Working from home can introduce unexpected challenges to romantic relationships, sometimes increasing the chances that a couple will think about breaking up. A psychological evaluation provides evidence that when remote workers and their partners have clashing ideas about keeping work and home separate, the resulting stress can foster deep feelings of loneliness. These findings were recently published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
To understand how remote work affects couples, it helps to look at a concept known as a segmentation preference. This term describes a person’s psychological desire to protect their personal life from work-related interruptions. Some individuals have a high segmentation preference. They prefer to silence work emails after hours and keep job discussions away from the dinner table.
Other people have a low segmentation preference. They feel completely comfortable answering a quick work message while watching a movie. They might also enjoy talking about a professional project during a family lunch. Problems can arise when people with different boundary styles share a small living space.
Previous research has largely focused on how flexible work arrangements impact the individual employee. Those studies tend to view remote work as a tool that boosts job satisfaction but creates an exhausting “always on” mentality. The authors of the new paper noticed a blind spot in this existing research. They wanted to know how remote work affects the romantic partnerships that share the burden of these new daily routines.
Alejandro Canek Hermida Carrillo, a research fellow at Imperial College London, noticed this dynamic in his own life. “We were all working from home more than usual during the pandemic,” Hermida Carrillo said. “It then suddenly hit me that what mattered for my experience were less the preferences or attitudes of my co-workers, and more those of the people I was living with.”
He reasoned that an individual’s remote work schedule does not happen in a vacuum. Spouses and partners must negotiate physical space, time, and attention on a daily basis. “Any disagreements could be more pernicious to our relationship when working at home rather than in the office,” Hermida Carrillo said.
The researchers suspected that a mismatch in boundary preferences would create work-to-home conflict. This specific type of conflict occurs when professional demands interfere with a person’s ability to participate fully in their home life.
To test these ideas, the authors designed a two-part research project. The first study involved 170 heterosexual, dual-earner couples living in Munich, Germany. The researchers collected data at two different points during the spring and summer of 2020. This timing allowed them to observe couples navigating work from home arrangements during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Each participant filled out surveys measuring how many hours they worked from home each week. The surveys also measured their personal segmentation preferences and how much work-to-home conflict they were experiencing. Eight weeks later, the participants completed a follow-up survey to assess their levels of loneliness. The scientists used a well-established psychological scale that asks people how often they feel they lack companionship.
The study produced nuanced results regarding how couples match up. When employees spent a high number of hours working from home, having different boundary preferences than their partner affected men and women in opposite ways. For men, clashing preferences increased their experience of work-to-home conflict.
The outcome for female employees was completely unanticipated. “Unlike men, the more women worked remotely, the more they actually profited from having partners with different segmentation preferences,” Hermida Carrillo said. “This was contrary to our expectations, and we believe it might be explained by women being generally more open to learning from their partners than men are in situations of stress.”
The study also looked at couples where both partners had a high preference for separating work and life. When both partners wanted strict boundaries but also worked from home frequently, they experienced increased work-to-home conflict. The authors suggest that trying to maintain rigid walls between work and home in a flexible environment creates unnecessary friction.
The data tracked the emotional toll of this conflict as well. The researchers found that higher levels of work-to-home conflict reliably predicted higher feelings of loneliness in the individual employee. Because work stress drains time and mental energy, employees often lack the emotional capacity to connect with their romantic partner. This lack of connection breeds a sense of isolation even when the couple shares the same physical space.
To build on these initial findings, the researchers conducted a second study using a much larger sample. They analyzed data from 1,561 cohabiting, dual-earner couples from a national German database. This database is widely used by scientists to track changes in domestic life. This second dataset covered a span of one year, starting in 2019 and ending in 2020 or 2021.
This longer timeframe allowed the scientists to see how remote work stress might evolve over an extended period. In this broader sample, the participants again answered questions about work-to-home conflict and loneliness. They also answered a specific question about relationship stability.
The survey asked if they or their partner had seriously suggested a separation or divorce over the past year. The researchers wanted to see if the loneliness generated by remote work friction would lead to thoughts of ending the relationship. Relationship instability is known to cause severe personal distress and can also lower a person’s productivity at work.
The findings from the second study provided evidence that work-to-home conflict has a ripple effect. An individual’s work-to-home conflict increased their own loneliness, just as the first study showed. However, the second study revealed that this conflict also increased the partner’s loneliness. When one person is mentally exhausted by work, both members of the couple feel the social and emotional absence.
This shared sense of isolation had serious consequences for the relationship. The authors found that increased loneliness in either partner was linked to a higher likelihood of discussing a breakup. When remote work drains the resources needed for intimacy, couples tend to drift apart over time. The researchers suggest that this mutual loneliness acts as a bridge between work stress and relationship dissolution.
These findings offer practical guidance for couples navigating modern work arrangements. “Remote work is a matter of, at least, two,” Hermida Carrillo said. “Individuals should consider not only their own, but also their partner’s (segmentation) preferences to decide whether and how long to work remotely.”
Employers can also draw lessons from this research without overstepping personal boundaries. “It is unrealistic to expect firms to have knowledge of their employees’ preferences or those of their romantic partners,” Hermida Carrillo said. “We thus believe that they should continue offering remote work whenever the role allows it and leave it to the employees to decide whether and how much to take.”
Instead of micromanaging home setups, companies should focus on the outcomes of their work policies. “What they could do, instead, is to monitor the extent to which employees experience negative interferences of work in their private lives (i.e., work-to-home conflict),” Hermida Carrillo added. “We studied it in the context of remote work, but it has been singled out as a crucial step linking many other work practices to harm at home.”
While the study offers a detailed look at couple dynamics, the authors note a few potential misinterpretations and limitations. The initial study took place during the early months of the pandemic, when general anxiety levels were unusually high across the globe. The researchers controlled for pandemic-specific changes, but the unique historical context might still influence the findings.
Additionally, the data comes entirely from couples living in Germany. “Mainly our setting: Germany, a country known for valuing a clear separation between work and home life,” Hermida Carrillo said, noting this limitation. “That cultural backdrop may have shaped our results, so as with most research like this, replication in other cultures is necessary.” Readers should not assume that all remote work inherently destroys relationships.
The researchers recommend several directions for future studies. They suggest observing the specific daily tactics couples use to manage their boundaries, such as how partners negotiate shared office spaces or agree on quiet hours. The authors also hope to investigate the psychological benefits of flexible work.
“We only focused on the negative potential for relationships, but recently I have been thinking about more positive, unexplored aspects of remote work,” Hermida Carrillo said. “Perhaps there are conditions that allow remote workers to engage more meaningfully with their broader communities? Or to be more present in their children’s lives? These are underexplored yet important questions for a complete picture in light of the current backlash against remote work.”
The study, “Until Work From Home Do Us Apart? Couples’ Segmentation Preferences and Relationship Dissolution in the Era of Remote Work,” was authored by Alejandro Canek Hermida Carrillo, Felix Bölingen, Russell A. Matthews, and Ingo Weller.