“Hard work doesn’t cover grief, loneliness, lost friendships, and postponed joy” has the ring of something true without a clear mechanism attached to it. A specific study on working couples gives that idea a concrete, measurable pathway, tracing exactly how overwork drains something a relationship needs, and how that shortfall doesn’t stay contained to the person working too much.
The research is a 2009 study by Arnold Bakker, Evangelia Demerouti, and Ronald Burke, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. The researchers surveyed 168 dual-earner couples in the Netherlands, all parents of young children, recruited through daycare centers so that both partners in each couple could be reached. Each partner independently completed questionnaires measuring their own workaholism, using a validated compulsive-tendencies subscale, along with their experience of work-family conflict, how much support they felt from their partner, and how satisfied they were with the relationship overall. The results, analyzed using structural equation modeling, traced a specific chain of effects. Workaholism strongly predicted work-family conflict for both men and women. That conflict, in turn, predicted a real drop in the social support their partner reported receiving from them. Statistically, the researchers found that work-family conflict fully explained this connection, meaning it wasn’t workaholism directly making someone a less supportive partner. The effect worked entirely through the conflict that overwork generated between someone’s job and their home life. That reduced support then predicted lower relationship satisfaction. And in a detail worth sitting with, the researchers found a direct crossover effect between partners: one person’s relationship satisfaction was significantly tied to their partner’s own satisfaction, meaning the strain didn’t stay confined to the person who was overworking. It measurably spread to the partner too.
A separate line of research on relationships more broadly helps explain why this pathway makes sense mechanically. A 2019 study by Jeffrey Hall, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, tracked real relationships as they formed and found that closeness accumulates specifically through hours spent together, roughly 50 hours to become casual friends and more than 200 to become close ones. The detail that connects most directly to the Bakker findings is what kind of hours counted. Time spent working alongside someone contributed far less to that total than relaxed, unhurried time spent together did. Taken alongside the couples research, a consistent picture emerges: closeness in a relationship, romantic or otherwise, runs on a specific resource, time and attention with nothing else competing for it, and a demanding relationship with work draws directly from that same limited resource without offering anything comparable back to the relationship in its place.
It’s worth being direct about where this research is more limited than the tidy version of the story suggests. Bakker and colleagues’ sample was specific: Dutch dual-earner parents of children under three, recruited through daycare centers, a demographic and cultural context that may not generalize cleanly to single people, couples without children, or workplace cultures very different from the Netherlands in the mid-2000s. Their study was also cross-sectional, measuring everyone at a single point in time rather than following couples over years, which makes the mediation pattern they found consistent with a causal story but not fully proof of one on its own. All of the measures relied on self-report, which means the findings describe how partners perceived their own conflict, support, and satisfaction rather than some independently verified account of it. Hall’s friendship research, similarly, relied on participants estimating their own hours rather than objectively tracked time, and it examined new relationships forming rather than existing marriages under strain.
Within those limits, what the research offers is a more specific and more useful account than the general sense that “work gets in the way.” The damage, according to Bakker and colleagues’ data, doesn’t come from hours worked in some direct sense. It comes from the conflict overwork creates between someone’s job and the rest of their life, which quietly reduces the support they have left to give the people closest to them, and that reduction, the data suggests, doesn’t stay with the person working too hard. It reaches the people waiting for them at home too.