This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mojo and Zainab Joyo, owners of Elaichi Co. It has been edited for length and clarity.
A few years ago, I found myself missing a very specific piece of my childhood: sitting in chai cafés in Pakistan with my cousins. We’d be together, late at night, sharing stories and enjoying quality time together — and chai was at the center of it.
I wanted to recreate that feeling, especially after the social isolation of the pandemic. My wife Zainab and I talked about how to do that, and finally, in 2024, we had the courage to open Elaichi Co., a chai café in Berkeley.
At first, we were both working full-time while running the company. Zainab, especially, felt a lot of social pressure to hold onto a stable job. But when she was laid off in November 2024, we decided she would work at Elaichi full-time, while I continued with my day job.
I felt like I was living with my business partner, not my wife
Zainab was wearing many hats: marketing, events, HR, inventory, and more. When I got home, she’d fill me in on everything I needed to know about. It wasn’t long before we realized that about 95% of our conversations were about the business. That wasn’t what we wanted.
Finding the right tech tools helped some. We were able to get quick insight into our finances without getting into the weeds when we started using the fintech company, Mercury. Yet tools alone weren’t enough.
We had only been married a few years, but Zainab wasn’t getting the emotional support she needed from her husband, and I felt like I was living with my business partner, not my wife. Business kept getting in the way of our relationship, so we decided to make a shift.
We made the bedroom and dining room business free zones
Both of us found it frustrating to lie in bed at night, only to have the other person bring up a business question. We decided to designate certain areas of the house for personal talk only, not for business. The bedroom and dining room were spaces for our relationship.
It sounded great in theory, but it was inevitable that someone would bring business up when it popped into their head. If Zainab asked me a business question and I reminded her about our rule — no business talk in bed — she’d just be even more frustrated.
We abandoned this approach within a week.
Designating family days didn’t work well either
Next, we tried blocking off certain days of the week for family time. Saturday night was for us as a couple, and Sundays were for extended family. This worked much better, and we were able to stick with it for about three months.
As the owners, however, we were always on call. If an employee called out or there was a big event, we needed to be there. It was hard to maintain the rhythm of family days when we were constantly being thrown off.
We stopped fighting against business talk
Everything came to a head about a year ago. We went to Puerto Vallarta for Zainab’s 30th birthday. It should have been a great trip with just the two of us, but we felt disconnected throughout. We didn’t like that we were still unhappy with how our relationship was going, despite trying different solutions. Neither our marriage nor our business was going to succeed unless something changed.
Once we got back, we shifted from talking about our rules to thinking about why we were using them. We realized we were trying to fit into other people’s ideas of what makes a good relationship.
We really enjoy running our business together, and we realized that if we were having fun talking about Elaichi, that was OK. We don’t have to force ourselves to have a business-free night out together if we’re actually really excited about working on a new business project together. Fighting against that had actually been making our work-life balance harder.
I’m doing business with my life partner
This year, we’ve had more fluid boundaries between our marriage and our business partnership. We focus on what we want to do together, rather than on arbitrary boundaries that we thought we needed. If we want to have a date night, we do; but we also sometimes talk about business at the dinner table, because it’s something we’re both passionate about.
That’s defused a lot of tension, and we’re able to communicate with each other quickly and more honestly. We have a level of trust and understanding that we don’t have with anyone else.
Today, I no longer feel like I’m living with my business partner; I feel I’m doing business with my life partner. That’s a much better approach.
