Are you in love with your Work Self? Do you fly from crisis to crisis, stop client bullets with your teeth, hoist massive accounts with one finger? Do colleagues speak to you with respect, laugh at your jokes, let you win–I mean, lose to your superior game at golf?
And then you get home, and does anyone praise you for mastering the universe that day? Noooo. There are dishes in the sink and kids fighting over the Transformer and a grumpy spouse who doesn’t even feign interest in how you singlehandedly rescued your corporation. That joke that killed all day? Crickets.
Ben Dattner, a workplace psychologist at New York University, has this theory. “For many people, the most stressful part of the day is going home,” he said to me recently. “Their most stressful moment at work is better than their least stressful moment at home.”
Something strange is happening here. Dattner cites The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, the 1997 book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, for one explanation. At the office, we’re all about team-building and collegiality and praise. At home, we’re outsourcing childcare and managing schedules and booking dinner as we would a meeting.
This might explain another phenomenon that intrigues Dattner: the office spouse. You know: that colleague to whom you bitch and moan about your boss, who calls to check on you when you’re sick, your lunch buddy. “Sometimes, people in the workplace confirm your greatest hopes about yourself,” says Dattner. “They respect you and appreciate you.”
“Home,” on the other hand, “is much more fraught. At work, if you break something, you can fix it. Things are a lot messier at home.”
So true. In my case, the mess is literal. As some of you know, we’re mid-potty-training right now at the Cullen household. Yesterday I got home after 9 p.m. following a day in which I closed an essay for this week’s magazine, interviewed sources for an upcoming feature, attended three meetings, met my agent, planned the upcoming launch of the paperback of my book with my publisher, oh, and posted a blog entry. King of the world, right? Me this morning: on my hands and knees mopping up pee-pee from the kitchen floor.
I couldn’t wait to come home to work.