This former couple says splitting up saved their pizza company. Here's why they and others found running a business with your ex doesn't have to be a nightmare.

• Working together after a break-up can be surprisingly successful, couples told Insider.
• For one pair who run a pizza business, getting divorced was the key to thriving professionally.
• For another, selling coffee helped rekindle their failed romance.

Cheese shortages might have been the final straw for Alex Wagner and Arwen Chen's marriage.

In March 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days by the container ship Ever Given, causing huge international shipping delays. This led to major cheese shortages in Wagner and Chen's hometown in Taiwan, which imports most of its dairy products.

"We're in the pizza business, so that brought a lot of stress," said Wagner.

Wagner, 38, moved from Wisconsin to Taiwan in 2010 and soon started dating Chen, 33.

From the beginning, their relationship centered on work. "We weren't that romantically compatible," Wagner said. "We just worked well together."

They launched Slice N' Dice, a pizza-by-the-slice business, at a night market in Taipei in early 2012.

Chen and Wagner got married in 2015. Wagner said that while the marriage was, for the most part, "good, steady, and easy," it "didn't have a lot of the other things that you'd expect in a romantic relationship."

Several years later, Chen gave birth to the couple's child. At around the same time, they expanded their business into a frozen-pizza factory. Ultimately, Wagner and Chen said, this new venture — and the resulting professional challenges, like 2021's cheese shortages — was "probably what got us divorced."

Since Wagner doesn't speak Chinese, Chen had to take on a lot of vital tasks like negotiating loans, managing staff, and coordinating with local authorities. This put a strain on romance.

"Professional problems definitely affected our relationship," said Chen. "Our marriage just wasn't built to survive doing something on such a large and professional scale," added Wagner.

When you run a business with your partner, it can be easy to let personal problems spill into your professional life — and vice versa.

Wagner and Chen divorced in 2021. Since then, their communication has improved significantly. They even hold weekly meetings to discuss their business and their child. "It's more relaxing than before," said Chen. "We actually speak now," said Wagner. 

Wagner said he used to "take offense" when Chen didn't share his visions for the business, because he felt they should be collaborating as a couple. "Now I can just let it roll off my back," he said.

He's glad to have salvaged — and even improved — his professional relationship with Chen.

"It would've been terrible if I'd destroyed this relationship, which works so well for our business, because I was all butt-hurt about the divorce," he said.

Cynthia Price and Bernadette Sebastiani's experience is the inverse of Wagner and Chen's. They started their small business as ex-girlfriends but found that working together professionally helped reignite their romance.

Price, 48, and Sebastiani, 56, launched Blue Oak Coffee Roasting in Bakersfield, California, in 2015. They'd broken up a few months earlier but maintained a strong friendship.

Shortly after the breakup, Sebastiani had a spinal-cord injury in a workplace accident and ended up needing extensive support. Price tried to step up and help — but it was tough on them both. "We were working in the entertainment industry, and it's very unforgiving about time off," she told Insider.

They started brainstorming new ideas for making money. "We'd roasted coffee as a hobby for years," Price said. "So I was like, let's sell it at a farmers market."

That idea turned out to be popular — and Blue Oak grew into a full-time business.

Price said that running a business with her ex-girlfriend "definitely" brought certain challenges. Some resentment spilled over from the failed romance and old disputes resurfaced. "One of the biggest issues we'd had when we were together was that I always ended up being the person that cleaned the house, Price said. "When we got the business, it initially fell to me too."

But launching Blue Oak ultimately helped Price and Sebastiani make their relationship more harmonious. "When we were together, we were arguing a lot because we're very opposite people," said Price. "But in the business, that's really helped."

"Cynthia literally stopped and took a different course in her life to take care of me, when she certainly was not obligated to do that," said Sebastiani. "So, despite our initial growing pains of working together, there was, and still is, an undercurrent of being so grateful."

Price said Sebastiani is a "people person" who can charm customers, while she is a "cautious planner" who carefully manages Blue Oak's finances.

The business also offered a powerful imperative for the ex-couple to overcome their communication challenges, since their livelihoods depended on their ability to cooperate.

Sebastiani and Price rekindled their romantic relationship shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19. They got married last Christmas Eve — more than seven years after their initial breakup.

"We finally realized that even though we come at things from the opposite direction, we're trying to get to the same conclusion," Price said.

"It took all those years of running the business together to figure that out."