Stress and marriage at the end of a work day

After a long day at work, does going home make you feel better or worse?

There’s a new study that shows that women who report being in satisfactory marriages have less stress at the end of their work day. But for women who don’t consider their marriage satisfactory, the stress doesn’t lift at the end of the day.

What’s interesting is that the results were very different for men.

The study is in this month’s issue of Health Psychology. It was conducted by the Sloan Center on Everyday Families, at UCLA. Researchers studied 30 couples. Each couple was a two parent, two career family, with at least two children. First, researchers gave the couples a questionnaire to figure out whether they were happy with their marriages – was the marriage “satisfactory?” Then, four times a day over the course of a week, the couples were asked to answer questions and measure their stress, by testing their own saliva to record the level of the stress hormone Cortisol.

So this wasn’t laboratory work. It was a week-in-the-life kind of test.

It turned out that men’s stress level decreased in the evening after work regardless of how they felt about their marriage.

But women’s stress level decreased only when they were in what they considered a satisfactory marriage.

Rena Reppetti is one of the researchers who conducted the study. She says perhaps – and this is still being looked at – women are more likely to stay stressed because they’re more likely to face what’s sometimes called “the second shift.”

In 1989 Sociologist Arlie Hochschild invented the term "second shift" to describe the end of the day chores of household and childcare most often done by a woman in a two parent working family.

They get home from work and have to deal with dinner, childcare, and housework.

It’s different for men. Repetti says if men are in what they report to be unsatisfactory marriages, they withdraw from the family when they get home. Researchers observed that the men would rest on the couch, or read the paper.

In what women described as satisfactory relationships, researchers noted that the man was sharing domestic duties and childcare. They both participated in household duties and family life at the end of the day. And stress levels dropped for both partners.

It’s basically some concrete evidence that when there is equality in domestic life, sharing of chores and responsibilities, each person in the marriage experiences lowering of stress levels during the evening.