My company announced a return-to-office policy a few weeks ago. It's already affecting my relationship with my partner.

"I hadn't always been a believer in working from home. When remote work first became part of my life, I resisted it. I missed the structure of an office, the separation between work and everything else. Home felt like the wrong setting for serious work. Then, slowly, it didn't. I found a rhythm I hadn't expected. Mornings became mine. I cooked real lunches. I thought more clearly."

"More importantly, my girlfriend and I have been living together in London for a year, and we have built a life around being home together that feels chosen rather than forced. I've stopped seeing remote work as a compromise and started seeing it as the better version of my day. So when the email came from work that said I'd have to return to office, it wasn't just a scheduling change."

"The first thing we've had to confront was practical. Two people who both work from home occupy a shared space in a very specific way. That balance had taken time to calibrate. We had never sat down and designed it. It had just formed, organically, around our needs. The return-to-office policy exposed how deliberate that accidental life actually was. My girlfriend still works remotely, so the shift hasn't been symmetrical."

Remote work enabled a couple to build a chosen, daily routine at home that included clearer thinking, personal mornings, cooking real lunches, and a deliberately calibrated shared space. A return-to-office policy required one partner to commute into a structured, commuter version of London while the other remained in the home life they had created, producing asymmetry. Practical arrangements and unconscious divisions of space and time were exposed. The commuting partner feels more exhausted and the couple now must be more intentional about time together, renegotiate household rhythms, and actively design a new balance between work, home, and relationship.

Read at Business Insider