Work – is it the perfect bad relationship excuse or the cause of your problems?

When celebrities split with their partners, they often trot out the ‘conflicting work schedules’ line. Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillipe? Too much time apart. Tom and Nicole? Ditto. Johnny Borrell and Kirstin Dunst? You know the script by now.

Yet back in the real world, work can be a handy and credible get-out clause. He says: ‘I never see you these days.’ You reply: ‘I can’t help that. Do you think I enjoy working late every night?’

Yet often, we can help it. What’s the first thing we do when a relationship hits a stale patch? We don’t hurry home, breathless at the thought of seeing him. Instead, we linger on at the office, chatting with the cleaner and polishing the stapler. Later still, we might tumble into the wine bar with colleagues, ‘forgetting’ to call home and explain that we’ll be late. I was so passionate about a job that my ex-partner accused me of having an affair. One night, when I rolled into our flat just before midnight, he said, ‘You care more about work than you do about me.’

Did I disagree? I wasn’t so sure. Yes, my job was coming between us – but only because I was allowing it to. In fact, I was gobbling up extra responsibilities, leaping at invitations for conferences involving overnight stays, even putting myself forward for additional projects that would require weekend working. A friend asked, ‘What’s more important: your job or your relationship?’ Let’s just say the relationship lost.

True, we’re working our socks off these days and relationships are bearing the brunt. A survey conducted by Bupa/UMIST reveals that 75% of managers work more than their contracted hours; research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reveals that, among those working over 48 hours a week, more than half admit that their sex lives are suffering.

Sally, an IT project manager in her mid-thirties, has been single for nearly a year and admits, ‘There’s no way I could have a decent relationship and hold down my job. I can’t scoot off to the car park just because it’s six o’clock on a Friday and I’m dying to see a boyfriend. My last relationship ended because my partner was sick of never seeing me and, when we did spend time together, I would bark a list at him, detailing all the domestic stuff we had to catch up with.’ No wonder she would tumble into bed and emit ‘no sex tonight’ vibes. However, Sally says she would like to get close to someone, ‘because I’m aware that my life is terribly unbalanced. While my weeks are filled with so many meetings I barely have time to think, weekends are empty and seem to stretch forever.’

So why has it happened? Sally admits she has spent the past five years putting her career first, ‘to the point where I’ve almost forgotten how to open up and get to know men on a personal level. I had one, eight-year relationship that went terribly wrong and my career has filled part of the void. But not all of it,’ she admits.

Like Sally, many of us are increasingly relying on work to fulfil our every need. A report by the Industrial Society indicates that barriers between work and home are crashing down and that ‘more and more people find love, friends and sense of community in their jobs.’ Yet work isn’t and shouldn’t be everything. If we’re coming home so late that we’re only fit to sink into a bath and blunder towards the bedroom, there’s something deeply amiss with our job descriptions, working methods or, more tellingly, our relationships.

When I met the man I eventually married, I’d just landed a new job with an off-the-scale workload and 19 staff to manage. Compared to this, my previous job had been a 9–5 teabreak. Yet my partner and I managed to see each other five nights a week; rather than complaining that we never saw each other, he was more likely to answer the door, find me standing there and say, ‘Oh! You again.’ I wouldn’t have dreamed of sloping off to the wine bar with its miserable dishes of salted snacks in favour of seeing the person I cared about most.

A friend realised her relationship was hitting the skids when she found herself ‘making diary notes, reminding me that I should see my boyfriend at least twice a week.’ She observes, ‘If you’re committed to someone you make sure you spend time together. You put that person before work. You might work occasional overtime but not every weekend. No wonder my boyfriend started seeing someone else.’

Work schedules are the modern way to end an affair: kinder than ‘I went off him’, more sympathy-inducing than, ‘I don’t want to settle down.’ And if you find yourself single for longer than you intended, there’s always that sleek, shiny desk to cuddle up to.