Working From Home is Hard. Working From Home With Your Spouse is Harder.
How my wife and I created work personas named Janice & Barbara.
Let’s be honest, COVID has been hard on relationships. According to the New York Post divorces skyrocketed during peak COVID and according to some other source that I’ve since forgotten, divorces were up 34% by Spring of 2020. That's a lot of separations.
It makes sense when you think about it. B.C. (Before COVID,) most of us had secret lives. I don’t mean we had a second, hidden spouse in the Niagara Falls region, but we had a whole work life and work persona that existed outside of our homes or apartments. Work Robin was fun. She loved a 10 am snack break. She was always happy to gossip about the boss or that one coworker who eats other people’s food from the company fridge. She looked for any moment where she could cater drinks for the team, on the company dollar, of course. There are lots more of those opportunities than one would think.
Then a global pandemic happened, and all of a sudden, married lives became a “we’re together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” venture.
Mary and I are not immune from the phenomenon of “Why are you always home?” I'm not saying we’re nearing divorce. Mary never gets to leave me. You hear that, Mary? But things did get sticky with our new setup. Let's say that I learned a lot about Work Mary. Not all of it is good.
I was dismayed to learn that Mary does not believe in using headphones for conference calls. Did I mention she has a pretty robust meeting voice? She also likes the volume of her meetings to be at or around 9000 decibels. That reminds me to set up her hearing appointment.
I’m not saying that I’m perfect. I’m sure my predilection to yell out, “I have an audition now. It’s live and everyone has to be quiet.” While I stand in the living room and try to make the casting director love me is quite annoying. If people aren’t silent I yell out, “Guys! This is my work!” But if Mary wants to bring up more of my faults, she’s going to have to start her own Substack page.
In the beginning, I figured we could sort through our differences by adjusting our desk setups. Mary was working from our dining room table, while I sat in our bedroom on a janky, Walmart desk jammed between our dresser and the radiator. The problem wasn't the setup, but rather that those two rooms were next door to each other. If Mary continued to work out of the living room, I was pretty sure the divorce rate would rise from 34% to 35%.
A new arrangement was imperative, so Mary began paying our son $5 a month in rent to keep a permanent desk in his bedroom. This small change was enough to stave off divorce initially as our son’s bedroom is at the other end of the apartment. But then Mary got a job working for a company in the midwest and my freelancer lifestyle became permanent. Working from home was our new normal.
The never-ending togetherness dragged. Look, I love Mary and she loves me, but I don't think people are meant to be together all day, every day, without interactions with other people. Zoom calls don’t count. If you pull that off, you’re better than me, and I applaud you.
I missed being alone in our apartment. I started dropping passive-aggressive comments into our conversations with Mary like, “I haven’t been alone in this house since the early 70s.” That was a slight exaggeration given the fact we moved into our place in 2012, but sometimes that’s necessary to get your point across with Mary. She doesn't do subtle. When my hints weren’t landing, it bubbled up into an argument while I paced in the hallways of the Brooklyn Central Library. Mary’s a homebody and doesn’t understand my need to be alone. She kept saying things like, “I’m in the back of the apartment. I’ll shut the door and not bother you. Why do you need me to leave?”
All I could shout was, “Because I need it!”
I think this argument between Mary and I is indicative of what happened to a lot of people. Tempers got hot because in our new normal, we’re not just partners, but also office besties.
Something had to shift.
Mary and I chose to solve this problem by creating work personas named Janice and Barbara. I know you’re like, “Wow, this essay just took a turn.” But I'm going to once again ask you to stay with me.
Mary became Janice, the disinterested, creative who works in the back of the office without lights on. I became Barbara who is not the head of operations but has taken on most of the operational responsibilities because our company is too cheap to hire someone. Is art imitating life?
Janice and Barbara started as a joke. I think I just yelled out, “Janice! I’m talking to you.” And et voila, personalities were born. Mary ratcheted up the joke, as she’s one to do, by taking leftovers from our dinner and putting a big sticker across the lid of the Tupperware that said: “JANICE’S FOOD. DON’T EAT!” I nearly peed when I found it. Any time I came back to her office area and said something she didn’t like, she would lean over her desk and yell down our apartment hallway to no one, “Yup. She’s back here! She’ll be right there.” As for Barbara, well, it turns out she is quite crusty, generally walking through the apartment and yelling only a single word, “Janice!” Especially when Jancie is in the kitchen hogging the microwave. Janice counters by regularly asking Barbara why there are no snacks in the company pantry.
We even roped the kids into the madness and made our yearly family holiday card from the “Hop-Tell Corporation.” Our daughter became Maria, the 20-something marketing intern who doesn’t care about anything, and our son became Bill (sometimes Bob when I forget) from I.T. Bill/Bob is always gaming and ignoring all I.T. duties.
Why in the hell are we doing all this? What do Janice and Barbara have to do with divorce rates, working from home, and COVID?
Well, I think it gives us a pressure release valve. We are together all the time. Have I mentioned that? Sometimes it’s fun to just bitch at each other (JANICE!), to play fight, to pretend to be on company outings, and to laugh again.
As a couple, as a country, as a world, we’re in the middle of a very freaking big life adjustment.
If I were prone to research, I would drop a stat here about how life has not changed this dramatically since the Industrial Revolution or the Great Depression. But you know I’m doing that research. But you also know that sounds about right. What is correct is that nothing looks the same as it did B.C. We need time to adapt.
We’re all just trying to get our heads around this new normal. Sure, there are many benefits to working from home or hybrid life. I can cut out from work to pick up my sick kid from school, I can take a morning walk or meet friends for 7 am tennis instead of commuting on the train. Bras are optional for Janice. Barbara believes in the bra but reserves the right to work in a nice(ish) top combined with pajama bottoms. We can slip in the laundry without skipping a beat or missing a meeting.
But I do think we have to be aware of how compressed our lives have become. I’ve lost track of work clothes vs. sweatpants. When I have an audition I’m like “Ugh, now I have to shower tomorrow and put on makeup?” I’m not a psychologist, but I have to believe that not seeing people or not leaving our homes for days is going to impact us in some way. I worry about the young folks who are transitioning from college into the workforce. So many moments of growth or understanding about work culture happen in those moments in the conference room waiting for a meeting to start or on that walk for a 3 pm snack.
We’ll have to all learn how to work around these new problems. We’ll have to adapt. Maybe there will be training programs for young folks. Meetups. Smarter folks than me will need to design and implement solutions to these problems.
What I can contribute to the conversation is Janice and Barbara. To anyone struggling with their new normal, find your Janice and Barbara. You don’t have to be quite as off the wall as creating a fake company and personality, but what can you implement to bring the joy, the fun, and the connectedness to your work-from-home lifestyle?
It’s an important question to ask yourself!
Oh, and for those of you wanting to hear Mary’s side of this whole conversation, I’m dropping a companion audio piece to this story. Both Mary and Janice will get to share their voice. Come back next week for the follow-up!