How to Cowork With Your Partner Without Losing Your Mind

It’s tempting to post up on the couch all day together, but it’s not healthy

- Sophia Benoit

As measures to limit the spread of coronavirus ramp up across the world, more and more people who’re lucky enough to have jobs that they can do remotely are now conducting their nine-to-fives from home. As such, lately, there’s been a lot of chatter online about how to work from home effectively. The majority of the advice is the same: put real clothes on, set up a desk space that’s not your bed, and go about your morning routine as though you’re actually heading to work. I (politely) think that’s bullshit: the beauty of working from home’s the ability to sit on your couch in holey underwear while you type up expense reports. But if you live with your significant other, it might not be quite that simple.

Hypothetically, it sounds great – getting to be around your boo all day every day, for weeks on end. That’s probably all you wished for back when you two first got together and were having sex seven times a day. But when your partner excitedly barges into the room to show you that video of the penguins touring an aquarium, which we’ve all seen, interrupting your train of thought for the third time while you try to draft a delicate email to your boss, you might feel differently.

Keith Pandolfi, a writer who’s now working from home alongside his wife, tweeted, “To my wife, who has a much more important job than I do – I’m simply a lazy coworker who always wants to talk about my inner life and what I just saw on the internet while she’s actually trying to get shit done. If I worked for her, she’d fire me.”