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Ask HN: If you and your spouse both work from home, does it help your marriage?
For the sake of this question, let's assume that working from home also includes a spouse who is doing unpaid work (e.g. caring for children in the home or other homemaker-type stuff).
- jawns 9y agoMy initial guess is that it has roughly a neutral effect in the aggregate, but that on an individual level, if it has any consistent effect, it probably slightly amplifies whatever dynamics are already present in the marriage, i.e. it helps happy marriages and is unhelpful for troubled marriages. Reasons why it might help happy marriages: It allows you to spend more time together, even if you're not technically working together. You can have meals with your spouse. And it fosters feelings of security, e.g. "If either one of us were to have a serious emergency, the other would be present." Reasons why it might be unhelpful for troubled marriages: If the spouses are working separately but in close proximity, there's just enough togetherness for each spouse to irritate the other, but not enough togetherness that they can actually work on their problems.
- epc 9y agoWe've gone through stretches where we've both worked from home extensively. As long as we've had separate physical spaces to work from it hasn't been a problem, but I don't know that I'd say it "helped" either. It helps to be able to signal "work mode" in some way (door closed, headphones on, whatever). If you both have to use video ensure your network/ISP can support it, have fried some low-end junky ISP firewalls that way.