If you and your spouse have different work schedules, it can be difficult to find time to be together. Here's what one wife shared with us:
Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash
“My husband and I keep very, very different schedules. And as a result, our sex lives are very rocky. My husband has come to the point where he’s frustrated and almost angry because I’m working and I take care of a two year old. He doesn’t get home till close to midnight. I get up at four. How do we find that area of compromise because I am tired a lot and I don’t want to wake up so we can be sexually intimate?”
More than 15 million, or 16.8% of all full-time wage and salary employees, work nonday and/or nonfixed shifts, that include evening shifts between 2 p.m. and midnight, night shifts, rotating shifts, and irregular shifts. Among dual-earner couples in the United States, one in four includes at least one partner who is a shift worker; this number rises to one in three if they have children.
Recent studies have found that nonday shift-work schedules had negative effects on relationship stability, especially for couples with children. Among men married fewer than 5 years and with at least one child, working fixed nights made separation or divorce six times more likely than working days.
Mothers married more than 5 years and who worked fixed night shifts were three times more likely than day shifters to experience separation or divorce.
(source: "Shift Work, Role Overload, and the Transition to Parenthood", University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Psychology)
If your schedules are very different and there is simply no way to change them, then you’ll need to come up with a game plan. If you have to say to your spouse, “Honey, not tonight,” you’ve got to come up with an alternative that says, “Not tonight, but for sure this weekend” or whenever.
Maybe you’re going to have to put “sex” on your calendar (of course, not where your kids will see it!). Put it in code on your calendar at a time when you know you can give each other your best. Look forward to it and save part of your energy for it. Seem silly? It’s not, because this is such an important part of the marriage relationship.
If you and/or your spouse are concerned about how working opposite schedules is affecting your relationship - and your sexual intimacy - that shows wisdom and that you are alert to each other's needs. In order to guard your marriage in this area, it is vitally important that you find a way to make time for each other.
*For more practical marriage advice, check out The Great Marriage Q&A Book. It's available in our online bookstore!