Well sooner or later the question had to be asked, the thought acknowledged and our curiosity satisfied. What happens to the sub-text of working life — sex, romance, and intrigue — when someone goes home to work? Rarely mentioned, yet ever present in one form or another, these aspects of human interaction are woven into our working lives. The boundaries inherent in the traditional office environment allow for the mild flirtation, the gentle ego flattery and the fantasy love affair to be enjoyed in the safety of clearly defined place and time zones.
Working from home is a great challenge to us. If we are to enrich our lives by adopting this increasingly popular way of working, if we want to integrate our work and home lives, those aspects of behaviour which harmlessly enough enriched our office working lives may not seem so harmless when brought into the domestic arena.
David and Christine had been married for fifteen years when David decided to become self employed and work from home. They were both delighted with the prospect of spending more time with each other. At first all went well — better than that, it felt like a second honeymoon. The honeymoon period lasted for about three months and then things began to go wrong.
By the Autumn, six months after David had come home to work, not only had the romantic interludes in the afternoon disappeared, but it felt that Saturday and Sunday and many evenings had too. It seemed that it was possible to work twenty four hours a day seven days a week, and that although David was physically alone in his room, it felt to Christine that the relationships he had behind his closed office door were far more important than his relationship with her.
Now Freud knew a thing or two about life and love. When he wrote about the Oedipus Conflict he was writing about the intolerable feelings of pain and jealousy experienced by us all when we feel excluded from a relationship that is important to us. When we feel excluded from a relationship that involves our partner, our most primitive passions can be aroused.
I began this article by referring to the challenge facing us if working from home is going to enrich our lives. Working from home means that we will be no longer able to separate our work self and our home self in the way we have for the past hundred years or so. Perhaps our definition of a healthy Teleworker might be someone who remains aware that his work and his love reside under the same roof.
As a Post Script, I need to tell you that Christine and David did not remain at an impasse; they came to understand their difficulties and so were able to resolve them.
© Pauline Hodson