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When Work Comes Home: Remote Work and theRelationships We Live In


By Rob Krupicka, MSW


If you work from home, or live with someone who does, you are already navigating

something that has no clear precedent in most of our families' histories. The commute

that once created a transition is gone. The office that separated professional from

personal identity no longer exists in the same way. For some area families this has been

a genuine gift. For others, it has created quiet pressures that are easy to underestimate

and surprisingly hard to name.

As a therapist, I have seen both. I work with families who feel genuinely more connected

since remote work became the norm, parents who now catch school drop-off, couples

who now can share lunch. I also work with families where the overlap of work and home life has

introduced a new kind of friction: the partner who is technically present but

unreachable, the spouse who can never quite leave the office, the household where the

rhythms of work and family have never been explicitly negotiated and are beginning to

show strain.

What the research tells us is worth knowing.

The benefits are real.

Studies find that remote work can meaningfully reduce work-family conflict,

particularly when it comes with genuine flexibility and autonomy over one's own

schedule (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; Shin, 2025). Eliminating a daily commute

returns real time to families. A 2024 paper from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

found that fully remote couples work fewer total hours than onsite couples, suggesting

that remote arrangements can, under the right conditions, create more room for shared

life ( Pabilonia & Vernon, 2024 ).

The challenges are also real, and often underappreciated.

A consistent finding in the research literature is that remote work blurs the physical,

temporal, and psychological boundaries that help people transition between roles (Allen

et al., 2021; Garcia-Salirrosas et al., 2023). Without the spatial and scheduling cues that

once marked the end of the workday, many remote workers find it genuinely difficult to

stop working, a phenomenon researchers call boundary permeability. Pre-pandemic

remote work tended to increase workers' autonomy and flexibility, whereas pandemic

conditions made boundary management difficult and led to negative spillover between

work and non-work domains (Mincarone et al., 2025). That spillover does not stay

abstract. It lands on the dinner table and in the living room.

A longitudinal study of newlywed couples found that elevated workload at one point in

time predicted declines in a partner's relationship satisfaction six months later, a

crossover effect in which one person's work stress becomes the other person's relational

experience (Lavner et al., 2017). Research on dual-earner couples found that when one

partner completed more work tasks at home, they perceived greater work-interfering-

with-family conflict, which led to increased withdrawal from family and feelings of guilt

(Hu et al., 2023). These are rarely dramatic ruptures. They are the quiet accumulations

of distraction, irritability, and unavailability that couples often struggle to name until

they have been building for a while.

An "always on" expectation, combined with concerns about productivity and job

security, can lead remote workers to blur the work and family domains in ways that are

particularly difficult for couples with children (Brumley et al., 2024). When one

partner's work demands intensify inside the home, household labor and caregiving often

redistribute unevenly, which adds a layer of relational strain on top of the availability

problem. This can feel less like a single argument and more like a slow accumulation of

small grievances that are difficult to address because nothing feels quite serious enough

to raise.

What does this mean, practically?

The first thing I would encourage is simply noticing. Is working from home creating

pressure in your relationship that has never been directly named? Are there patterns,

interruptions at predictable times, irritability at the end of the day, a sense that your

partner is present but not quite available, that have become normalized but are worth

examining? Naming a pattern is not the same as solving it. It is usually, though, the

necessary first step.

The research on boundary management is worth paying attention to. When the

boundaries between work and home life are well defined, it becomes easier to keep these

two segments of life separate, and the positive associations between flexible work

arrangements and overall balance are stronger when clear structures are in place

(Garcia-Salirrosas et al., 2023). In practice, this might look like a designated workspace

that is genuinely closed at the end of the day. It might mean agreed-upon times when

interruptions are off-limits. It might mean a brief, deliberate transition ritual that

signals, for both partners, that work has ended. These are not rigid rules imposed from

outside. They are structures that couples design together, and the process of designing

them is often as valuable as the agreements themselves.

Protecting time that belongs fully to your relationship is worth the effort. Research using

the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation model found that spending quality time with family

members and maintaining a sense of balance between work and family were among the

most effective adaptive processes for maintaining relationship quality under work-from-

home conditions (Wu et al., 2022). Connection requires intention and space. Space does

not appear automatically in an arrangement where work and home share a floor plan. It

may be worth asking yourself, what are you doing to prioritize and engage with your

family members each day?

If you and your partner have never explicitly talked about what remote work looks like

in your household, it may be worth doing so now. It is common for people to absorb new

arrangements without ever discussing them, operating on assumptions that have never

been tested and expectations that have never been spoken. Couples who perceived that

changes in shared time were creating stress fared better when they actively processed

that stress together rather than managing it separately (Derbyshire & Stanton, 2023).

The conversation itself, what each person needs, what is not working, what would help,

is often more valuable than any specific outcome it produces.

Working from home is a part of our lives now. The question is not whether it creates

challenges. It is whether those challenges are being seen, named, and worked with

together. There are real, hard consequences to your partner and your kids to not talking

about it.


References

Allen, T. D., Merlo, K., Lawrence, R. C., Slutsky, J., & Gray, C. E. (2021). Boundary

management and work-nonwork balance while working from home. Applied Psychology,


Brumley, K. M., Montazer, S., Pineault, L., Maguire, K., & Baltes, B. (2024). Remote work and

work-family conflict during COVID-19: Individual and crossover effects among dual-

earning couples. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 10,1-19.


Derbyshire, K., & Stanton, S. C. E. (2023). Love under lockdown: How changes in time with

partner impacted stress and relationship outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 40(9), 2918-2945.


Gajendran, R. S., & Harrison, D. A. (2007). The good, the bad, and the unknown about

telecommuting: Meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(6), 1524-1541. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-

9010.92.6.1524


Garcia-Salirrosas, E. E., Rondon-Eusebio, R. F., Geraldo-Campos, L. A., & Acevedo-Duque, A.

(2023). Job satisfaction in remote work: The role of positive spillover from work to family

and work-life balance. Behavioral Sciences, 13(11), 916.


Hu, X., et al. (2023). How working from home affects dual-earner couples' work-family

experiences. Journal of Applied Psychology.Summary via Society for Industrial and

2023-how-working-from-home-affects-dual-earner-couples-work-family-experiences/


Lavner, J. A., Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (2017). Workload and marital satisfaction over

time: Testing lagged spillover and crossover effects during the newlywed years. Journal

of Family Psychology.PMC open access.


Mincarone, P., Leo, C. G., Fusco, S., et al. (2025). Mental health and social relationships shape

the work-from-home experience: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in


Pabilonia, S. W., & Vernon, V. (2024). Couples' remote work arrangements and labor supply.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic Working PaperWP-581.


Shin, J. (2025). Impact of telework on job satisfaction and work-family conflict: Insights from

Japan and Korea. SAGE Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440251342349


Wu, Y., Song, D., Proctor, R. W., & Chen, A. Y. Y. (2022). Family relationships under work from

home: Exploring the role of adaptive processes. Frontiers in Public Health, 10,782217.


River Grove Therapy • Alexandria, Virginia • RKrupicka@rivergrovetherapy.com

 
 
 

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