In today’s uncertain economy, job loss, financial stress, and shifting roles aren’t just economic challenges—they can strain personal relationships, often testing the stability of a marriage.
In a recent edition of the New York Times advice column Work Friend, an anonymous inquirer asked for help with a painful work-life dilemma.
Following a serious illness in 2020, the advice-seeker’s husband lost his job. Despite submitting many applications in the years since, and beginning an online degree program, he has not found work.
Anonymous, who is both a graduate student and the couple’s sole breadwinner, wrote that the stress of trying to make ends meet is “ruining my life” and straining the marriage to the breaking point. “I don’t really want to get divorced, but I think about it constantly,” they wrote. “I can’t live this way for the next 30-40 years.”
As Max Read, the advice columnist, points out, it’s easy to understand both sides of this problem: to feel the pain of the husband experiencing the triple whammy of illness, financial stress, and inability to find work; and, simultaneously, to understand the exhaustion, frustration, and resentment of the spouse who is shouldering so much financial and practical burden. And why the marriage is buckling under it all.
This couple is not alone. Ample research has shown that job loss and unemployment are tremendously hard on a marriage.
In the Times column, Anonymous does not identify their own gender, nor directly relate their husband’s illness or job situation to Covid; however, both the pandemic and gender, independently, play key roles in this conversation.
The Labor Market, 6 years post-pandemic
According to an April 10th Fortune article, “Newly released data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that Americans are less optimistic about finding work than they were in 2020.”
March data from The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed hiring is at its lowest since the beginning of Covid lockdowns; and, aside from that precipitous pandemic dip, the lowest since 2014, as it struggled to bounce back from the Great Recession, Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told Fortune.
A post-pandemic hiring surge was followed by drastic subsequent reductions. Now, amid tremendous economic uncertainty, the labor market appears to be stuck in a “low-hire, low-fire” and “low-quit,” “job-hugging” environment, according to SHRM.
In other words, the job search can be incredibly tough – and unemployment potentially long-lasting.
“Today, more than half of U.S. job seekers are spending six months or more shooting out résumés into the void of applicant tracking systems, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Confidence Survey,” Fortune said.
Joblessness, divorce, and gender roles in 2026 — a complex picture
A long-term study (1990-2008), conducted by researchers from Texas A&M University, University of Oklahoma, and Montana State University, found that “both men and women face a statistically significant increase in risk of divorce following a layoff.”
In 2020, as COVID-19 was drastically increasing unemployment, the same team published updated, related research in Econofact – reiterating and reinforcing their findings that “negative income shocks from losing employment can increase stress, impair health, and increase marital strain,” and “that job losses increase the risk of divorce.”
A well-established body of research associates long-term unemployment with an enormous variety of ill effects on the family: poverty, mental/emotional/physical health problems, domestic violence, reduced academic achievement for children, and divorce.
Anyone who’s been through the loss of a job and/or a challenging job search knows how scary, demoralizing, and defeating it can feel. It’s not just about money – unemployment cuts to the heart of how we feel about ourselves, our value, talents, skills, and potential, as well as our roles and responsibilities within the family and society.
A 2018 Brookings study found that, for jobless individuals, unemployment-related severe declines in “happiness and life satisfaction… are due to psychological factors related to losing identity and social contacts rather than the loss of income.” And these negative impacts extend beyond themselves. The Brookings research confirmed that “unemployment lowers the life satisfaction of spouses living in the same household.”
Numerous studies have found that gender – and traditional gender roles and expectations – can influence the effects of unemployment on both the individual and the marriage, but the research on how unemployment affects men and women within heterosexual marriages is complex and at times conflicting.
Many studies, particularly older ones but also some more current, have found that “unemployment is particularly undermining of married men, due to the effects of the traditional male breadwinner role,” according to a 2017 analysis published by the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences. However, as the same article points out, some newer research suggests that “with changing gender roles it is now married women, more than married men, who are vulnerable to self-blame and the emotional toll of identity loss.”
In a 2023 paper, Jarron Bowman, Ithaca College Dept of Sociology, explains that the impact of unemployment on each spouse may be less about gender itself and more “on the ways roles are gendered within couples.”
Sharing the burden
Ultimately, when a couple is struggling through either spouse’s bout of unemployment, it’s crucial for both partners to understand that what they’re going through – as individuals and as a couple – is real, and something they have to confront together.
One spouse’s unemployment affects the well-being of the other because “unemployment can disrupt the social, economic, and familial roles and obligations of both spouses,” Bowman says.
As Read advised Anonymous, navigating a situation like this has to begin with communication: honesty on both sides about the stress (emotional, logistical, financial) and the state of the marriage; clarified expectations; creative problem-solving; and professional counseling, if possible.
“The point of this conversation,” adds Read, “is not to fix your difficult problems overnight (it won’t), nor to permanently solve the eternal troubles of money, jobs, and relationships (it can’t). It’s to ensure that the tasks of thinking, worrying, and doing something about these issues [are] shared between both of you.”
If you’ve reached the difficult conclusion that unemployment has strained your marriage beyond what is sustainable, the skilled and compassionate family law attorneys at SFLG can help you navigate the next steps.
By Debra Schoenberg
