, when he owned 19 KFC franchises. "I was passionately involved in the lives of every one of my managers," he said. "They'd tell me that their wife was leaving, that their kid was sick, that they couldn't pay the rent. I'd sit there like a priest receiving confession. I tried to pass on any wisdom I could." George had a practical reason for playing father-confessor: "I knew that what was going on in their personal lives would affect their work lives—whether they showed up to work, how well they worked, whether they felt they needed to lie to me." Still, his wife complained that he spent too much time engrossed with employees and not enough with her.

Of course, a family atmosphere is a selling point for many companies, especially those that are, in fact, run by families. Leaders of such businesses can feel a sense of benign paternalism toward their employees. A man I'll call Michael is vice president of a construction company in Texas. He is on track to become CEO when his father retires. Like his father and grandfather before him, Michael routinely assists employees with their personal and financial issues, to the chagrin of his wife, whom I will call Lynn. "I applaud Michael's concern for his people, but I'm facing similar stresses at home," said Lynn. "I'm raising a flag over here. Because after dealing with the nitty-gritty of their issues, Michael is too tired to hear about mine. I want to feel the support of my husband as much as his employees feel it." Lynn acknowledges that Michael has incentive to go the extra mile with workers, who, after all, have the option of leaving. He knows she and their young daughter are going to stick around.

Such situations kindle resentment. Jealousy ignites when the spouse is convinced that the entrepreneur simply prefers his co-workers' company. (That he might enjoy a particular co-worker's company in a manner incompatible with marital fidelity is a problem in any workplace, so I won't belabor it here.) Those hellishly long hours at work become suspect, even for the spouse who understands that launching a business requires them. Two or three times a week, an entrepreneur I'll call Josh, who is CEO of a telecom equipment supplier in New York, meets after work for several hours with a handful of managers. "That's when the growth happens, as far as creativity, problem resolution, and new-idea development," Josh told me. His wife sees those gatherings as a convenient excuse for Josh to hang out with work buddies. "I think she resents that they are getting and giving something that she wants to be a part of but can't be," said Josh. Another spouse in the same position as Josh's wife told me, "Every night that he stays late to be with his employees, I feel like it's to spite me and our family, even though I know that's not the case."

Time spent with employees is just one bee in the spousal bonnet. In the home-family-versus-work-family competition, there are many ways to play favorites. Spouses glower when entrepreneurs urge employees to take a few hours off to watch their kids play soccer, then work extra hard to cover for them, missing their own children's events in the process. Money becomes a sore spot when founders reduce or forsake their salaries in order to pay workers enough to retain them. The sacrifice makes eminent sense to the entrepreneur, who depends on his people's loyalty to succeed.

But the spouse has a different view. Melissa Lerner's husband, Scott, is CEO of Solixir, an Evanston, Illinois-based manufacturer of natural drinks. When cash flow is tight, Scott reduces his salary, while his staff's paychecks remain untouched. "These shortages set up an adversarial dynamic, where it is me against the employees, competing for the same resources," Melissa said. Things got tense when Scott told Melissa that their family could afford to go without, but his employees could not. "He is so emotionally close to his business that he feels like it's one of his children," Melissa said.

Some tension naturally resolves as companies grow and management layers are interposed between the entrepreneur and most of the work force. Beyond the start-up crucible, relationships begin to normalize, becoming familiar rather than familial. Opportunities for the spouse to socialize with employees and employees' families at company functions can also smooth hackles. Entrepreneurs should be mindful of their time, weighing whether each extracurricular hour is better spent with work friends or with family, and restricting after-hours calls to emergencies only.

The spouse, for her part, must accept that, particularly in a small company, some play-together-stay-together time is both inevitable and warranted. She will draw her own reasonable line in the sand. One woman choked back tears as she described her husband's mentoring of the young men who work for his moving company. "It's what I love about him," she said. "He is so generous and so committed. But," she added resolutely, "when we have a child, our needs are going to have to come first."

Troubles arise when the spouse's paycheck supports a family and a business.

During the perilous early years of Stonyfield Farm, I didn't work outside the home. My husband, Gary, and I managed to live on his meager income. But many spouses of entrepreneurs are their families' sole financial support. While their entrepreneurial mates are off pursuing a risky vision, these forced-to-be-practical husbands and wives work as hard as they can in the most secure jobs they can find so that they and their loved ones don't have to go live in a tent. People can get tetchy in arrangements like that, and not just because they're stretched for cash.

In these situations, the family endures the stress of two working parents but must survive on the income of one. Making matters worse, part of that income frequently gets shoveled into the ravening maw of the business. It's probably not fair to compare such situations to the melodramatic cliché of long-suffering wives surrendering their paychecks to ne'er-do-well mates who squander the money on drink or drugs. That would imply entrepreneurship is expensive and addicting and may end badly. And I, of course, would never suggest that.

Normally, when only one household head is earning a wage, the other takes up the slack at home. But company founders are often busier and more preoccupied than are their salaried mates, who consequently reap no stay-at-home-spouse premium. Sole-supporting spouses also fear that their sacrifices may come to nothing. If a husband plays breadwinner while his wife pursues higher education, brighter postgraduation job prospects will likely reward both. The same is true if the wife is an entrepreneur whose company succeeds. But that's a much bigger if, and the timeline is unpredictable.

Many sole breadwinners report feeling professionally trapped and jealous that their entrepreneur-spouses are able to chase their dreams. I spoke with a former investment banker who had quit her job to launch a company. One day, her husband, a physician, called from the office to announce that he had a buyer for his practice and was considering selling. "I freaked out," she said. Turns out the husband wasn't serious. But he wanted her to understand that her decision to launch a business had left him feeling cornered, forced to work longer and harder than he might have preferred.

Gender stereotypes can also ramp up guilt and resentment, even in 2012. Some male entrepreneurs worry that they're not fulfilling their traditional bringers-home-of-bacon roles. One told me he was failing at being "a provider and protector." A woman whose husband is an entrepreneur said that even though she has the job and the credit cards, he grabs the check at restaurants, ashamed that the waitress will see who pays the bills. "Sometimes I'd look at him and think, Wow, you are useless financially," she told me. "That is a horrible, destructive thought."

Matters get worse when the spouse supports not just the family but also the business. Though most couples make early commitments to keep business finances separate from the family's accounts, young companies are like baby birds with gawping beaks, always needing to be fed. When Andrea Mealey's husband, Jim, started a company that rehabbed houses, she used some of her salary as a Boston attorney to pay for equipment, subcontractors, and other business expenses. "For several years, 'B of A' meant 'Bank of Andrea,' " she told me. "Jim said he was happy not to be 'some wage slave working for the Man.' But the fact is that his decision to start a company forced me to be a wage slave, and much of what I earned went right into the company."

In these situations, joint checking accounts become hubs of domestic drama. The spouse deposits; the entrepreneur withdraws; and then the spouse withdraws from the entrepreneur in anger for not being consulted. Or the spouse demands a say in company expenditures, irritating the entrepreneur, who resents being slowed down or second-guessed. "Jim hated having someone to answer to," said Andrea, who insisted on oversight of the rehab company's spending. "It took me a long time to say, 'You also have to answer to me.' " (Jim has since dissolved his company and now works as an economist.)

Perhaps even more debilitating for the marriage than resentment is guilt—even fear. Entrepreneurs know they are indebted to financially supportive spouses. A sense of obligation naturally arises from the request, "Sweetie, could you start working overtime so I can realize my life's dream?" And the spouse has the option of removing support at any time. One entrepreneur told me that she became so desperate to remain in her husband's good graces that she traveled less, cooked more, and rarely challenged him on family issues, such as how he disciplined the kids. Anxious to keep his salary flowing to her new venture, she tried to make her husband happier in other ways, too—becoming, in her words, more "accommodating" in the bedroom.

And, of course, every penny diverted to the business is diverted away from the family. That can lead to queasy confrontations, such as one described by Kris Boesch, founder of Choose People, a Colorado-based company that helps businesses improve their cultures. Kris reported feeling vexed that her husband would cheerfully spend his income on art school for their child but wouldn't pay for an airline ticket to a convention that was important for her business. "I asked him why he was willing to help with our child's dream but not mine," she said. "When he placed limits on how much I could use for the business, I wondered where that limitation was coming from. Was it financially based or just what he was arbitrarily willing to do?"

In time, though, Kris came to see things differently. She realized her husband was putting money into the company as an investment, not as a favor to her. That insight, in turn, made her more hardheaded about the business. She began focusing more on closing sales than on marketing and became a frugal bootstrapper, staying with friends when she traveled on business trips. "I had been giving my company a longer runway than it needed," she said. "I feel much more accountable now. It's no coincidence that I'm at breakeven." Kris's shift in perspective improved not only her company but also her marriage. "We're now on the same team," she told me. "We're both investors. Of course, it also helps that I no longer need his financial support."

Like Kris and her husband, couples can drain much of the emotion from sole-support situations by treating the business as a shared investment and setting expectations and ground rules up front. Long-horizon, detailed family budgets are critical. And spouses need assurance that the I-give-the-company-takes dynamic will eventually reverse. For several years, Jacquelyn Draplin's Web-analytics job has supported her husband, Justin, and their young daughter while Justin and a partner have built PowerCapes, a Livonia, Michigan, company that sells custom superhero costumes. Justin, not surprisingly, wanted to plow everything back into the business. But he agreed that once the company inched into the black, 15 percent of profits would return to the family's personal account. Fifteen percent "may not be much," said Jacquelyn. "But it makes me feel he's putting the family first, not the company."

In the best of all possible worlds, the business thrives and the spouse proudly shares credit. At that point, she is free to take a break, continue her education, or tackle a new, more fulfilling career. She may even choose to start a company. She already knows someone who can help out with the money.

He's the frequent subject of Meg's Column. Now, the founder of Stonyfield Farm gets to speak up about what he's learned from being his wife's favorite recurring character.

To celebrate the publication of her book For Better or for Work, Meg Cadoux Hirshberg invited her husband to offer his take on the demands of business and family life.

Millions of consumers and entrepreneurs know Gary Hirshberg as the dynamic founder of Stonyfield Farm. Inc. readers know him as the risk-ravening, dream-chasing, often absent husband of Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, who writes Balancing Acts, a regular column about the experience of being married to (or the child, parent, or sibling of) an entrepreneur. Since Meg debuted in our pages, in 2008, with a story about Stonyfield's protracted birth pains, she has chronicled the couple's 28-year relationship with humor and candor. We have read about Gary asking Meg's mother for investments (without Meg's knowledge), missing family events, and sending employees during staff meetings to raid the family's kitchen. We have also read about Gary's devotion to family and mission, and how Gary, together with co-founder Samuel Kaymen, built Stonyfield from a disaster-plagued operation on a hardscrabble farm in New Hampshire into an international brand. (Groupe Danone bought 40 percent of Stonyfield in 2001 and an additional 40 percent in 2003. Gary stayed on as CEO of the company, which in 2011 had sales of $360 million. In January, he relinquished that role. He remains chairman of the company.)

Meg's book For Better or for Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families hits physical and virtual shelves this month. It is a practical yet intimate guide to building companies and families at the same time. To mark the book's publication, editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan sat down with Gary to see what he has learned from being his wife's favorite recurring character.

In which the frequent subject of this column finally has his say

Meg says she had no idea how difficult it would be building a family and a business at the same time. How did you imagine it was going to work?
I was as naive as Meg. I was delusional. I just assumed it would work—that Meg would fall in love with New Hampshire and country living and our beautiful winters. To be sure, I was trying to put the best possible spin on it for her. But I wasn't thinking about the dark side, any more than I thought about things that could go wrong when I bought a filler or a capper for a machine at work. I was just moving forward.

The question's not what was I thinking when we started, but while it was happening. That's when I started to realize there were limits, especially to time. And that was a problem. Once, this guy called Meg and asked her on a date. I was in the room, so I heard it. Apparently, people saw her alone so much of the time, because I was always working, that they'd got the impression she was single. Meg told the guy, "No, I'm with Gary." But I thought, Wow, this is something I need to pay attention to. We should go out to dinner or something.

For years, your wife was convinced your company would collapse. Did you take her lack of confidence personally?
I took it very personally. There's no question I would have preferred Meg be supportive and cheering for every single decision. Instead, until we stopped discussing the business altogether, she would press hard for explanations. And sometimes, in the end, the best answer I could give her was "because." Like I was a 5-year-old. That was hard. What I was really saying was, "Look, just trust me on this." I don't fault her for not being able to do that. Often, the choice was between something bad and something really terrible.

So if the entrepreneur is going to do what he wants anyway, would you advise the spouse to...
Put up and shut up? No. Over time, I realized that she was worth listening to. Meg has a nose for people—an instinct I've learned from. I remember we got involved with this dairy in Massachusetts, and Meg sensed things were amiss. She didn't trust the situation. Samuel and I didn't do our due diligence, and it turned out their balance sheet was totally leveraged. It was a bad decision that nearly cost us the company. So even though it's painful and can create tension within the couple, the spouse should speak up. But my advice to the spouse is, there's a point where you have to recognize you've said everything you can say. And then you've gotta stop. Because the entrepreneur is going to make that call.

How did you deal with your own doubt and fear? Did you try to conceal them in the interests of protecting your family?
Yes, I tried to conceal them. The tension inside me would be so incredible. Meg couldn't understand how at 10 at night, instead of coming home and being warm and cuddly with her, I was off playing tennis when I had been gone all day and all the previous day and all the previous, previous day. I had to have an outlet for the tension. On many nights, tears would flow. I couldn't show her that. I was very stoic. But I had grown up in an emotionally challenging household, so I had learned to bottle it up. I can't tell you it's the most virtuous attribute. But it's a necessary survival skill.

What were the hardest things you hid from her?
One was how much her mother had invested. Meg didn't know that for about 10 years. There were probably 15 transactions I didn't tell her about. I also don't think I ever really told her about our cash burn. That year, we were losing about $25,000 a week—I know I didn't explain that. Then, when we opened the new facility in Londonderry, there were errors in how it was engineered. By the end of the first week, we were forced to discard 75 percent of our yogurt because it failed to meet quality standards. I definitely didn't tell her about that, because, for starters, it was terrifying. But also, it was embarrassing. It was a reflection on me. I don't think I wanted her to know that her husband was failing again.

As you have made decisions over the years, how have you weighed the competing interests of work and family?
In a tug of war, the business always wins. Of course, you say that the family needs the business to survive financially, so that prioritizing the business is really prioritizing the family. But that's just a made-up debate in your head. The fact is, you're going to deal with emergencies first. And until it stabilizes, the business is the critical-care patient.

How might things have been different if Meg had been more involved with the company? Would you have liked that?
She was involved for a while. That didn't work. One reason our marriage has prospered is because we're so different. I doubt we would have fared as well if we were doing the same things. Anyway, I already had a spouse in the business. I had Samuel. And I don't know that I'd be very good in a triangular relationship. He and I would often close the doors to argue with each other—it was usually me venting at him. He could handle it; he was very thick skinned. I certainly wouldn't have wanted that level of venting going on with Maggie.

As Meg has mined the subject of entrepreneurs and marriage, the two of you have talked a lot about your relationship. What has come out of those conversations that has surprised you?
One thing—and I didn't see this until I was writing the afterword for the book—is that while Meg says she has a very low tolerance for risk, that's not really true. It's just low compared to mine. She had to be somewhat risk tolerant just to marry me. She had plenty of alternatives. I think people who are drawn to entrepreneurs are often more risk tolerant than they realize. They're attracted by the excitement. So there is some complicity.

It also brought home the extent to which Meg has a strong sense of her own limits, which is something I almost totally lack. Like her decision that she didn't want to hear any more about the business, even though she was living there and it was all going on around her. She just said, "I can't take it." So, for five or six years, I didn't tell her anything. And that was good, because it meant home was a place I could escape from work, and I wasn't burdening her with problems.

Looking back, as this process has compelled you to do, what do you wish you had done differently?
Probably there were travels that were unnecessary. And I got involved in a lot of extracurricular stuff that was a distraction and not all that relevant. I just kept taking things on. Because I have no limits. If I hadn't taken them on, Meg and I would have been better off.

I also wish I had been more proactive about finding things we could do together in our day-to-day lives. Most of our togetherness happened away. We leapt from vacation to vacation to vacation. We could have taken dance lessons. Learned a language together. Something.

Stonyfield has a save-the-world kind of mission focused on health and environmentalism. Do you feel as though you, personally, serve a higher purpose? Should entrepreneurs who serve a higher purpose expect more sacrifice from their families?
The answer to the first part is yes. Without that higher purpose, I probably wouldn't have run the company as long as I did. It's why I got up every day even when it was horrible. Insofar as family goes, I don't know that I asked the family to make sacrifices for a higher purpose. Certainly not in a conscious way. Meg was always right there with me on the mission. That brought us together. It was the business that was the problem. And I think it made the kids feel good that Stonyfield wasn't just a cool brand. We were actually doing something important. But I don't think having a higher purpose can be an excuse for justifying sacrifice. Not other people's sacrifices, anyway.

You recently considered running for governor of New Hampshire but decided against it. How much did family concerns factor into that decision?
They were the biggest issue. Meg was always saying, "Ultimately, it's your call. I won't stand in the way." But she was completely against it. The reality is that if I had run and won, I would have been living half the year alone. She wouldn't have been here. We kept joking: "Where's the first lady?" As for me, I'll tell you, lifestyle is everything. With the kids out of the house, we finally have some freedom and the space to design the lives we want next. Being governor would have been a huge encumbrance.

Still, I was really torn up about it. I thought I could win and that I would be a great governor.

So the governorship isn't your next big thing. What is?
Twenty-eight years after starting Stonyfield, I think it's time to pause and take measure. I stepped down as CEO at the end of January, although I will remain chairman, which means I'll be working half time, mostly on external things. I want to take the lessons of Stonyfield's positive business model to a larger audience, with the goal of influencing policymakers and business thinkers. And Meg and I talk about living in France. I've been puttering around with the French language for years, and I think the only way I can really learn it is to live there.

Would you retire there?
Entrepreneur and retirement are contradictory terms. It happens I've got some business enterprises in France, so it works. Stonyfield has an organic yogurt brand there called Les Deux Vaches, and I'm starting a restaurant in Paris with that name. It will be an organic, healthy quick-serve place, like Stonyfield Café. We're designing it now and hope to open this spring. But I'm not running it, which makes a big difference.

Which Balancing Acts columns have been your favorites? Which didn't you like so much?
My favorite, hands down, is the one about how, at some point, the spouse has to answer the question, Are you in or out? Are you committed to this enterprise—and by extension to this entrepreneur—no matter how miserable it gets? All entrepreneurs should ask their spouses that question at least once a year, maybe every quarter. "How are you doing now? You in? You out? You heading in or heading out?" If the spouse is out, she may be too embarrassed to say so. But it's legitimate to feel that way, and the entrepreneur should be aware of it. I think our marriage would have had an easier time if I had understood that.

I don't recall any columns I didn't like. I know that's the nice spousal thing to say. The one where she talked about me playing tennis instead of spending time with her made me a little uncomfortable.

If you were going to assemble a kit for entrepreneurs with growing companies and families, what would be in it?
Exercise clothes and a stretch band. An insulated, soundproof black bag into which the cell phone can be dropped one day per week. A laptop with Skype and speed-dial numbers for the spouse and kids. The account number for Organic Bouquet, which is like 1-800-Flowers but for organic flowers. An Amex miles account to be used for vacation and getaway travel. A mirror for the entrepreneur to look into each time he or she faces a crucial decision. And Meg's book.

Go back to the mirror thing. Do you do that?
I learned this years ago. There was a very bad period when I was struggling over what to do with a couple of managers, and I found myself looking in the mirror, having a conversation with myself. I do it every time I have to make a crucial decision, like the governor issue. Just standing there alone, looking myself in the eye. It grounds me.

What kinds of questions do you ask yourself?
Are you in, or are you out?

Extended breaks are wonderful things, unless the spouse and kids have other plans.

A few years ago, my husband, Gary, instituted a two-month paid sabbatical for anyone who has worked at least five years at Stonyfield Farm. The program has been one of our company's most popular benefits: So far, almost 200 employees have taken advantage of it. I am ever hopeful—and ever doubtful—that one day, Gary will be among them.

Entrepreneurs understand in theory the restorative value of downtime, but they are notoriously tough to pry from their companies for extended periods. The reasons are fairly obvious. No. 1 is fear the company won't progress—or may even stumble—without its leader. Others include addiction to the work and to the pace of work, and unease at being separated from the founder's mainspring of identity. Unless the entrepreneur is burned out, persuading him to take off a couple of months or, heaven forbid, six months to a year won't be easy. It's like asking him to become someone else for a while—to stop doing things he loves so he can do things that he and his family might love.

Still, I'm a big advocate of career breaks, both for active entrepreneurs and for serialists between ventures. Full stops are a reminder that life is more than what happens in the interstices of business: They provide an opportunity not just to rest but also to change and grow. Given sufficient scope and thoughtfully managed, a sabbatical can be a life stage unto itself. The entrepreneur, his relationship with his family, and even his company may sustain benefits far beyond those of a mere vacation.

Jay W. Vogt, a Boston-based organizational consultant, is my sabbatical poster boy. It's not just the duration of his leaves that impresses me—it's also how hard he works to make them happen and the importance he invests in them. In 1987, when Jay's business was just five years old, he and his new wife, Stephanie, traveled around the world. The trip took Jay away from his young company for almost half a year. And this was before the Internet. "We fast-forwarded our marriage," Jay told me. "We lived five years in five months. It was an unbelievable gift to ourselves. I still get teary thinking about it."

Then, in 2004, Jay took off another six months to live with Stephanie and their teenaged daughter, Camilla, in Mexico. The couple wound up buying a retirement home there, and Camilla, now in college, has become so enamored of travel that she spent last summer in Senegal and will study in France her junior year. "I look at how transformative these trips were for our family," Jay told me, "and ask myself not how did we do this twice but why we didn't do this more often."

Jay and Stephanie managed to save what they thought the vacations would cost and also accounted for the shoulder times, before and after, when Jay would be winding down and then rebuilding his business. Jump-starting his practice after each sabbatical was easier than he imagined. Before the couple embarked on their world tour, a respected colleague warned Jay that he was committing professional suicide. Instead, "my clients' actual reactions shocked me," says Jay. "There was an almost universal respect and a wistful envy—a sense of 'Gosh, I wish I could do that.'"

Of course, the megatrip is just one way to spend a sabbatical. If the goal is to take a break from business, then holing up in your den to write a screenplay or embarking on a home-improvement spree or training for an Ironman is equally valid. But long vacations are a good way to at least start sabbaticals, because all family members are simultaneously lifted out of their routines. That makes the entrepreneur's reentry into domestic life less jarring.

Jim Garland, founder of a private-jet-cleaning company called Sharp Details, in Dulles, Virginia, contrived a plan whereby he, his wife, and their four kids would visit 30 countries in nine months. They would travel two or three weeks at a time, then settle down for a month of home (as it were) schooling. Away from the familiar, always on the move, the Garlands soon settled into a pattern of no patterns. "We had no 'normal' on the road," says Jim's wife, Carrie. "It would have been harder if he'd taken a sabbatical and stayed home."

Even so, the initial transition was rocky. "I love my family to death," says Jim. "But I went through the withdrawal from my engagement with work to being with my kids 24/7. I asked my wife, 'Are they always this crazy?' "

The problem isn't that entrepreneurs find so much family time onerous but that they and their families have been experiencing time differently. Most company founders charge ahead at warp speed, grappling with one huge challenge and momentous decision after another. Their families progress, too, but they do so according to the gentler rhythms of biology and society. School year follows school year. Another birthday. Another drama-club production. Consequently, when entrepreneurs take months off from work, they are transitioning not just from fast to slow (slower, anyway) but also from making things happen to experiencing life as it naturally unfolds. The result can be more stress rather than less.

Prospects for deepening familial bonds instead of annoying one another improve if the family works out in advance how the entrepreneur will integrate herself. How much contact will she maintain with the office? What will be her role in the household during her months as a civilian? How do her plans for the period jibe with those of other family members? What can the family do that will make the best use of its time together?

Richard Humphrey regrets not having had that discussion in 2007, when he decided to take a year off between companies. After working 80 hours a week to build a product-design firm, Richard wanted to "live all the dreams I had deferred" before launching Kavoo Air, a private air-taxi service in New England. "I assumed Michelle had embraced my dreams," he said, speaking of his wife, "but that wasn't the case. We had a new baby, and she wanted to buy a house and settle down, not go live in France for a year."

The couple compromised with a four-month sojourn in Europe and Tahiti. After that, Richard was largely on his own. He went winter camping, visited friends, and scuba-dived in the Great Barrier Reef. While home, he enjoyed taking his son to the playground and remodeling their new apartment. But he now believes he inadvertently pushed his wife away by "being in her space too much." The marriage is strong, Richard says, but the sabbatical taught him that "our rhythms are different. We were unaccustomed to being together full time. I'd been a workaholic. So my attitude was, 'I'm here—let's do something together!' But she was trying to kick-start her career after the baby, and I had too much time on my hands."

Sabbaticals—too rare and precious to squander—are among those things that, if not done right, probably should not be done at all. Sure, I wish Gary had given the kids and me a few months of his undivided attention back when everyone was still living at home. But it would have been worse if we'd tried and failed—if he'd turned restless or (shudders) used the time to cook up another business.

For entrepreneurs, the desirable outcome of a sabbatical will be rest and rejuvenation, but also a new understanding of how family life unfolds when they're not there to see it. Internalizing that knowledge, entrepreneurs will move in greater synchronicity with their families long after family members return to their own orbits.

Gary Hirshberg talks to his wife, Inc. columnist Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, about his recent decision to step down as CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

My husband, Gary Hirshberg, announced last week that he was stepping down as CE-Yo of Stonyfield Yogurt, after 28 years on the job. (He will become the company’s Chairman.) As readers of my Balancing Acts column know, I regularly chronicle both the trials and the joys of running a business from the perspectives of both founders and their families. When Inc.com asked me how Gary’s decision would affect our lives, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk to him about a few issues I’d wanted some clarity on myself. (I’ll be talking more about my own reactions in a later column.)

First of all, for the readers, could you explain why you decided this was the right time to step down as CEO? What will you do now?
Stonyfield’s management team and facilities are in a strong place and our future looks bright. It’s good for the company to have a new leader and for me to make a change. The organic industry is at a crossroads right now, and I want to put my efforts into dealing with our most pressing challenges: addressing both organic supply shortages and lack of public understanding about the true differences between organic and conventional foods.

As for future plans related to business, as chairman of the company, I have every intention of helping Stonyfield grow. Beyond that, there are other businesses I’d like to help. This will be a good exercise in self-discipline: being involved without getting completely sucked in. Until now, the need to run my own business was always a governor on how much time I could give to other companies. I no longer have that excuse. I’m familiar with my inclination to take on new things, so my sentries are at high alert.

How is this all settling in, emotionally?
It’s only been a few days, but so far it’s completely surreal. I think what I’m most excited about is getting to know myself in a new way. You get grooved into a certain track as a CEO. You are making decisions 24/7 and constantly giving people direction. It becomes who you are. Now there’s no one to give direction to. A big Stonyfield crisis came through over email last night. For the first time, the burden won’t fall on my shoulders alone. I don’t have to step into the phone booth and put on the cape.

Talk about all the e-mails you’ve been getting.
It’s been overwhelming. Interestingly, a lot of them use the word “retire” in them. What? I’m not retiring! I understand how it looks that way, but that’s not what I’m doing. To me, the word “retire” means “get tired again.” But a friend of mine had a positive take. “Retire means get a new set of tires,” she wrote me. “I hope they take you where you want to go.”

Let’s talk about us. How do you think leaving your job will affect our lives together?
Since we married, I’ve been on the Stonyfield clock, 24/7. I’m used to keeping silent about things I didn’t want to burden you with. I’ll have to learn to communicate more, and co-pilot more, and hold back from trying to grab the controls. This is like hitting the “refresh” button on our relationship. We’ve been together for 28 years, and you’ve only known me as a CEO. You’re going to have to decide if this is still the guy you want to be married to.

Do you honestly worry about that?
I’ve watched friends go through this transition. Sometimes they spend a lot more time with their spouses, traveling and enjoying shared passions, and sometimes they wind up spending a lot less time together, because their visions don’t overlap. One of my objectives is to have more want-to’s and fewer have-to’s. Hopefully my want-to’s will be compatible with yours.

What do you hope to do for yourself?
I want to take the lessons of Stonyfield’s positive economic business model to a larger audience, with the goal of influencing policy makers and business thinkers. I want to share what I see as win-win solutions to the crisis in our environment and in our health. I’d like to live in France for a while. I also want to travel—New Zealand, Eastern Europe, Patagonia. I’m eager to see where my spirit and inclinations take me. Antarctica’s another dream, though I know you probably won’t want to accompany me there.

That is correct.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg contributes a regular column for Inc., called “Balancing Acts,” that explores the impact of entrepreneurial business on families. Her new book, For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families, will be released March 5.

Entrepreneurship, for all its challenges, can bestow on families unexpected benefits beyond the obvious financial ones.

Although my husband, Gary, is CEO of Stonyfield Farm, his name doesn't appear in the company's phone directory. So after-hours calls often land in the voice-mail box of the only Hirshberg listed: his sister Nancy, who has worked at the company for decades. One morning, back in the '90s, Nancy retrieved her voice mail as usual…and nearly fell over. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead had left a message soliciting Gary's participation on the board of a farm group headed by one of the guitarist's friends.

"He was one of my biggest crushes of all time!" recalls Nancy. "I kept the call on my voice mail for years. I never wrote down his home number, as I wanted to respect his privacy. But it put a smile on my face every time I heard him say, 'Hi. This is Bob Weir.' Bobby saying 'hi' to me each morning! How lucky could I be?"

Nancy's quirky connection with a musical idol would never have happened without Stonyfield. Her story reminds me that entrepreneurship, for all its challenges, can bestow on families unexpected benefits beyond the obvious financial ones. The spouses, children, parents, and siblings of company founders sometimes get to see and do things that relatives of the conventionally employed can only dream of.

Recently, I asked readers of this column to tell me about wonderful experiences made possible by having a business in the family. Not surprisingly, many of their stories involved travel—children tagging along to visit suppliers or clients in China or Botswana or the cloud forest of Ecuador. Others talked about young kids having fun with grown-up jobs—acting as host and hostess in their parents' restaurant, for example, or learning to take credit card orders over the phone. Many offspring were proud to have products or entire companies named after them.

Entrepreneurs are the first to advise that, in business, it's important to go out on a high note. In that spirit, I'm devoting my last column of 2011 to a selection of perks, opportunities, and adventures enjoyed by the lucky families of company founders. Here are some of their stories:

Our company takes entrepreneurs on extraordinary excursions that are combined with business-building sessions and philanthropy. I was able to take my wife, Missy, and two kids, Zack and Zoe, aged 6 and 4, to Necker Island, Richard Branson's private retreat in the British Virgin Islands. At the time, the island held a maximum of 28 guests, catered to by a staff of 60. At one point, I walked up to the pool after a business session and saw my children sitting in the hot tub with Richard.

Yanik Silver, CEO

Maverick Business Adventures

We had been sending Peeled Snacks to the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live for a couple of seasons through a connection with one of our investors. As a thank-you, SNL gave my husband and me tickets to see the show. Afterward, we got a backstage tour where the likes of Will Forte, John Lutz, and Bill Hader weighed in on our products. My husband is a big Andy Samberg fan, so he was utterly starstruck listening to Andy expound, at 2 a.m., on the virtues of dried mango.

Noha Waibsnaider, CEO, Peeled Snacks

My family and I were featured in a story that appeared in Woman's World about a professional organizing service that was a client of my marketing firm. A team of organizers went to town on our townhouse. For the first time, everything in our home had "a place," and it looked stellar. Even more fun, we all had our hair and makeup done for a big, professional photo shoot right in our living room.

Julianne Weiner, COO, Sonic Promos

I run a game company. My kids—Allison, 17, and Nick, 15—loved my idea for a giant ball into which you could strap yourself, then roll down hills, run, bounce, and flip. They were the human guinea pigs who tested the prototype. They gave me some great ideas for marketing and promotion and helped come up with the name, Bodi Bouncer. Nick suggested we do a demonstration video, so we spent an afternoon filming the kids' friends using it. My son edited the video on his laptop.

Stephen Yennaco, CEO The Giant Game Company

My son benjamin and I appeared twice on The Martha Stewart Show to talk about the family company, Divvies. We make allergen-free food, including Benjamint Crunch, a chocolate bar named for and inspired by Benjamin.

Lori Sandler, founder, Divvies

Not many kids have their dads pilot them to summer camp or get to watch fireworks from the air. My former company, Rokop Corporation, which supplied continuous casting machines to steelmakers, owned a couple of airplanes. I learned how to fly them and was able to take my kids on flights all around the region.

Nik Rokop, managing director

Entrepreneurship Academy Illinois Institute of Technology

My company's success enabled me to join the Entrepreneurs' Organization. Our chapter in Los Angeles threw a party at the Playboy Mansion. I was able to invite only one guest, and I couldn't think of anyone I would rather have with me than my dad. He got some stories to tell his buddies back in New York, that's for sure.

Ben Schaffer, CEO Bulletproof Automotive/Bespoke Ventures

When we launched an Internet product last year, we decided to turn it into a couple of splashy, Apple-style events in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In front of audiences totaling around 700 business people, my 14-year-old son, Alex, skateboarded onto a fog-shrouded stage and did tricks. My 7-year-old, Alina, sang a solo.

Joe Kiedinger, co-owner Prophit Marketing/About Me International

I used to travel with my mom to Los Angeles every three to six months to buy products for her clothing store in Arizona, called Body Heat. I got to see all the next season's styles before anyone else and picked up ideas for my own wardrobe. As a fashion-obsessed teenager, I loved it.

Jennifer Hill, attorney Gunderson Dettmer

I have an advertising agency. Over the years, my daughter, Erin, has appeared in a number of ads for clients. My son, Jacob, made his acting debut in a client's commercial when he was 4 years old. The production company we hired started calling on Jake for other work unrelated to our clients, so he has since appeared in a number of television spots and radio commercials.

Mark Shipley, president, Smith & Jones

Thanks to stonyfield, my children and I have had too many cool experiences to count. We held an event for Barack Obama at our home, and many presidential candidates have toured our plant. I often accompany Gary on trips to Europe. My kids got to know Raffi and have appeared on our packaging and in our ads. We've developed close friendships with many fellow entrepreneurs and their families. During the 25 years I've been hitched to Gary's business, countless dark clouds have massed and threatened. But these days, life is mostly about the silver linings.

MEG CADOUX HIRSHBERG

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg examines the limit on what your spouse should know about the companys problems.

In the early years of Stonyfield Yogurt, my husband, Gary, and I acted like the three wise monkeys. When it came to the company's finances, I covered my eyes and ears so as to see and hear no evil. Gary went along by covering his mouth.

I embraced ignorance (or innocence, as I prefer to call it) for emotional survival. The company was hovering near bankruptcy, and I couldn't bear to learn the gory details portending its demise. I knew I should know what was going on. Our entire future was on the line. But I wanted to listen to a financial report the way I watch the movie The Shining: running out of the room during particularly terrifying scenes.

I wish I could have been the supportive spouse who listens sympathetically, then calmly puts everything into perspective. As it was, Gary accepted our don't-ask-don't-tell pact because it prevented my fear from making him crazy. He avoided what he calls the double penalty—intense stress at work compounded by intense stress at home. After a day spent putting out fires, he didn't need my alarm ringing in his ears.

Launching a company is a risk couples assume together. But unless they are equal business partners, only the entrepreneur has firsthand knowledge of every hurricane and hiccup. The CEO comes home to a spouse whose interest is mixed with anxiety. Sometimes, beneath the query "How was your day?" lurks the plea "Reassure me, or at least don't say something that will leave me cowering in the coat closet clutching a vodka tonic."

Most couples don't know right away how much about the business it's optimal to share. Spouses may start out as enthralled spectators, closely following every play and—even when the home team is hopelessly behind—cheering from the stands. Some continue that way. But others discover they have low tolerance for trouble and would just as soon remain in the dark. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, adopt reticence out of self-preservation. As one CEO put it, "Entrepreneurs have people freaking out on them all day long. We don't want the same thing at home."

The ensuing silence stifles conflict and drama. But it also forces the entrepreneur to shoulder the burden alone. That can send him into what one spouse I talked to called battle mode: quiet, tense, and toxic. The spouse, meanwhile, worries about the entrepreneur and also worries about whatever unknown catastrophe the entrepreneur is worried about. Couples become disconnected from huge chunks of each other's emotional lives. Communication frays and with it, empathy. "Ultimately, I was willing to sacrifice some intimacy to avoid conflict," Gary told me.

A business can be an endlessly fascinating subject that encourages the exchange of ideas and eager speculation about the future. Or it can be a marriage's third rail, which a couple dares not touch for fear of shock waves.

One way to defang bad news is to limit when it's shared.

Risk is easier to live with when you have some degree of control. Entrepreneurs are hands-on with their companies; confidence in themselves translates into confidence that they can weather any storm. And because they see the big picture, they have perspective. They can distinguish between things that kill and things that make them stronger.

Spouses, by contrast, have little power beyond the right to advise and—occasionally—consent in business decisions. Their impotence increases their fear. Lacking the thorough context and nuanced understanding that come from working in the business, they may magnify problems or focus on the empty half of the glass. "I worry," one spouse told me, "but I don't say anything. The problem festers, and then I get angry, because I don't have any money or solutions to fix things, and it's not my responsibility to solve it." Entrepreneurs, in turn, keep quiet to save their spouses' agonizing about matters beyond their control.

Richard Haig once shared everything with his wife, Pam. Then he started Haig Service Corporation, an alarm company in Green Brook, New Jersey. Richard recalls the evening he told Pam that the company faced higher estimated taxes because it had had a good year. The "good year" part barely registered with his wife. But she lost sleep over the tax bill. "I considered it just another day at the office," Richard told me. "I was dumping 10 times the weight on my wife's shoulders that I felt on mine." Now he avoids discussing the company at home. "Her reaction made me realize that the hurdles I jump every day at work are, to nonentrepreneurs, the equivalent of jumping out of a plane without a parachute," Richard said.

Even spouses who work together need not be equally informed. Keeping information from a partner may sound patronizing. But if that partner deals poorly with adversity, there are good reasons to do so. Employees and customers take their cues from the owners. I spoke with one CEO whose husband manages sales at her company. "I feel like I can handle our precarious financial state better than he can," she told me. "If he knew how close to the line we're cutting it, I'm afraid he would spiral into a negative place, where he'd feel all this wasn't worth it. My fear is that he'd walk into every sales meeting with customers with his head hung low. Frankly, I think he's grateful to me for taking on the burden of the worry."

I admire couples that talk with absolute candor about the company, and whose relationships benefit from the common interest. Paul Williams, president of Isite Design, a digital consultancy in Portland, Oregon, tells his wife, Leah, everything. "When it comes to business, ice runs through her veins," said Paul. "She doesn't get stressed. Without our collaboration, I'd be missing a confidante and valued partner." Still, I couldn't help wondering whether Isite's track record-one unprofitable year out of 14-made that openness easier. Leah acknowledged that an unstable business would have made information sharing more challenging. "I would have just wanted him to fix it," she told me.

So, knowledge is scary. But, outside the Garden of Eden, ignorance isn't bliss, either. What couples need are strategies to calmly and productively discuss their companies' fortunes.

One way to defang bad news is to limit when it's shared. That at least stops unpleasant subjects from tainting every part of the day. Mitchel Harad of San Francisco owns a business consultancy. His wife, Kristin, has a financial-planning firm. The couple sets aside 30 minutes every week for a formal business meeting to discuss both companies and the family's finances. All that needs saying gets said in that half-hour, so worries don't rear up unexpectedly as husband and wife are brushing their teeth before bed. "At that hour, even innocuous issues blow up," said Mitchel.

Bad news is also less chilling when families hedge their bets. Dan and Allison Turner can discuss any development with equanimity because they have a Plan B if something goes wrong at TCG, Dan's IT government contracting firm in Washington, D.C. "I don't know how entrepreneurs function without a personal safety net," said Dan. "We've laid out things we can do—like sell our house and buy a less expensive one—if cash gets tight." During one tough period, Dan didn't take a paycheck for three years. "I remember worrying but not second-guessing," said Allison. "Our backup plan made any worst-case scenario less scary."

As for me, I was most comfortable hearing about Stonyfield during board meetings. There I received a detailed snapshot of the company, stripped of emotion. And it was reassuring to watch Gary address problems coolly and professionally while his audience reacted as though everything were normal.

As my husband embarks on new, uncertain ventures, he knows from experience that there are good times and bad times to talk to me about his businesses. "The good times are when you're relaxed and feeling upbeat, or when you're in the company of others who react calmly," he told me. And the bad times? All the rest, Gary said.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. Sheis married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm.

Its a fact: More companies fail than succeed. So when that happens, can the marriage survive?

Gary and I have lived through so many crises, I must be a masochist for dwelling on the one awful thing that didn't happen. Still, I can't help wondering what our lives would have been like if our company had failed.

Though we both knew the poor odds of any small business succeeding, Gary believed we'd be the exception to the rule. I, by contrast, was pretty sure we had rule stamped on our foreheads. Had my prophecy come true, I don't know if we could have recovered. The loss of Stonyfield Farm would have meant the loss of our home, our lifestyle, our children's college funds. More profoundly, it could have meant the loss of my confidence in Gary. If his big bet had not worked out, would I have looked at him differently? Trusted his judgment less?

I've talked to entrepreneurs about many painful topics, but conversations about business failure have been the most wrenching. "It's just too raw and emotional for me," apologized one entrepreneur who backed out of an interview. "I don't know if I could make it through your questions; I might just cry and cry." It's not surprising that a recent loss would be so overpowering. But this woman's business went under almost a decade ago.

In the wake of a company failure, the founder's belief in himself falters, even shatters. So do many of his relationships. He feels responsible for everyone—his now-jobless employees, the lenders to whom he owes money, the investors who bet on his idea, sure, but first and foremost on him. Worst of all, he knows he has kicked his family's fortunes back to Square One, or past that, to Square Zero or Minus Three.

The spouse, meanwhile, is expected to remain strong and encouraging. If the marriage is healthy, she'll try to channel her panic into pragmatism. If the marriage is shaky, then all those recriminations built up over years of scrimping and postponing and single-parenting gush out.

A failed business consumes a couple's assets until there is nothing left. It may do the same to their love for each other.

There but for the grace of God.…

One reason business failure is so hard on marriage is that the entrepreneur and the spouse experience it differently. The entrepreneur may regret his mistakes, but he chiefly agonizes that his vision for the future will never be fulfilled. The spouse dwells more on the past, wondering: Was all that sacrifice really for nothing? The entrepreneur desperately needs his spouse's reassurance: "It's OK. You did the best you could." But, at least initially, the spouse can only splutter, "How could you?"

A woman I'll call Cynthia experiences a twinge as she recalls what she said to her husband, "Stephen," when he voluntarily closed down his Manhattan-based social networking company. "You got us into this mess," she told him. "Now you've got to get us out." The business had begun to gain traction, but not quickly enough to support a family of four. The couple had set benchmarks for the company's continued existence, benchmarks it failed to meet.

Cynthia held Stephen responsible for the financial and emotional strain that the company's liquidation placed on their 14-year marriage. "The ordeal sucked a lot of life out of our relationship," she says. Stephen was left to mourn largely on his own, just as during his company's short life he had kept Cynthia at arm's length from it, to shield her from worry. Fortunately, Cynthia came to see Stephen's willingness to shutter the business before he was forced to as testament to his commitment to his family.

The time it takes a couple to rebound is largely a function of the entrepreneur's resilience. Some founders are drawing up new business plans a month after a failure. Others become so enervated, they can't lift the page to see the next chapter.

I spoke to one woman whose husband lost his business and now spends most of his day lounging around the house in sweatpants, trying to figure out what to do. Every day the couple lose ground, depleting their retirement money and their children's college funds. They lose ground psychologically, too. The children give their father a wide berth, sensing his sadness and fearing his emotional volatility. They wonder why he is at home so much, and the wife worries that his apparent aimlessness will, in her words, emasculate him in their eyes. A crack is spreading through the family, with the entrepreneur on one side, his wife and kids on the other. Neither spouse is sleeping well. Not surprisingly, "couple time is not a priority," the wife told me.

"I am in free fall. What felt like solid ground has vanished."

Anyone who has lost a business knows how Gail Horvath felt when she wrote those words. Gail shared with me her diary entries for 2003, the year her company went bankrupt. Just Desserts, the San Francisco baked-goods business that Gail started with her husband, Elliot Hoffman, cranked out high-quality confections for three decades, until a couple of bad decisions proved fatal. The failure was especially devastating for coming after such a long run. "Our business felt solid and bigger than life," wrote Gail, "as if it would always be there, with its uncanny ability to claw itself out of any difficulty."

As Gail attests, entrepreneurial companies occupy vast psychic space. They define how founders and their families live and, to some extent, who they are. With failure, an entrepreneurial family's identity and position, as well as its security, crumble. Friends and relatives gingerly avoid the subject, treating failure—as one spouse put it—like a serious medical condition that everyone is aware of but too diplomatic to acknowledge.

The loss of a business may have one salubrious effect: It relocates entrepreneurs' noses toward roses and away from grindstones. And so, occasionally, love is reborn among the ruins.

I spoke with one woman whose husband lost his business after four years and several million dollars had swirled down the drain. At first, she had been excited about the enterprise, but she quickly grew disenchanted with her husband's prolonged absences. Meanwhile, his health declined as he smoked heavily and stopped exercising. Worse, he grew emotionally unrecognizable. During one argument, the entrepreneur told his wife that the company was more important to him than anything, including her and the kids. "That's the closest we ever came to divorce," she told me. "What saved our marriage was that the business went belly-up."

In the aftermath, her husband spent three months catching up on his sleep and becoming reacquainted with his three children. He went back to his legal practice. "It was like he had survived a war," the spouse said. "When it ended, he saw his little world was still intact, and he was so grateful."

Although the marriage of Gail Horvath and Elliot Hoffman never faltered, the bankruptcy of Just Desserts sent them scrambling for a new direction. Fortunately, they found one. "Our crisis would have been a terrible thing to waste," says Gail. Today, she works with friends in their strategy and branding company. Elliot has launched a venture that advises companies on sustainability. Gail declined to become part of that business; after Just Desserts, she will never put her personal guarantee on anything again. But she is happy to see Elliot back in the game. "It's what I love about him," she says. "He thinks big."

The week after Just Desserts cashed in its chips, Gail and Elliot went camping in the California park where they'd met almost 40 years earlier. They sought solace in nature and each other, and reconnected with their pre-entrepreneurial selves. So much had been lost. But what remained, wrote Gail, were "those things that cannot be destroyed—our love and our experience, our sense of humor and our spirit of adventure."

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm.

Business owners strive to control their lives and fortunesand then illness strikes, and everything falls apart.

My mother always says there are problems, and then there are troubles. Problems are hard, but most can be solved. Troubles take you down. Sometimes they take you out. Gary and I began the millennium flush with troubles.

In 2001, I learned I had advanced breast cancer. Six months of "the killing cure" ensued: surgery, chemo, and radiation. Just as I was finishing my treatment, Gary's two brothers entered the hospital. The twins were born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. By the time they reached age 39, their heart muscles had become irreparably damaged. I made it through fine. Gary's brothers both died, in early 2002.

As he was coping with my illness and his brothers' deaths, Gary was in the midst of protracted negotiations with Groupe Danone to sell part of our business. Stonyfield Yogurt relied on Gary's energy and ideas to move forward, and the Danone deal required his unwavering concentration. But running back and forth to hospitals scrambled Gary's schedule and diminished his focus. His mind ricocheted between high-level problem solving and existential dread.

A loved one's serious illness can absorb an entrepreneur's energy and concentration for months or years. Those who back-burner their businesses for that long risk losing them, even as medical bills mount. And, of course, entrepreneurs are as vulnerable to disease as anyone else. I recently read an online article in which company owners listed characteristics essential to success. Good health was right up there: Many described themselves as people who "refuse to get sick." Illness equates to weakness, which is antithetical to the entrepreneur's self-image. He starts off defiant, but the disease wears him down. The body gives the spirit only so much autonomy.

Illness is the rudest awakening to the dream of entrepreneurial control. All those mechanisms meant to balance family and the business collapse. Priorities are reshuffled when instinct (must care for self/loved one!) rams into expediency (must preserve paramount financial and psychological investment!). The fear of losing everything is compounded by the fear of losing everything.

When it comes to being bad patients, doctors have nothing on entrepreneurs, who believe they can heal themselves the way they do everything else: by force of will. The business owner simply reframes her condition as another set of numbers to beat or an unexpected downturn that requires an aggressive response.

Krissi Barr, founder of Cincinnati-based Barr Corporate Success, took this approach to coping with early-stage breast cancer. "I am quarterbacking my treatment the way I would a project at work," Krissi told me. Her company, a strategic planning consultancy, is growing; her calendar is full. But Krissi is her shop. When she's not working, there's no revenue. So she found an oncologist who let her schedule chemo around client meetings and speaking engagements. When Krissi's oncologist told her to cut back, she did—on volunteer commitments, not on her business.

Krissi's husband, Dan, accepts his wife's decisions. "It's good for her to stay determined," he says. But other families argue that illness nullifies all prior agreements over how much the entrepreneur will work. The husband who grudgingly accepted his wife's long hours now agonizes that they threaten her health. Yet if he insists she put her dreams on hold, will he crush her spirit and breed resentment? If he begs her to step away from their sole hope for financial security, does he court greater calamity?

Jerry Gonzalez, founder of the food company Maria Elena's Authentic Latino, in Valencia, California, was found to have Stage 4 colon cancer in 2007. Convinced he must stick with the start-up or lose it, he continued taking sales meetings and dragging himself to the office. He is now free of cancer but fears its return. "I feel as though I'm in a race," says Jerry. "I need to get my family on sound financial footing."

Karen Gonzalez, Jerry's wife, feels differently. "My thought is, Are we wasting time?" she says. "Should we give up everything—have a slower pace of life away from L.A. and spend quality time together?" Karen worries that stress and long hours will precipitate the cancer's return. Yet she understands that what threatens her husband's life also gives that life meaning.

The stress intensifies when leaders keep their conditions secret. "Sue" runs a company with her husband, "Jay," who suffers from debilitating depression. Sue doesn't feel she can level with their employees. But sometimes Jay's affliction is so obvious, she assumes everyone must know. When Jay descends into his private hell, Sue covers for him—doing his work, making excuses for his absences, and reviewing all his decisions. Even when Jay is well, she buffers bad news, fearful lest some small setback trigger months of incapacitation.

Sue's and Jay's desire to hide his condition means they have few confidants and little support. Of course, the person with whom Sue would naturally share the heaviest burdens—in business and in life—is lost to her.

The entrepreneur's confidence that he can beat his illness doesn't extend to the illness of a loved one. Sickness in others often rattles company founders, who fare poorly when there's nothing they can do. Although Gary would have preferred a lighter load during our year of woe, the 12-hour workdays at least offered refuge from his sense of helplessness.

Others take advantage of the flexibility afforded by ownership to modify how they work. One founder I spoke to lost his wife to cancer when his daughter was 8. A single parent of a child with an autoimmune disorder, he reduced his work hours and travel to shepherd her care. With his daughter stable, he remains focused on her well-being. "My business would have grown more had it not been for her illness," he says. "But I make enough to pay the bills."

Sometimes, cutting back is not enough. Drake Sadler is co-founder of the tea company Traditional Medicinals, in Sebastopol, California. When his 13-year-old son, Kai, was rushed to the hospital with a life-threatening strep infection, Drake and his wife, Nioma, planted themselves at the boy's bedside. Kai went into septic shock and was hospitalized for a year. (He is well now and back to being a normal teenager.)

Fortuitously, Drake had recently hired a successor CEO. Instead of the yearlong transition he had anticipated, he made a clean break with day-to-day operations, not returning to the office for seven months. (He is now chief visionary officer and chairman of the board.) "I'm right up there with other entrepreneurs in terms of being a control freak," Drake told me. "With Kai's illness, everything was out of my hands. It was an exercise in letting go."

Such priority-reordering exercises often continue long after the entrepreneur or loved one has healed. After recovering from a severe staph infection that waylaid him for months, Tim Barrett, COO of Barrett Distribution, in Franklin, Massachusetts, devoted more time to his three young children. "A gravestone near my parents' has the guy's company name and logo on it," he said. "That's the last thing in the world I'd want to be remembered for." If illness has an upside, it is the opportunity to remember our true values.

In February, a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, where Gary was giving a speech. Even before I heard the news on television, he had phoned to let me know he was OK. (His hotel was destroyed. His clothes and money went with it.) So, a close call. And a reminder that fate can take it all away at any time. All we can do is keep building. Our businesses, we hope. Our lives, absolutely.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

Handing off a business to the next generation is the realization of a dreamor a complete nightmare.

My husband, Gary, and I have three kids in college, none of them interested in joining the family business. Like the offspring of hippies who flee communes for Wall Street, Alex, Ethan, and Danielle will probably seek lives far from the madness of entrepreneurship. That's fine with us. Stonyfield Yogurt was never meant to be a legacy.

We may be unusual in not indulging fantasies that a Hirshberg presence will linger at Stonyfield for another generation. After all, most entrepreneurs spend their lives nurturing two things: their companies and their kids. It's natural to want to pass one down to the other. A family business is the perfect vehicle for transferring knowledge and know-how between generations. It provides progeny with employment and perpetuates the family "brand." And bringing in family members signals to suppliers, customers, and employees that the owners have confidence in their company's enduring strength and value.

Still, I suspect Gary and I dodged a bullet. Kids coming on board—as designated successors or just employees—create a hornet's nest of complications. Which child will ultimately take over? How do you fairly divide the inheritance when one child works in the business and others do not? Can you maintain equitable emotional relationships with the entire brood while working closely with just one or two? Can children achieve healthy separation from parents when both have, as one entrepreneur put it, "an abnormal amount of information about each other's lives and wallets"?

Then there's the Prince Charles Syndrome. Parents who treat succession plans like living wills—to be carried out only in the case of death or incapacitation—undermine their offspring's authority, stifle their opportunities to lead, and provoke justifiable resentment. I recently met a woman whose two sons, in their 40s, work in her company. "I will die at my desk!" she told me defiantly. Such declarations must make her sons cringe.

And what if the kids come aboard just to make Mom or Dad happy? Peter Kohn is the son of the founder of an automation-component company. I love his description of the moment when his father, over lunch, asked him to interview with the head of sales at the company. A senior in college at the time, Peter had already decided not to join the business, but loyalty to his father prevailed. When Peter agreed to the interview, his father removed the Rolex from his own wrist and handed it to him. "At that moment, I felt like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, when he makes the decision to shoot Captain McCluskey and Sollozzo in the restaurant," Peter told me. "By taking that watch, I had symbolically agreed to join the family business. I didn't love the business. But I loved the man who ran it." (Peter stayed with the company for two years; then it was sold. He now owns a brand-extension-licensing business in Richmond, Virginia.)

Worst of all are scenarios in which a child wants to run the show but is not up to the job. I spoke about this with Paul Karofsky, founder of Transition Consulting Group, in Framingham, Massachusetts, and a counselor to family companies for 20 years. Paul said entrepreneurs must decide: Does the family serve the business, or does the business serve the family? If parents take the attitude that blood is thicker than ability when choosing a successor, chances are the business won't be around long enough to serve anybody.

Even in successful family businesses, it's tough to leave entrenched emotional patterns in the parking lot. Old attitudes and arguments surface. Parents may feel strange consulting with their children as equals. Kids fret that their bosses during childhood are still their bosses in the workplace.

Nick Horman Jr. is a self-described "third-generation pickler" in his family's wholesale business, Allen Pickle Works, in Glen Cove, New York. Nick spoke about the terrible screaming fights he used to get into with his father, Nick Sr. "I'm not proud of it," he said. "But family can bring that out in people. The fact was he was still my father, not just my boss. In every event, in every encounter, that relationship is there. You can't pretend it's not."

As an adolescent, Nick Jr. had chafed under his father's dominion. College brought him independence, but upon joining the company after graduation, Nick once again felt controlled. "In a business, there can only be one captain," said his father. "I had to exert authority, and my son didn't like that." Nick Jr. doesn't disagree. "I regressed back to a childhood power struggle," he told me.

Work tension, in turn, sours personal relationships. When Jesse Brubaker joined his mother's occupational medical clinic, the two were close. Soon after, his mother was in a serious car crash, and Jesse managed the clinic for six months. She returned, and the two clashed. "She didn't take my ideas seriously," Jesse said. "She thought I wasn't competent enough. I was still her little boy." Jesse left the company and remains distant from his mother. "I kept thinking we were going to be able to separate the business from our personal lives and get back to being a family," he told me. "But what happened created a gap between us. We're working to resolve it."

For many entrepreneurs, the myriad reasons to keep children and business separate pale beside the fact that these are their kids. Whom else do they trust? Whom else do they build for?

The odds of a good outcome improve when the child has grown up in the business, helping out on weekends and vacations. In this way, she may come to understand the company intimately and perhaps learn to see a future in it. As Jessica Lundberg says of her decision to join the fourth-generation Lundberg Family Farms, in Richvale, California, "The family legacy and the opportunity were compelling."

Though Jessica worked on the farm as a child, neither she nor her parents assumed it was her destiny. But after college, she decided to spend a year seeing if she could make a place for herself. Harboring zero sense of entitlement, Jessica embarked on a series of low-level jobs: filing papers, working sales shows, driving a tractor, and weeding in the plant nursery, which she now runs. That apprenticeship exposed her to important parts of the business and gave her credibility with other employees.

Experts also advise kids to seek work experiences outside the family cocoon. Tony Stein knew his father's company—Camp Echo Lake in Elmsford, New York—inside out. As a child, he cooked out and canoed with the other campers; as a teenager, he worked summers there. Tony recognized what the camp needed to grow and proceeded to outfit himself with the necessary skills, earning an M.B.A. and taking outside marketing jobs. He wanted to test his mettle "where my reviews, compensation, and feedback wouldn't be colored by family relationships," he told me. By the time Tony took over the business, he had the confidence and experience he needed.

Nick Horman Jr. quit Allen Pickle Works to pursue his own interests, including art and philosophy. But after two years, he returned to launch the company's first retail line. With maturity and perspective gained during his time away, Nick Jr. has learned to appreciate his father, and the two no longer fight. Working in the company together, he says, "deepens the understanding of what it is to be a family."

Perhaps that is the greatest gift of a family business: that it brings parents and children closer long after most have begun to drift apart. A dysfunctional family enterprise, says consultant Karofsky, is "like no other hell on earth." But when such a business works, there are few greater joys.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg explains why building a business with a strong social mission can also be great for your marriage.

I write a lot about how entrepreneurship complicates relationships and even drives couples apart. Sometimes, though, it binds them closer. When the venture serves a larger purpose, through either its core business or philanthropy, spouses who may feel ambivalent about company building (isn't there a less-consuming way to make money?) suddenly get it. Sometimes, they become part of it. And that shared passion -- often more powerful than the shared hobbies that marriage counselors recommend -- can translate into greater passion for each other.

When I met my husband, in 1984, I was managing an organic farm. Gary and his partner, Samuel Kaymen, had just launched Stonyfield, the organic yogurt company. Our idea of fun was making compost together. I appreciated that Gary saw himself as an educator and each little cup as an opportunity to teach people about the importance of organics. But as we hemorrhaged cash for nine years, our small attempt to change the world began to seem delusional. That we labored on behalf of a mission we both cared about made the sacrifice tolerable; I doubt I would have lasted long had we been cranking out Fritos instead. But eventually, although I still supported the cause, I felt disconnected from the company itself.

In recent years, however, I've bonded again with the business. The catalyst has been Stonyfield's philanthropic outreach. Its charitable arm, Profits for the Planet, has supported several causes about which I care deeply, including posttreatment cancer care and restoration of an agricultural building at a Shaker museum. And several years ago, Gary and I together created a loan fund to help New Hampshire dairy farmers through the high costs of transitioning to organic. I personally brought Gary into these and other projects that dovetailed his business mission with my interests. I now influence the company in ways that fulfill me, as opposed to the any-warm-body-will-do kinds of tasks I performed in the early days. And for the first time, I feel truly connected to Gary's work and consequently more tolerant of his frequent absences and distractions.

Something similar happened to Jill Kearney, a professional writer. Jill had no affinity for business when she married Stephen McDonnell, founder of the natural meat company Applegate Farms. "I didn't get the vision and the drive," she told me. "If you're already making money selling X, why do you need to sell 2X?" At first, Jill believed she had nothing to contribute. Eventually, she started writing promotional material and "romance copy" for the products, becoming what she calls a "published pot pie poet." As she worked in the company, Jill began to see the potential for creativity in business and to consider how Steve might apply his abilities to problems outside Applegate.

Then, in 2005, the couple's daughter, 13 at the time, traveled to a remote village in Ecuador as an exchange student. Nora McDonnell's host family was part of a community of subsistence farmers who sold cacao beans. Most of the profits had gone to middlemen until an American researcher helped the farmers form a cooperative to buy the beans and fund the creation of a value-added product: chocolate bars. But the cooperative needed more markets. Jill's interest was piqued, and she and Steve flew down to Ecuador to meet with the farmers. "Afterward, I joked with Stephen, 'If you don't help them, I'm going to divorce you,' " recalls Jill. Steve says, "When Jill has that level of conviction, I respond." So he created a for-profit entity in the United States to sell the chocolate, under the brand name Kallari, and loaned it money. Jill researched how to set up the company and do business in another country, and she applied her writing and art skills to Kallari's packaging design. The farmers now receive a much higher price for their beans, and the profits -- when there are profits -- will flow back to the cooperative to pay for health and education projects. Steve and Jill are in the process of passing control of the company to the cooperative.

A few arguments over process cropped up during the start-up. But those marital tensions were tiny compared with the salutary effects of building something together. Jill loved watching Steve focus his entrepreneurial intensity on a project that did not contribute to their personal bottom line. For the first time, she truly appreciated his business skills. "It's no accident that Steve is successful," Jill told me with fresh pride. "He's detail oriented and extremely tough." Kallari became "an unexpected thrill in my life," Jill said. "We definitely grew into this together. In the early part of our marriage, Stephen's work was the villain. Not anymore."

Perhaps more profoundly, the two discovered they were compatible professionally as well as personally. While working on Kallari, Steve saw how Jill could be more useful to Applegate. And Jill realized that she had a lot to contribute. "Our work at Applegate became a more creative collaboration as a result," said Jill. In the past few years, she has offered marketing ideas, helped Steve think through critical business decisions, and joined the Applegate board.

In some cases, a spouse who helps with company mission winds up going all in. Sheila Hollender gave up her legal practice in New York to move to Vermont, where her husband, Jeffrey Hollender, was building Seventh Generation, the natural home-care products company. Her career upended, Sheila joined Seventh Generation's board and became the buyer for its catalog. But when the catalog business was sold, she said, "there was no place for me in the company."

At about that time, some of Sheila's good friends were receiving cancer diagnoses, and Sheila was growing concerned about the environment's effect on women's health. That became her cause, and she realized her husband's business provided a powerful platform. In 2005, she began pushing senior management to develop organic feminine-care products.

The male-dominated senior management team (there was only one woman at the time) was skeptical. But Sheila argued forcefully that the move would both advance Seventh Generation's mission and enhance its bottom line. "Ninety percent of our customers are women," she told me. At first, Jeffrey was leery of Sheila's involvement, concerned his employees might think he was making decisions for personal rather than business reasons. But over time, he became her greatest champion. Sheila joined the company full time this year, to promote the feminine-care line, which is growing twice as fast as the business overall. "I'm grateful that I could use this company that I've supported for 25 years to further my own passions," Sheila says. Sheila's work at Seventh Generation, Jeffrey told me, has deepened his appreciation and respect for her opinions, ideas, and intuition.

Applegate and Seventh Generation -- like Stonyfield -- are good, socially responsible companies. Yet for Jill, Sheila, and me, that wasn't enough to compensate for the perpetual strain they placed on our family lives. Now, however, those companies -- once antagonists to intimacy -- make it possible for us to spend more time with our spouses and to enjoy our spouses in new ways. For me, it's like making compost with Gary again: layering our mutual talents, interests, and concerns and watering thoroughly with our organizational skills and drive. The result is a rich and fertile ground in which our marriage can thrive.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

Why the start of a company so often spells the end of a marriage

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, Stonyfield Yogurt, 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. Particularly in already-strained marriages, there is no tension a business can't make worse. Kyle (for this column I'm mostly omitting last names) recognized fissures in his marriage before he launched an electronics manufacturing company. Afterward, those fissures widened into canyons. Kyle admits he neglected his wife, poring over business plans when she wanted to chat. For her part, his wife didn't take him seriously; she openly doubted that the company would ever support them. Her resentment assumed material form. If Kyle bought a tool for his business, then his wife would go out and buy jewelry of equal value. "Once I bought an oscilloscope, and in return I had to buy her a Corvette," Kyle told me. "She considered my stuff toys. Playthings." The couple divorced after two years.

Kyle's situation highlights how conflicting perspectives can destroy a union -- specifically if the entrepreneur insists he is acting in his family's interest, but the spouse believes he is acting in his own. One test of the entrepreneur's motivation is how much of the family's collective life he is willing to sacrifice with little payoff. Tony, a software and media entrepreneur, admits subjecting his wife to "eight years of damn-near abject poverty and suffering" while he struggled to produce and sell a TV show. Finally, "she couldn't take it anymore," he said. "Two kids in diapers and wondering where next month's mortgage payment was coming from." Tony's wife delivered an ultimatum: the TV show or her. "I said the TV show," he told me. "That was the day the love died." The marriage died with it.

Sometimes, entrepreneurship changes a person -- and not for the better. In the crucible of company building, traits such as bossiness, self-importance, and impatience intensify. Roger says his wife of 23 years dominated their relationship even before she became an entrepreneur. In his view, building a successful company made her feel so powerful and confident that she became dismissive of him. "The seeds of our dissolution were already there," says Roger. "But they were like popcorn. The heat of the business made them pop up all over the place."

Ironically, Roger says, the thrill of starting a business initially reinvigorated their relationship with freshness and energy. But over time, as his wife's workaholism continued, Roger asked if she really still wanted a husband. "She replied with some version of, 'Not now. Maybe later.' "

Roger had reason to resent his wife's treatment. But some male spouses of female entrepreneurs have less justifiable complaints. Even in 2010, marriages are still being wrecked on the rocks of sexism: There are husbands who resent rather than celebrate their wives' entrepreneurial success. The CEO of a thriving PR agency told me she split from her husband when he became emotionally and physically abusive in response to her growing independence. "He would tell people I wore the pants in the family, just because of my income," she said. Of course, successful women in any profession risk similar backlash. But entrepreneurs -- by definition leaders of others -- may pose a particular threat to vulnerable male egos.

Just as company building can lead to divorce, divorce can destabilize a company, and even sap brand equity if the company trades on a family image. Chris Blanchard grows 20 acres of vegetables at Rock Spring Farm in Iowa, a stone's throw from the Minnesota border. In his original marketing materials (which he is slowly replacing), he and his now-ex-wife, Kim, were the literal face of the farm. They still smile together in newspaper articles, from brochures, and on posters in natural-food stores. "We had this public image of the idyllic farm family, and that was part of what we were selling," Chris told me. He hasn't lied about the end of his marriage, but he hasn't broadcast it, either. "Look, my customers want a good story with their vegetables," he said. "They want a narrative. This divorce just doesn't belong in a Smith & Hawken catalog. And I have a business to run."

Chris assumed considerable debt to renegotiate his equipment and real estate loans after the divorce, putting the farm on shakier financial footing. He sorely misses Kim's skills and perspective. (Recently, in fact, he hired her back to work on the farm.) But farming has humbled him; he understands that outside forces can wound a business. There are droughts. There are floods. And now there is divorce.

Spouse partners and those who work in the company suffer their own reversals of fortune and status with divorce. Kim put 10 years of sweat equity into their farm; her only way out of an unhappy marriage was to leave that investment behind. "I didn't want to destroy the farm by asking for half of it," Kim says. She emerged without a job, her own credit history, or even a title to list on a resumé. Roger, whose wife thought she might want a husband later, lost his CFO spot along with his marriage. "I'd made a huge contribution, and that identity was stolen from me," he says.

In one respect, entrepreneurs are like everyone else who divorces. They vow to do things differently next time. Many accept blame for having skewed priorities and promise their future spouses undivided attention. They talk about date nights and shared hobbies. The next marriage -- like the next company -- will benefit from lessons learned in the failure of the first.

But prospective spouses of divorced entrepreneurs: Tread carefully.

Entrepreneurs are teachable but not wholly reformable. Underneath the grace notes of good intentions, I heard a common bass lick: The business will still come first. As Chris Blanchard puts it, "Anybody I get involved with will have to know that I already have one wife -- and it's the farm."

"My priorities haven't really changed," another divorced entrepreneur told me. "I still have big plans."

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

The four words an entrepreneurs spouse dreads hearing: I have an idea.

As a resident of New Hampshire, I do not fear earthquakes. But I live in terror of four little words: "I have an idea." When my husband utters them, the ground beneath me trembles.

We were hiking a local mountain when Gary revealed his brainstorm for a chain of healthy fast-food restaurants. This was in 2000; his first venture, Stonyfield Yogurt, had been profitable and stable for several years. Gary saw this new business as a logical extension of the mission of our organic yogurt company. My husband sometimes refers to himself as a "pathological optimist." To me, this plan was just pathological.

When you live with a serial entrepreneur, you are never safe from the siren song of new ideas. As one repeat offender told me, "The personality of a serial entrepreneur is almost like a curse. You see opportunities every day." Danny Meyer cites a practical reason for populating much of Manhattan with his eclectic restaurants and food businesses: The new ventures provide development opportunities for his 1,500-plus employees. But as fundamentally, "I can't stop thinking of ideas that excite me," he says.

That creativity and independence are what attract people like me to entrepreneurs in the first place. As Gary points out, I knew what I was getting into when I married him. "While you didn't sign on for multiple rounds of pain, you signed on with me," he says. "You were drawn to the upsides of entrepreneurial business -- the excitement, the fascination, and the fun." All true. It had never crossed my mind to request a one-company-only prenup.

But when Gary broached the restaurant idea, I had not recovered -- in fact I have still not recovered -- from the extended trauma of the yogurt company's start-up. Stonyfield took nine agonizing years to reach profitability. Even though Gary said he intended to hire a CEO to run the restaurants, I anticipated a return to the grueling hours and constant distractions I thought we had finally put behind us. Serial entrepreneurs are like women who suppress the recollection of labor in order to marshal the stamina to give birth again. For their families, such selective memory is not so easy to muster.

Then, of course, any new business entails risk. Here I thought we were on terra firma, only to find Gary gazing longingly at rough seas. Entrepreneurs, as I knew from experience, are masters at defining risk down. So in my brain: "Gary knows nothing about the restaurant business." In Gary's brain: "I'll bring in smart people and figure out the rest." For many spouses, life stages enhance that sense of risk. Entrepreneurs launching second, third, and fourth companies are by definition older than when they started out: If they fail, there are fewer years to rebound. No wonder when the adrenaline kicks in for the serial entrepreneur, the cortisol spikes for the spouse.

Yet who would want to quash a loved one's dream? That way, unhappiness and resentment lie. "It's a crappy part for the spouse to play," says a friend whose husband started a second company. "To say 'no' or 'have you thought of this or that problem?' The way I dealt with it -- and I'm not proud of this fact -- is, I said, 'You want to go through this again? Fine, but I don't want anything to do with it.' We agreed on a certain amount of money he'd sink into it -- but we passed that number long ago."

Inc. reader Mallary Tytel, an entrepreneur married to a serial entrepreneur, tries to be realistic. "You have two choices: fighting it or going along with it," says Tytel, founder of the consultancy Healthy Workplaces. "As an entrepreneur myself, I know there's no percentage in going against the grain."

Nor could I go against the grain with Gary. Painful as the prospect of this new business was, I kept my mouth shut. As long as he wasn't jeopardizing the roof over our heads or our children's college funds, I figured he was entitled to his next dream. I comforted myself with the fact that he'd succeeded once. This time the learning curve should be less steep. Would be less steep. Had to be less steep.

At what point, though, does the spouse get to say enough? Let's assume that the first business was successful, and financial need is no longer a compelling motive. When does a spouse's desire for calm and security outweigh the entrepreneur's desire to be "who I am"? The answer, of course, is different for each couple and set of circumstances. Is it selfish to discourage a loved one from doing something he or she desperately wants to do because it makes you uncomfortable? Or more selfish for him or her to persist in spite of your discomfort?

Among other things, the spouse should consider whether the entrepreneur is truly succumbing to an irresistible opportunity or driven by a darker motivation. He or she may be depressed or bored, or seeking to fill a psychic or emotional void. One man told me that he kept creating businesses to escape his marital woes. Unfortunately, he didn't have that insight until after his divorce. At that point, he realized other ways that starting multiple businesses had made him less fit as a mate. "Entrepreneurs feel they have to have all the answers," he told me. "Starting several businesses only reinforced that. The control issues became habit forming, a way of being. When you apply that trait to your personal life, it doesn't go over very well."

Fortunately, there are less risky ways, both personally and professionally, for an entrepreneur to flex those creative muscles. Passive or active investing and mentoring can be like methadone for the entrepreneur, providing some of the thrill without all of the risk. Gary loves to mentor because, he says, "what I remember most about Stonyfield's dark days was the loneliness. I'm rewarded by the idea that with a little of my extra time and money, I might be able to help others avoid some pain."

And running an existing company -- even a mature one -- offers some of the charge of a start-up. "In my work at Stonyfield, I'm inventing new enterprises all the time," Gary says. "I take huge risks every day."

Not that that stopped him. Gary launched the first O'Naturals -- recently renamed Stonyfield Café -- in Falmouth, Maine, in 2001. As I'd feared, the business has consumed considerable time and energy. Also cash: Gary has put in much more than either of us expected. (We have since agreed on a total amount that he can risk on entrepreneurial ventures, including this one.) The café is now in two locations and is still finding its way as a business. I avoid discussing it with Gary and try not to think about it too much.

Recently, Gary assured me that he wouldn't start another company unless I was fully behind it. If this is true, he won't be starting another company anytime soon. Or, actually, ever. But somehow I suspect that our lives will continue to be rocked by seismic activity. I hope Gary's next idea will score lower on the Richter scale.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

Working in your spouse's company may be the toughest job you will ever have.

When I moved to Stonyfield Farm in the mid-1980s to live with my then-fiancé, Gary, I immediately went to work in his yogurt business. I worked part time in the office and in sales, reporting to Gary, and part time as a yogurtmaker. At that time, the "factory" consisted of some jury-rigged machines in our barn; turning out good product required improvisation and luck. But my sales job was just as taxing, in personal ways I hadn't anticipated.

I started working for Gary for the same reasons most spouses get swept into entrepreneurial ventures: I was available, capable, and cheap. My role grew out of expediency, not because I possessed any particular skills or an abiding passion for the job. Because my future depended on the company's success, I was certainly dedicated. But Gary and I were not equal partners living a dream of our joint creation. And so we suffered double the stress without enjoying double the personal fulfillment.

Many couples meet on the job, and office anxiety follows them home. But when one spouse goes to work in the other's company, there is no relief in railing against the boss or fantasizing about going elsewhere. Even when one spouse doesn't report to the other, the entrepreneur usually wields implicit authority -- not ideal when you're trying to sustain a marriage of equals. The work environment may reveal quirks or irritating habits in both of you that never surfaced in domestic life. The most routine operations can generate a dozen new issues a day on which you disagree. And home ceases to be a sanctuary when dinner-table conversation picks up where the afternoon huddle left off.

Even the way you talk to each other is affected. Michael McMillan, an Inc. reader who works with his wife at their family-owned call center, Answer Center America, described it to me this way: "Problems at work demand yes-or-no solutions, and there's often no time for explanations. You need to keep emotions hidden at the office -- you can't personalize disagreements." At home, of course, conversation, compromise, and nuances are important. Everything is personal. Making the shift, from tough and impervious at the office to communicative, open, and sensitive at home, can be challenging for both spouses.

For Gary and me, working together revealed aspects of our personalities that had not emerged in two years of courting. Often when he'd give me instructions on how to handle our clients or suggest travel shortcuts for business trips, he'd talk fast and skip details. He sometimes became impatient with my confusion. For my part, I personalized everything and felt hurt by his occasional abruptness. I was unable to compartmentalize -- a critical skill for couples who work together. Unrealistically, I expected that we'd take the time, even during the workday, to solve problems as they arose.

We were often harried and uneasy -- a reasonable response to the constantly looming threat of bankruptcy. Our edginess seeped into our home environment -- home being about 10 feet from the office. Sometimes after my shift in the yogurt factory, I would meet Gary back in our apartment to make supper. Hairnetted and sweaty from the incubator, I'd fret about our endless production problems and thus further blur the faint boundary between the business and our personal lives. Sitting at the dinner table, we were in no mood to pose that sweet inquiry of the other: "Honey, how was your day?"

One reason spouse-employee arrangements sometimes sour is that so little thought goes into them. New employees are interviewed to assess their skills and interests; their working conditions and responsibilities are defined up front. Spouses, by contrast, may have to alter their shapes to fit whatever hole the company needs filled. Sometimes it's a match: The onetime accounting major takes over the books. Sometimes it's not: I was a literature major who helped with accounts receivable. In situations like ours, subjects such as compensation, flexible hours, and titles are often not raised. How long will the arrangement last? Is the spouse just helping out or putting his or her own aspirations indefinitely on hold?

Then there's the problem of power. Hierarchy at work is unavoidable. Someone has the final say. Established couples may find it easier to prevent those dynamics from contaminating their home lives. But when authority flows in one direction all day, it doesn't reverse course easily. One long-married Inc. reader wrote me: "My wife is the boss at home, too. I now feel like I work for her 24 hours a day."

Often, married couples imagine they're immune, because they know each other so well. Sometimes, though, they only think they do. When one friend of mine joined his wife in her business, he discovered that "she wasn't just a witty, sharp-tongued, funny woman -- she was actually mean and abusive. We stopped liking each other." The couple eventually divorced.

On the flip side, others told me they came to respect their spouses more after observing them on the job, where they appeared better organized, more focused, or more dynamic than at home. Working with Gary, I marveled at his creativity, and his optimism and calm in the face of disaster.

There are obvious ways to avoid the pitfalls. Establish job definitions and working conditions up front. Reinforce the message to each other -- and to everyone else -- that you are in this together, pursuing a common goal, even if one of you plots strategy while the other restocks shelves. At home, carve out inviolate time in which office talk is verboten.

Perhaps more important, ensure that the spouse receives the same appreciation and recognition due any talented, hard-working employee. "The gratitude thing is key," said Inc. reader Ginger Molthen, who works with her husband, Tom, in his salsa business, Pepper Dog Specialty Foods. "Otherwise, I feel like, Hey, I don't need this. We've both sacrificed for what he wanted."

After six months or a year, step back to evaluate the arrangement. This isn't a performance review -- it's a relationship review, with the option of reconfiguring either spouse's role. You may conclude you're simply not happy working together. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be together. As Michael McMillan put it, "The most important thing is to commit to saving your personal life before you save your professional life."

Some relationships thrive in the workplace, as couples share highs as well as lows and avoid the long hours of separation typical in entrepreneurial ventures. The intensity of the shared experience can strengthen their bond. They are likely to be able to sympathize with each other's stress and the need to work evenings or answer business calls on weekends. Couples who work together can offer each other wise and informed counsel about business-related problems.

But for Gary and me, those benefits weren't worth the cost. One spring morning, two years after I joined Stonyfield, we had our last business meeting in his office. By mutual agreement, we decided I should leave the company. Our business situation at the time was dire, and when I got pregnant, I became concerned that our chronic, extreme stress would affect the baby's health. Also, we had both learned something important: Though personally compatible, we did not work well together. We chose to protect our relationship, which had existed before the business and which we wanted to exist long after it. We smiled and embraced. I turned on my heel and walked the 10 feet back home.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

What to do when the work-obsessed spouse wants to play--without you.

Back in the 1980s, when my husband, Gary, and I were living the full catastrophe (young kids, new business) -- when hundred-hour workweeks were commonplace, dinners together a luxury, and most conversations an endless list of to-dos -- one commitment remained inviolable: Gary's tennis dates. Often, he and his friend Rick would meet at a local court in the evening, and by the time Gary returned to the farm, I was long asleep. As a nonjock, I was mystified and more than a little resentful of the choice he was making: to miss precious catch-up and connection time with me in favor of smashing little green balls over a net. I felt abandoned and pretty far down on his priority list. And at the end of my long day, I wasn't exactly gracious about being left with three screaming little people while he was off working up a cathartic sweat.

For families of entrepreneurs, the issue of leisure time is often a flash point. Spouses can usually -- albeit often unhappily -- reconcile themselves to the time demands a business makes on the entrepreneur. The family may depend on the income; dreams may rest on the company's anticipated success. But the spouse's repressed resentment can flower in the fertile loam formed by the entrepreneur's regular jaunts to the golf course or the gym. Voluntary abandonment stings in a way that obligatory leave taking does not. Work is necessary. Leisure pursuits are a matter of choice.

Or are they? For Gary, sports are a necessity, not a luxury. They lower his blood pressure and clear his head. He gets creative ideas while he hikes, in the fresh air, away from the clamor of people and the bleeping of computers and PDAs. "Doing sports makes me a nicer person," he told me recently. "I can't make the stress go away. But after the tension release of playing tennis or skiing, I feel more hopeful -- I feel revived. Better that than bringing the stress backwash home." (It's true that I've learned to gauge Gary's stress level by observing the number of pairs of sports pants in the laundry hamper.) This past winter, when Gary returned home on a Friday night after 10 days away on business and announced his plan to go skiing the next day, I felt a frisson of anger. But right on its heels came my lecture to myself: This is good. He needs this. The more he sweats, the more he smiles.

Tennis and skiing, however, are only two of Gary's many voluntary pursuits. He is politically active, serves on several boards, and travels frequently to give speeches. The crux of the problem, as Gary has pointed out to me, is that entrepreneurs are overoptimistic about how much they can take on without sacrificing something important. When you overpack a suitcase, something has to come out, or the lid won't close. It's hard when the item Gary chooses to remove is time with me.

My friend Kit Crawford, who owns Clif Bar with her husband, Gary Erickson, once wrestled with the same issue. "All Gary's adult life, he's taken an annual two-week intense bike trip," she told me. "Right after our third child, Lydia, was born in 1994, Gary left on one of his trips. I thought, You are kidding me! I rolled with it, but it was hard. He'd call me from the road, and I would weep. I felt lonely, overwhelmed, and resentful. He came home early from that trip, and then I felt guilty that he cut his trip short because of me."

Gary's commitment to his biking made Kit mad, but it also made her think. Having passions was a good thing, she realized. The solution wasn't to deny Gary his but instead to pursue her own. So, with Gary's encouragement, she started painting and resumed horseback riding and biking -- hobbies from before her kids were born. "My resentment sprang from the fact that I wasn't taking care of myself," says Kit. "We do a lot of things together. But doing what we love individually has ultimately made us stronger as a couple."

Like Kit, I believe it's important for both spouses to pursue their passions. And now that I have my own fulfilling work -- writing and teaching -- I sympathize more with both of the Garys. Professional gratification is not the same as personal fulfillment. Nor are work-life balance and work-family balance identical. There's more to personal life than just family. We all need to take care of ourselves and give back to our communities. For me, gardening and traveling and reading and serving on nonprofit boards (and, yes, even exercising -- thank you, Gary) are not just leisure pursuits. They have come to feel necessary.

Another friend, Nancy Rosenzweig, puts it more philosophically. Nancy is a serial entrepreneur and CEO and the mother of two small children. The fact that she also devotes significant time to volunteer work has sometimes caused tension at home. Paraphrasing the poet David Whyte, Nancy asserts that the antidote to busy-ness is not rest but rather "wholeheartedness." She says that her community commitments don't deplete her -- they energize her. Nurturing ourselves by doing things we're passionate about in turn allows us to "wholeheartedly" nurture others -- including our families and our companies.

So when Gary is off playing tennis, he is replenishing his body, mind, and spirit, and the children and I benefit from that. I get that now.

Right here would be a lovely place to tie up this essay with a bow. But the truth is, my understanding is more in my head than in my heart. I know I shouldn't chafe at Gary's rightful and healthy decision to do things he loves. Still, the extent of his voluntary commitments rankles. We enjoy our respective leisure activities in very different contexts. My work is largely confined to normal business hours and requires little travel. When I take up a new interest, our family life is not materially affected. The demands of Gary's business, by contrast, consume his mind and his time. Long before he snaps on that ski boot, his cup hath run over.

There will always be new things that Gary and I want to explore. Ideally, some will be interests we share. But many will not. And as our combined calendars fill up, the white spaces representing our unscheduled time diminish. Without conscious brakes and limits, heedlessly adding commitments can create a cycle of escalating busy-ness, a mutually assured (if unintended) destruction of shared time. Balance remains elusive -- but Gary and I do better when we grab the eraser together and reclaim some of those calendar squares.

On Valentine's Day, Gary and I woke up, ate a wonderful breakfast, and watched a movie we'd rented. It was a lovely, lazy start to a wintry Sunday, and I was looking forward to a rare day together for the two of us. And then, the backhand volley: "I'm playing tennis with Adam at 3."

I winced but immediately rallied and lobbed myself The Lecture: This is good! He needs this. Then up piped a wee voice in my head: "Isn't this out of bounds?"

Absent an umpire, I wasn't sure. I served up, "OK, but it would have been better if we'd talked about it first." Gary agreed. Neither one of us cried fault.

We both got the point.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

For better or worse, your children are deeply involved in your business. Stop feeling guilty about it, and start inviting your kids into your work life.

Now that our youngest is about to graduate from high school, my husband, Gary, and I have been reflecting on how we raised our three kids. Curiously, it had never occurred to us to ask our children how they felt about our company, Stonyfield Yogurt, and its endless claims on Gary's time, presence, and attention. Gary always worked hard to make up for his frequent absences. If he couldn't be there consistently, he wanted at least to be consistent about some things that were meaningful to the kids. When he was home, he would rise with them, make yogurt smoothies for breakfast, and drive them to school. He coached their soccer teams. When he was away, he constructed crossword puzzles, which he faxed to them from the road.

We both hoped it was enough. But we didn't really know. So I posed the question to each of my children: What was this like for you?

Part of my inspiration to ask this simple question came from a conversation I had at last year's Inc. 500 conference with Salem Samhoud, founder of &Samhoud, a consulting firm in the Netherlands. Stealing a trick from the manager's tool kit, Salem holds quarterly "360 degree reviews" with his wife and three children, ages 20, 13, and 9. The reviews show him where he's falling down as a parent and also where he doesn't need to sweat it. "Last September, they told me I spend too much time on my iPhone," he told me. "They were right. Now I switch it off on weekends. Because of their feedback, I already feel more relaxed and focused. They asked me to do it for them, but it's also better for me." Every six months, each child spends a day with Salem at the office. "They get to see not just the negative -- my absence -- but the positive -- what I do all day, how I work, how my work is valued," he says.

The subject of children is fraught for many working parents, but company owners experience extra dimensions of guilt. It's one thing to expose yourself and your spouse to financial risk and instability, another to expose kids who have no voice in the matter. Work follows the entrepreneur wherever he or she goes -- into the family room, onto the beach -- providing an ever-present reminder that Mom or Dad has competing priorities. Frequent travel is usually unavoidable. And even when you're there, you're often not there. Your body is at the Girl Scout meeting with your daughter, but your mind is mulling over margins.

When children are affected by a parent's absence or preoccupation, they often have ways of letting the parent know. At the same conference last fall, I met Susan Edwards, who told me that her entrepreneur-husband, Barry Edwards, got a wake-up call when their youngest child was about 2 years old. Susan had just pulled up to her husband's office with their son Cody. The boy excitedly pointed at the building and exclaimed, "Daddy's house!" "That comment changed my husband," Susan said. Across from his desk, Barry hung a poster of a little boy who looked like Cody. Printed in bold at the bottom was the word Priorities. "It's been his daily reminder of the need to shut down and go home," Susan said.

The competing pressures of business and children can be hardest on female entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is attractive to mothers, because it promises flexible hours, but how flexible can hours be when you're working 16 of them? Recently I met Amy Cueva, co-founder of a technology-design firm called Mad*Pow and the mother of three children, ages 5, 11, and 12. "Sometimes I don't even feel like a woman," she told me. "I don't have time to nurture and be there the way my mom was. Recently my daughter e-mailed me with a detailed plan for her 11th-birthday party. I didn't know whether to be proud of her organization and tech savvy or be depressed that she knows that e-mail is the best way to get in touch with me.

"People tell me how amazing it is that I accomplish all that I do," Amy said. "But I feel like I'm screwing up every day."

Still, there are upsides to being the progeny of an entrepreneur. Many company owners have extraordinary latitude to involve their kids in their work, spending time together while providing an early education in business. Packing boxes after school or counting inventory on weekends is often a terrific first job. Laboring alongside a parent, children feel proud of the family business -- this is ours! We are making this! And they watch their parents acting as leaders, taking responsibility both for their own lives and for the lives of others.

The intimate observation of entrepreneurship also helps shape children's future decisions. Some find their own horizons expanding as they realize they can choose to build something themselves rather than become part of something built by others. I was surprised to learn that my son Ethan, 19, is now interested in business. "Dad has a cool life," he told me. "It's really busy and demanding, but he has a personal attachment to what he does." Some children see the labor, the stress, and the sacrifice and decide the entrepreneur's life is not for them. My 17-year-old daughter, Danielle, for instance. "When I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to have Dad's job, but as I got exposed to what it's really like, I'm just like, ugh."

My children also had differing reactions to Gary's absences, mental and physical. The boys weren't much bothered by them. "Dad was there for things I cared about, like my soccer games and teaching me to ride a bike," said Alex, who is now 21. "All I remember now are the things that he was able to do." "I think Dad's absences put a lot more pressure on you than they did on us," said Ethan.

Danielle had another view. "It was great that he coached my soccer team. But during those times he was my coach, not my dad," she said. "Our games and practices were just part of his busy schedule. Sometimes I felt bad when he came to soccer games, because I knew there were more 'important' things he should be doing.

"At this point in my life, I appreciate his mission and what he's doing to support organic farmers," Danielle continued. "But sometimes I think, Why does my dad have to be the guy who saves the world? Sometimes you need to be the guy who chills out. Let somebody else save the world for a while."

An entrepreneurial business sucks the entire family into its vortex. Marinating in guilt is an opportunity lost. So invite your kids into your work life. Let them see how things are made or marketed, how problems are tackled and solved. They will gain more appreciation for what you do. "Daddy's (or Mommy's) house" will feel more like their house, too.

My "interviews" with our children let Gary and me understand them better and deepened our relationship as a result. Your kids' feedback may change the way you run your business and live your life. As I write this, Gary is downstairs in the den with Danielle, watching her latest favorite show (United States of Tara) and, to all appearances, completely chilling out.

Of course, it's possible he's mulling over margins.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

There's nothing like a home-based business for increasing family stress.

From 1986 to 1991, my husband and I lived in the dilapidated 19th-century farmhouse at Stonyfield Farm (the land for which our yogurt company is named). The huge, wood-heated building housed the offices and yogurt works, as well as two apartments: one for us and one for our partners, Samuel and Louise Kaymen, and five of their six kids. Newly engaged and fresh from living in my own apartment, I adjusted easily to sharing quarters with Gary. It was shacking up with his business that was hard.

We had zero privacy. Trucks groaned up our narrow gravel driveway at all hours. Employees were ever present, glancing at what was for dinner and frequently using our bathroom if the public one was occupied. When our best yogurtmaker couldn't find a babysitter for her son, yours truly would rock the boy to sleep while his mom worked the night shift. Our kitchen table overlooked the yogurt works, so we couldn't get through a meal without distractions from outside (Did that guy really just throw a lit cigarette into the Dumpster?). Hosting guests was a challenge. Arriving for a relaxing weekend in the country, they'd inevitably get caught up in the madness -- grabbing a shovel to help dig out a truck stuck in the mud -- before going to bed and nearly freezing to death in our unheated spare bedroom upstairs.

One afternoon, I walked into our kitchen cradling bags of groceries and found a young man I didn't recognize grabbing cutlery and plates from our cupboard. I stopped in the doorway and stared. "We have a lunch meeting in the office," he said nonchalantly. I was speechless, feeling completely invaded at the most basic level. This was my kitchen. My stuff. Then I chided myself. These were the people keeping the company afloat, and we all believed in using fewer disposables. Why couldn't I feel good about sharing; why was I so uncool? Still, I thought, there have to be boundaries. Only, where did they lie?

That question was answered a few months later. One Sunday morning, Gary and I were in bed when into our room walked an unfamiliar teenager. He announced he'd been hired to clean the offices, and did we know where to find the broom? By Monday night, our apartment door had a lock on it. But that bit of iron was mostly symbolic, a finger in a leaky dike. Employees, job applicants, investors, and suppliers still flowed freely through our home -- only now they knocked first.

The moment you create a business, you step into a twilight zone where the barrier between what is work and what is not starts to break down. The deterioration accelerates for entrepreneurs who work out of their homes. You may start off with a home-based business but soon find yourself with a business where you and your family also happen to live. I got an earful about this from Anna Breyer, whose husband runs a construction business. She is irked that trucks and trailers are always parked in her yard and feels awkward having employees walk through her house when it's piled high with dishes and laundry. "Sometimes, I'll have to sign for an early-morning lumber delivery while I'm still in my PJs and the dog's barking and my kid's screaming," she told me recently. Anna says things have improved with small changes, such as putting a coffeemaker and microwave in the garage for employees to use, instead of having them in her kitchen.

Privacy isn't the only issue. In homes shared with companies, living space may be drastically reduced by the demands of workspace and inventory storage. Sandy Abrams, an acquaintance in California, described to me how she was once literally imprisoned by her business supplies. Fifteen years ago, when she started Moisture Jamzz, a company that makes skin-conditioning gloves and socks, Sandy filled every room of her L.A. apartment with fabric rolls and shipping boxes. The dining-room table was piled high with packing tape and stationery. One day, an earthquake caused the fabric and boxes to tumble in front of the door. Sandy and her husband spent 10 terrified minutes clearing a pathway so they could exit.

Sandy still runs Moisture Jamzz out of her house (though she doesn't manufacture or keep much inventory there). But now she has strategies to contain it. She limits the company's impact on her space by storing stationery and press kits behind closed doors in her home office, and limits its impact on her time by letting business calls go to voice mail after 5 p.m. She also protects her family's privacy by meeting with vendors at the local Starbucks.

Of course, certain hazards of sharing a home with a business apply to anyone with a home office. We're all familiar with that slippery slope of nipping in after dinner -- just to clean up a few e-mails -- and emerging at midnight. (A friend of mine who frequently found herself making middle-of-the-night visits to her home office eventually put a sign on its door -- "Get a life" -- to remind her somnambulating self that she was being obsessive, and whatever it was could wait until morning.)

But for home-based entrepreneurs, daylight brings an additional challenge: diplomatic separation of the family's waking hours from the company's operating hours. A friend who wrestles with this commented to me that most people, including his wife and kids, have an ingrained belief that work is something you leave home to do. They assume that if he's home, he ought to be available to the family. Sometimes, his wife pokes her head into his office to see if he'd like to take a break and have lunch together. "She doesn't understand that I just don't want to break the work spell," he said. "I'm in the zone and need to stay there during the workday. But she takes it personally."

This resonated with me as I recalled those times I'd walk into Gary's home office while he was on a business call, only to watch him wince at my intrusion. And I realized that I react the same way. When Gary or one of the kids interrupts me on a work call, I brush them off with that frantic wave that is more desperate dismissal than greeting. Such behaviors inflict small hurts, little bits of damage that accumulate. Over the years, Gary and I have learned to deliver messages by silently slipping in and placing sticky notes in each other's line of sight. We have trained ourselves to distinguish between physical presence and availability. Though my eyes tell me that Gary is in his home office, he is not, for my purposes, at home. He is not available for figuring out where to meet friends for dinner or how to celebrate Danielle's birthday. I don't take it personally anymore, nor does he.

Cohabitating with a business increases the stress level of entrepreneurship exponentially. When home and company share an address, entrepreneurs and their families need to find ways to create the emotional equivalent of physical distance -- a gap that keeps worlds from colliding. Sometimes, the only means available will be closed office doors or a new location for the microwave or some sticky notes placed in front of your spouse. It might not hurt to scrawl "Get a life" on one or two of them.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

New Year's resolutions have always been good for Stonyfield Yogurt. Our sales invariably spike in January as a result of nearly universal vows to shed that extra 20. The season inspires people to set down concrete plans for improving themselves -- and their relationships.

In that spirit, I approached my husband, Gary, for help with composing a list of rules for entrepreneurs who aspire to a happy marriage and thriving family life. Some of the following derive from our own experiences, and some were offered by other entrepreneurial couples. (I've cast the entrepreneur as male and the spouse as female because that's our situation. But the rules apply equally when the reverse is true.)

At work, you're accustomed to running things and to being in charge. But when you walk through the front door of your house (or emerge from your home office), you emigrate from an autocracy into a messy democracy, with all its attendant chaos, conflict, and need for compromise. Your spouse should understand that this transition is not always quick or easy and that she must be patient while you adjust. But there's an upside. Though it's true that at home you can't command by fiat, you can relax in the knowledge that there, at least, someone is sharing the load.

It's difficult for spouses to make time for each other, much less take that desperately needed vacation. This challenge is here to stay: No matter what stage the business is in, it will require your all. But a vacation can be a cup of coffee together or a short walk around the block. Sometimes that's all you'll be able to manage. Any couple needs uninterrupted time -- even if it's incremental -- to share those grace notes and headaches that make up lives. Being together reminds you that you enjoy being together. And that reminds both of you why this enormous undertaking is worthwhile.

OK, you can leave it to buzz and bleep sometimes, or even most of the time. But be disciplined about carving out stretches that are technology free. Even if you don't respond to its whining, its mere presence on the dining room table, at the restaurant, or by the bed changes the nature of your shared space. Plus, it will be easier to pry the kids loose from their cell phones and video games if you can show that it's possible to resist technology's allure. In any case, your BlackBerry looks great in black leather. Slide her into that holster, and everyone will be happier.

Certain business decisions will affect your mate, too. Acquiring another company, launching an IPO, or expanding into other states or countries will require more travel, which increases the pressure on everyone at home. Thinking about signing a business loan using the house as collateral? Hello -- your spouse lives there, too! You can also consult her about business issues that don't affect the family. You've made smart decisions about your home life by combining perspectives; your mate may provide a fresh approach to work dilemmas, too. And unlike employees who might be nervous about disagreeing with the boss, you can usually trust her to be completely honest.

In many ways, you are fused with your business: Your very identity is bound to and dependent upon its fate. You have invested endless energy, time, imagination, and willpower in its success. Much of your conversation revolves around its ups and downs. Though your mate intersects with and cares deeply about the business, it does not contain or define her in the same way it does you. She spends her day in other worlds, consumed by other matters. Talk to her about them. Better yet, join her at a conference, read her student's paper, play audience while she rehearses a presentation, weigh in on the tile grout color, drive your child to the dental appointment. You'll understand each other better.

Your spouse knows you are busy and that you receive scores if not hundreds of messages a day. She wouldn't contact you at work unless it was important. (When I call Gary at the office, he knows I'm not phoning to see how the yogurt is coming out today.) Your spouse is busy, too, and can likewise be tough to reach. You will both feel more relaxed if it's easier to get in touch, and if you know that each other's missives will move to the top of the queue.

Emergencies or changes of plan aside, don't try to chat with your spouse from the airport. She likely feels frustrated when the conversation is drowned out by loudspeaker warnings not to accept packages from strangers or cut short because your row is called to board. Likewise, she's probably not keen on getting a phone call five minutes before your next meeting starts. Much as she misses you during your travels, it's no fun conversing when she's braced to hear her least favorite three words: "I gotta go."

You win clients and customers by courting them, by offering not simple attention but true attentiveness. You are solicitous, observant, mindful, and aware -- eager to anticipate and fulfill their needs. Your spouse is your No. 1 life client and most important connection. Court her -- with a thoughtful gift, a just-because hug, morning coffee in bed -- as though you really want to keep her business, too.

Often, the entrepreneur lives in the spotlight, while the spouse works behind the scenes. But the spouse plays an important role in the success of any venture. By keeping the domestic machine well oiled, she allows you to enjoy family life while reserving most of your energy for the business. She has saved you money by working inside the company and made the family money by working outside of it. She's proud of your business but also of the contribution she's made to the life you are building. So, go on, crow about her! To employees, co-workers, suppliers, family, friends. Post an accolade on the website! You're the boss -- name a product after her! (Note to Gary: Yo My Baby? Apricot Meggo? Get the marketing department on it.) Most important: Tell her directly that you value her contribution. Some things go without saying…but not that.

Spend time remembering all you've created together, all you've managed to survive. Maintaining a marriage through years of strain, sacrifice, and uncertainty requires both grace and grit. You have so many wonderful, horrible, heartbreaking, and hilarious stories -- about the company, about the kids, about the rich history you share. To paraphrase Neil Young, you've had your ups and downs, but you're still playing together. The music might not always be in tune, but take a moment to rejoice that you're still making it.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is a writer married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt. She invites readers to e-mail her their own rules for maintaining marital harmony when hitched to an entrepreneurial business.

During the 1980s, our first years in business, I felt great relief each November as we left behind the ruts of our New Hampshire dirt road, glided onto the interstate, and headed south to Mom's New York home for Thanksgiving. But around Hartford, my anxiety meter would start ticking up. My mother and three brothers had invested heavily in our company, Stonyfield Yogurt. And I knew that soon after our arrival, the conversation would turn to the fate of their cash. Their questions were sheathed in a kindness that barely covered the sharp blade of concern within. Profits? Not even close. Margins? Come on. Cash burn? Lots of that. I would sympathize with the turkey as slivers of explanations and excuses were sliced from our tender hides. In those early days, our carcass of a business felt cooked, too.

Fortunately, those discussions were for the most part supportive. My brothers (two physicians and a lawyer) were entertained and challenged by entrepreneurial problem solving. They enjoyed offering advice. My husband, Gary, profited from talking things out and getting some fresh thinking. At the very least, it was a break from making yogurt. But there was a lack of ease in the air, as our Thanksgiving reunion morphed into a literal kitchen-cabinet meeting. At times, I wished we could just hold a shareholders' Q&A beforehand and enjoy the pumpkin pie in peace.

Building a business requires sacrifices. When the business is funded by relatives, those sacrifices may include the carefree family gathering, the casual lunch with a sibling, and the lighthearted phone chat with Mom and Dad. Anxious and exhausted, entrepreneurs yearn for the solace and support usually provided by families: a sheltered place to lay their weary heads. But relationships change whenever money enters the picture. After all, the adjectives traditionally paired with cash are cold and hard. If business problems also endanger the family treasure, the entrepreneur may find her weary head resting on cold, hard stone.

Of course, you have to get money from somewhere, and founders naturally balk at the constraints and pressures imposed by institutional investors. Yet relying on the kindness of intimates can be even more fraught. Recently, I heard from an Inc. reader whose husband, unbeknownst to her, had borrowed money from his sister to cover payroll. She was furious when she found out. "I don't want people looking at me funny because we owe them money," she told me. "Debt erodes healthy relationships. I would have preferred a loan from a bank."

The people who love and believe in us are also those whose fortunes we least want to imperil, and whose positive regard it hurts most to squander. Venture capitalists understand this, which is why they often prefer that friends and families invest before they consider a deal. As one CEO said to me, "Venture people know you don't care about them, but that you'll work hard to make sure not to lose the money of loved ones." The decision to invest is about the business, but it's personal, too. After all, businesses reflect the passion, dreams, energy, and vision of their founders. What could be more personal than that? Entrepreneurs strive to keep people believing in them. But when things go wrong, losing the confidence of venture capitalists is far less painful than losing the faith of one's family.

Some stress fractures are so severe, they bring down the whole familial structure. Around the same time we were building Stonyfield, a friend of mine and her husband started what became a hugely successful consumer goods company. They were desperate for money, so early on, her parents bought 20 percent of the business. She tried persuading them to sign a minority shareholder agreement, but they were offended at the mere suggestion. Then, a few years later, her parents tried to force a sale or an IPO. My friend's voice still shakes when she tells the tale. "That was probably the most painful thing I've been through," she says. "You look at it as a child being supported by loving parents. They look at it as a calculation. What -- money is more important than me?"

My friend, who had been close to her parents, eventually saw them only in the presence of both sides' attorneys. She didn't speak to them directly for years. "It was horrible for me. Resentment is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die," she says. "The bottom line is that this was my life, and to them, the business was nothing more than an asset." My friend's advice: If you must take money from relatives, get them in and out quickly, with short-term debt. And whenever possible, structure the transaction as a loan rather than equity, so valuation does not become an issue. If you do give up equity, press for a shareholder agreement.

Our situation was different. My torment stemmed not from what my relatives were doing to me but from what I feared I was doing to my relatives. My mother, Doris, in particular, had invested far beyond what she could comfortably lose. I was terrified of the risks she was taking: how our potential failure might affect her retirement, her relationship with Gary and me, and our bond with my brothers. At one point, I begged her to stop. Each time Gary phoned her asking for another cash infusion, usually to meet payroll, I would call on the other line and urge her to say no. My mother -- an angel in more ways than one -- didn't stop lending and investing, though eventually she and Gary agreed to stop telling me about it. She continued to invest because, more than believing in Gary's endlessly evolving business plans, she believed in Gary. I saw her and my brothers as financial innocents -- whom Gary and I were leading to slaughter. "It's gonna work, Meggy," she would reassure me. "I'm a big girl." But from my perspective, she may as well have been shoving quarters into a slot machine.

Our personal story had a happy ending. My mother is at ease in her retirement. Her risky investment in Stonyfield secured college educations for all her grandchildren. Our family is as close as ever and feels great collective satisfaction at having been part of building a successful business. And Gary's success has spawned entrepreneurial dreams in other members of the clan. Some of what our family made on Stonyfield stock has been invested in my nephew Jon Cadoux's start-up. Mercifully, this Thanksgiving it will be Jon's hide on the carving plate instead.

But Jon has an unfair product advantage. His business is the Peak Organic Brewing Company. As we spend the evening sampling new flavors of Jon's beer in my mother's living room, I expect that his quarterly financials -- no matter what they are -- will start to look just fine.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt.

For entrepreneurs, there's never a right time to buy a house, start a family, have a life. While you are building a business, work-life balance inevitably suffers

A friend of mine is an entrepreneur in his mid-30s. His business is almost four years old, and it's growing well, though it still is not profitable. He and his wife chose to live near the nexus of two interstates -- a grim, realistic nod to his life on the road. She is 36 now but plans to wait to have kids until he is home more. I understand her fear of being widowed by the business and of raising a child with no money and no security. But if she waits for the right time to bring a baby into the world, she will likely welcome Junior along with her first AARP card.

The reality is that when you are entangled in an entrepreneurial life, there's never a right time -- for anything. There's no right time, because there's no time (and usually no money, either). For having kids, for buying a house, for getting a dog, for taking a vacation, for going out to dinner. Planning becomes difficult when income (if it exists at all) is insecure and savings are usually (to put it gently) unsubstantial. No matter how loudly private life calls out for investment -- of time and of money -- the business screams even louder in its demands for both. An entrepreneurial life becomes all about postponing -- "When we break even…," "When we get that contract…," "When we hire that salesperson…" -- ah, yes, that's when our lives can move ahead.

The fact is that while you are building (and building, and building, and sometimes rebuilding) a business, you are also composing a life. With apologies to John Lennon, life is what happens while you are busy making a five-year plan. All you get to decide is how, when, and especially whether you are going to craft it. There are personal opportunity costs to starting a business if it causes you to postpone making a life. This is especially true if family and business are young at the same time. Put off having kids too long, and you may end up with fewer than you wanted or none at all. Put off taking vacations and going out to dinner with your spouse, and you won't create those memories and points of connection that glue a relationship and family together. Put off exercise, and you may irreversibly damage your health.

Theoretically, entrepreneurs control their lives and schedules. But the exact opposite is usually true: Entrepreneurs are whipsawed by their businesses. There is a constant sense of crisis, and every aspect of running a business demands more time than there are hours in a day. If the entrepreneur doesn't build a high wall around his or her personal life, the business is sure to overwhelm it.

But how can you create a personal life when you can't even plan a day? Entrepreneurs often don't have the financial stability to erect the bulwarks of a normal life -- taking out a mortgage, depositing into a college savings account and a 401(k). Their paycheck is one of the first things they sacrifice when times are tight. How is it possible to build a solid home on such an insecure foundation?

My husband, Gary, and I had a young marriage and a young business at the same time. We learned early on to relinquish any sense of control over either one. In our personal life, we planned nothing at all. We had our first two kids in a rented farmhouse that was freezing and dilapidated. Our fledgling yogurt business, Stonyfield Farm, was a liability, not an asset. Our economic future was bleak. We lived in the country with very few friends around. We would stand next to the roaring refrigeration compressors to lull our colicky babies to sleep. It was chaotic and more than a little pathetic. Never mind paying for college -- where was the money to fix up the baby's room?

We took vacations we couldn't afford and paid off the Visa bills for a year afterward. I remember making copies of the credit card statements for Gary and writing "HELP" on them in big letters, as if he could magically convert 50-cent yogurt coupons into cash for our minimum monthly payments. But we took those trips and did other things we could ill afford because we knew we had to keep living and squeezing as much joy from life as we could under the circumstances. We had forsaken any traditional sense of normalcy and had utterly abandoned any notion of security. Before helping found Stonyfield, our partners Samuel and Louise had for a time lived in a wood-heated barn with their six kids; the children nestled together at night in sleeping bags in the loft. Compared with that, we felt bourgeois in our ramshackle farmhouse. I will always be grateful for the courageous example Samuel and Louise set by their refusal to tie life decisions to the ebb and flow of business.

Gary and I managed to separate our reactions to our business situation (depressed) from our feelings about our personal future (optimistic). He may have had all his fingers in the dike, but intuitively I knew that I shouldn't spend my time piling sandbags. We never fooled ourselves that someday would come and that we would reach a certain place in our business that would permit us to progress with our lives. In reality, a business never grows up. It may reach a point where it no longer needs constant coddling, but it's an evolving organism that constantly challenges its founder, sucking up attention and resources at every stage. The intensity is relentless, and the work never ends. If you allow a business, even a successful one, to dictate the terms of your life, you will always find reasons to delay making the big personal decisions -- there's the new branch that is just about to open, that merger on the horizon. When businesses survive and thrive, it's the nature of the entrepreneur to keep expanding them.

In our case, Gary and I now have no worries about retirement, and the kids' college educations are covered. Our business is successful, and we are in a position to enjoy the fruits of financial security. But after Stonyfield took off, Gary got into more mischief. He started another company, an all-natural fast-food restaurant. He began producing organic yogurt in Europe. He travels frequently and is more overcommitted than ever. Now that the kids are almost out of the nest, I'd like to take trips with Gary for pleasure, not for work. I'd like us to garden together and get really good at swing dancing. I'd like to create a less frenetic life. But it looks as if that's got to wait; until when, I'm not exactly sure. Now is not the right time.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm. She writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg writes about how her husband, Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg, never lets his BlackBerry leave his side.

Her name is Bond Girl.

My husband, Gary, refers to her simply as his BlackBerry, but I know better. Bond Girl has become the awkward third wheel in our relationship. She sleeps on Gary's bed table and wakes us each morning. When he reaches to silence her, he can't resist scrolling down her sleek silver body to check for last night's e-mails. Bond Girl joins us when we dine and sits on the sidelines at our kids' soccer games, purring randomly. She knows all Gary's secrets and contains all his memories. She alone knows where he'll be today, tomorrow, and ever after.

My normally calm husband turned quietly frantic when he misplaced Bond Girl a few months ago. She turned up after a 15-minute search, and I joked that it would be interesting to see just how long he could live without her. Not missing a beat, Gary replied, "I think you just did."

Over the 25 years that Gary has been in business, we've marveled at each new technology. I remember my amazement at our first PC in 1985 and first fax machine in 1987. Then cell phones came along. But none of those affected the texture of our relationship the way Bond Girl has. Although the barrier between work and the rest of life has been eroding steadily, it's taken the BlackBerry to shatter it altogether. Her incessant buzzing -- Check me! Check me! It just might be important! -- slices into our family cocoon. The way some mourn the loss of wilderness, I grieve the loss of quiet space, free of electronic intrusion and interruption. Bond Girl gives Gary constant access to the world. But more disturbingly, she gives the world constant access to him.

Entrepreneurial businesses are colicky babies that never stop screaming for their owners' time, energy, and imagination. Their families are in a constant battle for attention. For the entrepreneur, maintaining work-family balance involves managing guilt on both sides. Enter the BlackBerry. It beguiles both the entrepreneur and the family by creating the alluring illusion of freedom. The entrepreneur can be surrounded by family, untethered from the office -- but always accessible to work.

Nowhere is this truer than on our vacations, which Gary believes Bond Girl makes guilt free. But I would argue that his laptop freed him more effectively than Bond Girl has. This is not hair splitting. Before the BlackBerry, Gary would work on his computer each morning to lighten his load before we left to play for the day. Because the laptop is comparatively bulky and doesn't mix well with sand, sea, and piña coladas, he would leave it behind in the afternoon. But Bond Girl goes everywhere with us: She's in the restaurant and at the tennis court, on the boat and at the beach. On the surface, these family times "count" as leisure time spent together. But in my mind, Gary's not truly in nature if his BlackBerry hitches a ride up the mountain on his hip. If his BlackBerry's at the dinner table with us, then he's not.

Most of us lack strategies for dealing with the seductive power of these new technologies. Bond Girl is an irresistible superwoman: She brings e-mail and Internet; she is an alarm clock, phone, camera, and calendar keeper. The problem with this concentration of power is that she has become too big to fire. In the old days, if Gary needed to wait for a call while we were on the beach, he'd bring his cell phone. But because Bond Girl is also his phone, while he waits for the call, it becomes all but irresistible for him to check his e-mail, too.

Though Bond Girl distracts Gary, he'd also be distracted without her -- wondering when and whether to check in with co-workers and business associates. She does help Gary dispense with important items quickly and ignore the rest. Recently, he took our daughter Danielle college shopping and afterward told me that without his BlackBerry, he'd have spent hours on the phone with work during that precious daddy-daughter time. Because of Bond Girl, interruptions were minimal. What confounds me is that the device that allowed Gary to leave work for this trip is the same one that ensures he's always working.

I decided Gary and I needed some advice concerning Bond Girl. So I called an expert on the relationship between humans and machines: Sherry Turkle, an author and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle agreed that BlackBerrys and similar devices exact a psychic toll: Most of us now feel anxious when we disconnect from the world. She said we're losing the knack for solitude and the desire to "be here now." If we stay in the present, doing just one thing at a time, we feel like we're falling behind.

Turkle doesn't pass judgment on our new technology. "It's not good or bad -- it's here," she told me. "That ship has sailed. But it does pose a question: What are our human values? Is it important to give full attention to whomever you're with or to whatever you're doing, no matter how seductive the technology? I'm not saying to stop using these devices. But we need to be more reflective about their use."

Recently, I sat in on an executive M.B.A. class at the Wharton School, taught by Stewart Friedman. Friedman's course is about the relationship between "work/life integration" and leadership. He preaches about the importance of being fully present no matter what you are doing -- e.g., when you're with your kids, be with your kids. Give your family, your community, and your personal life the attention they deserve, and your work will benefit also.

Friedman asks his students to try a series of experiments related to this concept. Many students, not surprisingly, start by placing some controls on their BlackBerrys. I spoke with one of Friedman's former students, Sam Allen, founder and CEO of ScanCafe, an online photo scanning company. Sam told me that his experiment was to turn off his BlackBerry and ignore work for two hours when he got home to his wife and young son. "At first, I thought this would stress me out even more," he said. "But it helped me focus, and I was rejuvenated from the two-hour break. And my wife was happier." Sam has maintained this discipline while building the company to 625 employees.

Gary and I have decided to try some experiments of our own. He doesn't bring Bond Girl to soccer games anymore. She has been banished from the dinner table as well. Now that I've reclaimed the kitchen, I'm optimistic about the bedroom.

As for my experiment, I'm trying to mentally recast Bond Girl as Miss Moneypenny -- an indispensable sidekick but not one to make me jealous. In case that fails, I've started searching the globe for vacation spots with sun, sand, and piña coladas -- where satellites don't reach.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is a writer married to Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Farm, a maker of organic yogurt in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

When your marriage is hitched to a business, life is one long test of allegiance

Slide into bed with an entrepreneur, and you wind up cuddling with his business. At a certain point, the entrepreneur's spouse has to answer the question: Are you in or are you out? It is a question that surfaces in many forms over time. Are you in? In for as long as it takes this business to succeed? In for what is potentially a lifetime of financial risk? Or are you out? Out of patience, out of tolerance, out of your mind with stress and the bitterness of dreams deferred? The entrepreneur usually doesn't pose the question overtly. Yet the spouse does answer it, by giving or withholding support, encouragement, warmth, and reassurance -- the manifestations of love.

First base, second, or all the way home. How far are you willing to go?

I fell in love with an entrepreneur -- my husband, Gary, co-founded the Stonyfield Farm yogurt company -- before he really was one. The characteristics, though, were already evident. In 1984, Gary was a charismatic, humble-but-cocksure maker and seller of things, though at that time all he had to sell was himself. Two years after meeting him, I agreed to buy all his stock, and we married on a perfect June day. Gary never tried to hide his entrepreneurial nature, and I was too smitten to notice or care. I didn't think through the implications of a business on our life together. After all, the business was only a handful of cows and a few hundred cups of yogurt made per day.

Gary's partner, Samuel Kaymen, had started a rural education school at Stonyfield Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire. Gary was on Samuel's board of directors, and the two decided to convert Samuel's organic yogurt recipe into dollars to fund the school. By the time I moved up to live at the farm, they were selling three flavors -- plain, maple, and vanilla -- to New Hampshire stores. Then a call came in from a large supermarket's dairy buyer, who demanded that Stonyfield supply his stores with yogurt. When Samuel told him that we couldn't produce any more yogurt from the milk of our 19 cows, the buyer responded, "Then get some more goddamned cows!" That was the true beginning of our business.

During the nine painful years it took us to reach profitability, we endured countless disasters, mishaps, and near-death experiences. That meant there were countless times we could have rid ourselves of the misery we called a business. Gary and Samuel were overworked and exhausted but determined to persevere. I never had a voice in the decision to carry on, but there were many moments when I was forced to answer that question: Was I in or was I out?

The truth is, I was out, but I acted in. I believed in the product and in the company's mission to support organic farmers. (When I met Gary, I had been managing an organic farm for a nonprofit.) But I hadn't bargained for the endless stress of an entrepreneurial business. Gary never said or even implied, "Love me, love my dream." And I did love the dream. But there had to be a less harrowing way to save the world.

I was out, but I acted in. More precisely, I gave in. There is a difference between acquiescence and agreement. I was out the night Gary was called into the factory for a machine breakdown at 2 a.m., and the acid in the boot wash ate a hole in the heel of his foot. I was out when he built a new factory with money we didn't have and personally guaranteed the loans for several expensive pieces of equipment. I was out when, as a result of errors in inventory counts, Samuel had to lecture the warehouse and production staffs on the difference between writing 4s and 9s. (Fours are open at the top!)

I was out, but I never told my husband that. I simply couldn't voice my fears to him. He had enough to worry about with creditors nipping at his heels, potential investors laughing in his face, and employees writing 9s where 4s should be. Gary shouldered the great weight of our collective doubt. I refused to openly stand with the doubters, though I shared their skepticism. Instead, I would offer Gary halfhearted congratulations for new accounts secured, batches unspoiled, sales slightly increased. Most of our victories were merely disasters averted. Our bar of success could not have been set lower.

I had my rebellions -- begging my mother not to invest more money in the business was one. Mostly, I surrendered to the tide -- working in the factory and in sales. But my attempts to help only sharpened my doubts. It was plain that our farm factory was grossly inefficient; we lost vast amounts of product to spoilage. Sales calls were depressing; most supermarket buyers treated our low-volume brand as a hassle. Board meetings reminded us that our cost of goods was too high and our cash burn would continue for another quarter (always another quarter). We lost money on each cup sold. So why on earth were we trying to sell more yogurt?

Gary and I didn't quarrel much -- we were too busy just trying to keep the babies fed and the business alive. But after a while, we noticed a pattern. The fights we did have were about stupid things, unrelated to the business, and always took place in the car on the way back from my mother's house in New York. Back then, those trips were our only real vacations (unlike us, she had a bathtub and thermostats), and we dreaded returning to our life at the farm. That dread would convert to bickering on the bleak drive home.

The moment of truth came, as I suspect such moments do in most marriages hitched to a business. I had to decide whether it was possible to declare allegiance to my spouse but turn my back on the business with which his identity had become so entangled.

When we married, I asked Gary for just one commitment: that he never touch the $30,000 that was my father's legacy to me. It was to be my nest egg, a down payment on a home in the (likely) event that the business failed and we lost everything else.

In 1987, we moved production off our farm and began co-packing at a factory in Massachusetts. Without warning, our co-packer went bankrupt. We had three days to clean and relight the boilers at Stonyfield, hire new employees, and buy fruit, milk, and culture. And, of course, we had no money for any of that, except my $30,000. Gary came to me and said, "I need the cash." I couldn't straddle anymore. No weeping or wailing or gnashing of teeth would provide relief now.

In or out? Gary never put it that way, and I'm sure he didn't think about it that way. But that's what it came down to. I'm in, I guess, because you're in, and we're married, and my loyalty lies with you. I'm in, because we have employees and shareholders and customers who expect us to climb out of bed every day and do the entire scary and depressing thing all over again. I'm in, because I believe in your vision of a saner planet. I'm in, even though I'm convinced we're going to lose our shirts and take a lot of people's money down with us. I'm in, because your passion, your courage, your willingness to have a dream and run with it are a large part of what attracted me to you in the first place.

Goodbye, fantasy bathtub; goodbye, thermostat mirage. As I wrote the check, the door of my dream home shut with a thud. In my heart, a plea to my father: Dad, wherever you are, I hope you don't think your only daughter is a fool.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is a writer married to Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Farm. She will be writing a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.

My husband, Gary, and I met about 25 years ago at an organic farming conference. He and his business partner, Samuel Kaymen, a pioneer in organic agriculture, had just started churning out delicious cream-topped yogurt at their New Hampshire hilltop farm. Stonyfield Farm was more a place than a brand then, featuring "seven cows and a dream," as company literature would later romanticize that era.

Gary delivered the keynote about turning the organic movement into an industry. I was in the audience, thinking he was cute. The stars were bright that night, the bonfire lit, and a romance was kindled. Years later, Gary confessed that by the next morning he had forgotten my name and had conducted a surreptitious early-dawn search among my scattered clothes for my conference name-tag. We began a commuting relationship on the now defunct People Express airline, Newark to Boston, $29 each way. Some weekends, he headed to Logan airport from Stonyfield Farm. Other times, I navigated the New Jersey Turnpike, driving east to the airport from my organic vegetable farm near Princeton.

Knee-deep in muck and milk, respectively, we fell in love. Gary had big dreams and a twinkle in his eye. I liked the twinkle -- though I wasn't so sure about the big dreams. But when we married, I also became hitched to his entrepreneurial vision of changing the world, one yogurt cup at a time. I left a job I loved to move to his farm, where he and Samuel were making the world's best yogurt while losing tons of money -- one yogurt cup at a time.

In January 1986, we moved my things into a rambling, dilapidated 18th-century farmhouse, which was partitioned into our apartment; that of our partner (along with his wife and five daughters); the offices for the yogurt business; and the tiny yogurt factory. Donning factory whites and a hairnet, I assumed my role as helpful passenger on my new husband's arduous journey.

We labored in those early days under scowling creditors, mountains of debt, and looming bankruptcy. Business-as-usual consisted of an endless parade of catastrophes: spoiled product, broken filling machines, delivery trucks futilely spinning mud-spattered wheels as they groaned up our mile-long dirt driveway. There was no privacy -- no doors had locks. Our first two children were born at the farm. God knows what the employees were thinking as they vicariously endured my labor pains, which were audible through the house's thin walls.

Our wood stove could not compete with the farmhouse's leaky windows -- my hair would ruffle in the winter wind, indoors. Unidentified furry creatures often skittered over my slippered feet as I loaded laundry in our dirt-floor basement. One winter, when my brother Bob was visiting, the Dumpster caught fire and nearly incinerated our barn, which contained all of our nonperishable inventory. After Gary dealt with the fire, Bob headed up to his freezing bedroom and deemed Stonyfield Farm "a hard place to crash." The moniker stuck.

Even the coming of spring heralded problems. The effluent from the yogurt plant was piped into the leach field adjacent to our bedroom. As soon as the weather warmed, the sickening odor of fermenting curds and whey wafted through our windows as we tried to sleep. When I was nine months pregnant with our first child, Gary and I laid polyethylene tubing through an overgrown field to direct the effluent away from our bedroom window so the stench would not be drawn in with our newborn's first breath. The field turned out to be overrun with poison ivy. I went into labor a couple of days later, my skin itchy and red.

I hadn't bargained for this level of turmoil and stress. Like most people, I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I vaguely knew that I wanted to work to make a better world, which eventually led me to apprentice on an organic farm. I went to ag school and got a job managing an organic vegetable operation. I didn't have two nickels to rub together, but it was satisfying work, and I felt like I was contributing to an important cause. I was thrilled to meet a man whose dreams were similar to mine -- only his were incubating in little plastic cups. My vague desire to heal the world by cultivating one small piece of it was trumped by his very concrete, bold, and much grander vision. I got sucked into his enterprise -- our livelihood now depended on it -- and though I had little input into its direction, I stood to lose everything if it failed.

Gary often quotes Winston Churchill's famous remark that "success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." We certainly became practiced at ricocheting from failure to failure. It's hard to say when we had our darkest hour. There are so many that could qualify. Was it in 1987, when my desperate husband asked me to lend the business the only cash we had left? A year earlier, I had told Gary that we were going to pretend that the $30,000 my father had left me in his will didn't exist; it would be the down payment on our home, if we could ever afford one. But our new co-packer had suddenly gone belly-up, and we had to start making yogurt at the farm again. "I need the cash to buy fruit," he said simply. Numbly, I pulled out the checkbook.

Or perhaps the worst moment occurred the following spring. A large dairy had agreed to partner with us and retire our debt -- Gary had worked with the company for months on a detailed agreement. I was excited and relieved on that day in April when he and Samuel drove to Vermont to sign the deal; in our recently completed fiscal year, we had burned through $10,000 in cash each week and lost $500,000 on sales of about $2.3 million.

The meeting did not go as planned. The dairy executives and their lawyers knew we were strapped and in trouble, and had changed the terms of the deal. They basically offered to run off with our company for a song. Defeated but unwilling to sign on the dotted line, Gary and Samuel got back into their car for the long, dreary trip home -- during a freak spring blizzard, no less. But as they drove, the two men quickly emerged from their funk. Turning on the car's dome light, they came up with a bold plan to raise money to build a bona fide manufacturing plant.

When they arrived back in New Hampshire late that night, I excitedly greeted Gary at the door, eager to get confirmation of the newly minted deal. "Oh, no, that didn't work out," he said, "but for just over half a million, we can build our own plant!"

I wept that night, pressing the damp pillowcase against my nose and mouth to filter out the stench from the yogurt waste still souring in our backyard.

Gary was driven, in equal measure, by lofty vision, desperate hope, and abject fear. He dreamed of each little cup of yogurt serving as a billboard to educate consumers about the benefits of organic agriculture and the power of voting with our food dollar for a saner world. Starting with Gary's mother, Louise, many friends and family members bought into that dream. They invested in our young business, and Gary toiled around the clock to make sure their money wasn't lost -- a possibility that I found deeply chilling.

We joke about it now, but it's true: On several occasions, he tiptoed into another room on a Wednesday night, before Thursday payroll, to call my mother, Doris (an early and major investor), to beg for just one more loan, one more investment -- while I, wise to his midnight mission, dialed her on another line and implored her to say no. In my view, this was money she could ill afford to lose. I was also haunted by the specter of possible changes, profound and subtle, that might occur in my relationship with my mother and my three brothers should Stonyfield fail: How would my mother's financial loss affect her retirement? Would my brothers blame me for jeopardizing her future? Would they blame Gary?

It's good money after bad, I'd say to my mother. The more yogurt we make, the more money we lose, I'd add, sensibly. "Meggie," she would reply, "I'm a big girl, and it's gonna work." They're both insane, I'd think. The two people I love the most are nuts.

I shared Gary's vision, but not his method or his madness. I admired -- and still do -- his passion and determination. I wanted to believe that we could expand this business and make a difference in the world, but over time my confidence faded. The level of risk that Gary and I (along with our partners) had assumed was way beyond my comfort level. We had come perilously close to losing the business dozens of times. Frankly, there were many times I wanted to lose the business -- anything to be put out of our misery.

Gary and I were bound by love and, eventually, three children. We worked all the time, had few friends locally, and were jealous of the saner lives that our old college friends seemed to enjoy. At times it seemed Gary was working as hard as he possibly could in order to lose as much money as he possibly could. We had no savings and lived paycheck to paycheck, but our personal overhead was low; in our remote neck of the woods, there wasn't much to do or buy. Each night, I'd hate to ask Gary about his day, which was always dreadful, and yet my life and those of our children depended on the success of his unlikely dream.

I was no stranger to hard work. At my old job in New Jersey, I had regularly shoveled manure. I didn't expect the white picket fence. But I had to wonder: Wasn't there a less harrowing way to save the world?

From 1983 to 1991, Gary raised more than $5 million for the business, all from individual investors, none from venture capitalists. He raised $1 million in 1989 alone to build the plant that he and Samuel had cost out on that car trip the previous spring. We eventually had 297 shareholders, even though we had never closed a quarter with a profit. We didn't see our first profits until 1992, when Stonyfield's revenue reached $10.2 million. You can do the math -- it took us nine years to break even. Gary and Samuel's gamble on the promised efficiency of the new facility, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, was, in fact, the turning point.

Frankly, I was amazed that Gary was able to persuade so many investors to write a check, given the bleak history of our little company. I'm certainly grateful that none of them ever asked me about my own confidence level in our enterprise. My sense is that they were investing in Gary -- his smarts, his persistence, his commitment, and his confidence. They were also persuaded by the quality of our product (though my mother, Doris, the third-largest shareholder at the time, didn't even eat the stuff).

By 1988, when my eldest child was born, I had already begun distancing myself from the business; I quit the jobs I'd held in sales and as a yogurt maker. By 1990, I had two babies and decided that the best way I could protect my sanity and still contribute to the company was by promoting the culinary use of our product. In 1991, the first Stonyfield Farm Yogurt Cookbook was published. I wrote a second cookbook in 1999.

In 1994, with the company finally profitable, Gary and Samuel were persuaded by a slick dealmaker to set up manufacturing in Russia, with the idea that it would be cheap to backhaul the product to Europe in the trucks that carried goods from Europe into Russia but returned empty. "We had just enough free mental energy to get into trouble," Gary later explained.

Just when I had begun to think that my husband was not so crazy, I found myself begging him not to do something that was patently insane. Gary and Samuel made several trips to St. Petersburg and set up a small facility there. Everything went wrong. Finally, after someone was shot and killed in Gary's hotel while he slept, and an American colleague was briefly held hostage, Gary called it quits. "I lost half a million dollars and my innocence," he says now.

At that point, even Gary started to wonder if it was time to bring in some bigger guns to move the company to the next level. In 1997, he began to hire professional managers in sales and marketing. Corporate people from Kraft (NYSE:KFT) and Harvard M.B.A.s now started to populate the company. By and large, these new hires did not work out, and Gary and I both learned important lessons about the company's culture. I had been vastly relieved to see the infusion of what I termed "grownups" into our company, but now we both came to realize that a mission-driven business requires employees with more than flashy resumés; energy, spirit, and dedication to the work are essential.

After the grownups failed to produce, Gary decided to redouble his focus on expanding Stonyfield. But tending to our 297 shareholders -- constantly answering questions by phone and in meetings and providing financial exits for those who needed them -- consumed too much of his time. (My family owned a fair amount of stock; in those years, our Thanksgivings were more like Stonyfield board meetings conducted over turkey. Pass the quarterlies along with the cranberries!) Gary had avoided venture capitalists (whom he likens to Venus flytraps -- attractive flowers luring entrepreneurs to their doom), but he took seriously the personal obligation he felt to his investors. It was an emotional burden for us both.

Gary started looking for a way to get the shareholders an exit, to give them a well-deserved high return on their risky investment and allow him to focus on expanding the company. He often spoke with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's during this period and eventually soured on the idea of going public after Ben was forced to sell his company. In 2001, when sales were $94 million, Gary sold 40 percent of Stonyfield to Groupe Danone (owners of Dannon yogurt); it bought an additional 40 percent in 2003. The deal, finalized in 2001 after a two-year negotiation, gave our shareholders a highly profitable exit, allowed Gary to retain control of Stonyfield, and provided us with financial security.

But I was mistaken in believing that the deal would bring with it some measure of calm. Gary doesn't reach a plateau and then stop. Financial security was never his ultimate goal. There's always that next venture, that new new thing, that (in Gary's case) will reach more people with important messages about organics or climate change.

After we got some cash, Gary created and invested heavily in what is possibly the only business riskier and more likely to fail than yogurt-making: restaurants. He conceived of and co-created O'Natural's as a healthful, organic, and natural fast-food alternative. The concept is excellent, as is the food, but its fate, like that of all restaurant start-ups, remains uncertain. Gary has poured a lot more money into it than I expected. Once again, I try not to ask. Gary also co-founded the nonprofit Climate Counts, which measures the climate change commitments of major companies. Recently, he has been busy promoting his new book documenting how businesses can make more money by going green. People say they don't know how he does it all, and the truth is, neither do I.

It's all exciting, but I'm a slower, more deliberate, and (as Gary would say) "evidence-based" person. Gary is a consummate multitasker, while if there are more than four things on my plate, the fifth slides off. The person who runs faster sets the pace; usually, I am the one who must adapt.

We still have tension around our differing levels of comfort with risk -- business, personal, and physical (I leave the paragliding and ski racing to him) -- and around the difference in the speed with which we move through the world. His frequent business travel is still hard on our family, though less so now that the kids are almost grown. Still, the life of an entrepreneur's spouse can be quite lonely.

But because we found each other, it's clichéd but nonetheless true that Gary smells (OK, quickly sniffs) more roses, and I hike (mostly mosey up) more mountains. And you'll hear no complaints from me about business-class trips to Paris for meetings with Danone. Our financial success has allowed us to give to causes and candidates we believe in and, most gratifyingly for me, enabled us to create an interest-free loan fund for New Hampshire dairy farmers to help them become organic. My recent pursuits of teaching and writing are more feasible now, because I don't have to rely on them for my kids' college tuitions. And my wonderful mother is thoroughly enjoying her retirement. Miraculously, through it all, Gary has created and maintained a tight relationship with our three kids -- Alex, Ethan, and Danielle -- coaching them in soccer, getting to know their friends, and tuning in to their lives in an intimate way. The kids are proud of their father and of Stonyfield's success.

So with the benefit of hindsight, now that everything has worked out pretty well, what is my seasoned perspective on our entrepreneurial experience? Still crazy, after all these years.

for richer or poorer

About 10 years ago, Gary led a business seminar at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. He told some stories from what I refer to, not fondly, as the bad old days, and instantly the entrepreneurs in the room redirected their attention to me, sitting among them in the audience. Many had tears in their eyes. How did you survive as a couple, they asked? Tales of woe began to emerge: My husband left me, my wife divorced me, my mother's not speaking to me, my girlfriend walked. He couldn't take the financial exposure. She's risk-averse; I'm a gambler.

Our stories had tapped into a gusher.

It's not easy to find yourself hitched to someone else's dream. Gary and I often liken it to riding shotgun on a curvy stretch of road: Rarely does the driver get nauseated; usually it's the passenger who suffers. In getting to know scores of entrepreneurs over the years, I find it's uncommon that both partners are equally comfortable with high-wire levels of financial risk. They know the statistics are against success; most start-ups fail. If the spouse has qualms about refinancing the house or taking out another loan to fund the fledgling business or voices concern about the entrepreneur signing a personal guarantee on a piece of equipment, these worries can be construed as a lack of faith in the business, which quickly transmutes to a lack of faith in the entrepreneur him- or herself. It's personal.

I don't know if divorce is more common among entrepreneurs than others. It wouldn't surprise me. Like many businesspeople in the start-up phase, we led pretty grim lives on the emotional and financial edge. More than once, I longed for my old job in New Jersey, where life had been saner, more predictable, and a paycheck was handed to me every week. Both spouses need to believe in the mission of an entrepreneurial venture, because both people will pay a high price for bringing a new business into the world, no matter what the outcome.

Sometimes people ask me why I didn't leave my husband back then. For one thing, it never occurred to me. He was, after all, still that cute guy I'd met at a conference. On alternate days, I was either infected by his manic optimism or terrified of it. And then there were the kids. And the cause, which we shared. Mostly we just woke up every day and did what was necessary to survive; we were treading water together, just trying to stay afloat. There wasn't any romance to it then, but there is some now, in retrospect.

Today the business is thriving, with $330 million in annual sales. Stonyfield has managed to remain true to its mission of environmental activism and helping small farmers, is the third-largest yogurt company in America, and is the largest producer of organic yogurt in the world. Our kids are teenagers; we have a vacation house. What would have become of our marriage if we had lost it all -- our cash and sweat equity, the investments of my mother, our families, our friends?

I honestly don't know. I'd like to think Gary and I would have kept cruising together, just down a different road. Maybe we would have taken turns at the wheel. But I can't change Gary's nature any more than he can change mine. So it's more likely that had Stonyfield failed, I'd have found myself swerving down that road again, riding shotgun on yet another wild ride.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg lives in New Hampshire. She is collecting stories about couples and entrepreneurship.