There’s a lot to love about freelancing. No more boring commutes to the office. No overbearing bosses or soul-crushing meetings. Best of all, you have total freedom over what you do and when you do it.
But while that freedom is exhilarating, it comes with a cost. Freelancing can put a lot of strain on our relationships, romantic and otherwise.
This guide will go over the best ways to balance freelancing with your marriage, partnership or other relationship. It won’t be easy – nothing in life is – but it’s the best way to avoid burnout, make your work feel meaningful and build a happier relationship with your partner.
Why can freelancing cause relationship stress?
It’s hard to fix a problem if you don’t understand it. Before you try to balance freelancing with your marriage, let’s consider how they end up in conflict in the first place.
It takes up your time
Freelancing takes up a lot of your time – often much more than a normal office job would.
The hours you save on commutes get eaten back up by the need to hunt down your own work and strike deals with clients. You have to constantly market yourself and build up a network of contacts to stay in work.
Nobody needs to be told that overworking can damage a relationship. Even with a standard 9-to-5 office job, a lack of quality time spent with your partner can lead to a communication breakdown and simmering resentment.
No boundaries
Freelancing doesn’t come with set boundaries. That’s both a blessing and a curse.
You have the freedom to work as long as you want, but that can easily spiral into never ‘checking out’ mentally. Ever answered a message from a client during a family dinner? Or stayed up late to finish off ‘just one more piece’?
These are clear signs that you’re lacking boundaries.
When this happens, it’s hard to give your partner the care and attention that they need. Even worse, it becomes impossible for them to know when you’re truly with them, or still just thinking about work.
Paradoxically, the fact that you’re still in the house while working can make this even worse.
When your partner heads out to the office for eight hours a day, sure, you might miss them. But what if they’re only a few rooms away, and they still have to ignore you to focus on work? That easily breeds feelings of being pushed away or unwanted, even if it’s not intentional.
Uncertainty
Your partner might also have concerns about freelancing in general.
It’s inherently a lot less stable than a regular job, for instance. If you don’t get clients, you don’t get paid – simple as that. This uncertainty and fear rarely mixes well with a relationship built on trust and honesty.
This is particularly true when you’re switching from traditional work to freelancing. Career changes are always anxiety-inducing, and to someone not familiar with freelancing, it can feel like throwing away something safe and dependable for not much potential gain.
The best tips for balancing your career and marriage
OK, enough sitting around and thinking about our problems – let’s get to fixing things.
The most important way to keep yourself sane as a freelancer and ensure you’re not neglecting your relationships, romantic or otherwise, is to set boundaries. Let’s think about what that might mean in practical terms.
Most of these examples will focus on freelance writing, since it’s one of the most common freelancing careers, and one that lends itself to a contract-based workflow very naturally.
Don’t worry, though – these tips can be applied to all freelance work-from-home jobs, from graphic designers to accountants.
1. Set a schedule
Work to live; don’t live to work!
You should split your day up between working time and free time, and be strict about it. When your work for the day is done, put it out of your mind entirely.
Let’s say you’re a freelance writer: when the clock ticks over, close your word processor, close all the tabs you’re doing research in and put the keyboard away. Don’t even read your work emails or check notifications on your phone – they’re all ways of dragging you back in.
This approach lets you focus on your partner without being distracted by the nagging fear that you should be spending time being productive instead.
You don’t have to do all your work at once to get it out of the way, of course. That might actually be a bad idea: it’s easier to get tired and burn yourself out that way. You’ll then just feel guilty for not getting things done, forming a vicious cycle.
A simple hack for managing your time more effectively is the Pomodoro technique.
Rather than working for hours on end, you work for twenty-five minute chunks, split up by five-minute breaks. These breaks give you a chance to decompress, grab a coffee and chat with your partner.
This tactic is particularly useful for writers. For them, twenty-five minutes is just enough time to get down a few hundred words and break the back of their newest article.
Also, don’t think that you should only set schedules for work. Make a point of planning out ‘us time’ with your partner, too. Treat it as seriously as you would an appointment with a big client – after all, who’s more important than someone you love?
There’s a lot of ways you can spend that time to strengthen your relationship.
You could set aside an evening for a date night. Visit a nice restaurant, see a new movie or take a cooking class together. You could even take a weekend out every month for a road trip together.
The most important thing is to keep it feeling special. Don’t let even the slightest bit of work intrude: turn off your phone, if you have to!
2. Set out space
A common issue freelancers face is that we often work in the same places we relax.
If you’re a writer, for instance, your writing desk is likely in the same room as a TV, bookshelf or other entertainment. It’s even worse if you do your writing on a computer that has access to YouTube or gaming.
This makes it hard to truly separate the two parts of our lives. We only have to let our eyes glance over a few inches to be reminded of that contract we still need to get done, or the exciting novel we’re halfway through.
As a result, it’s hard to keep your mind fully off work when you should be relaxing, and hard to properly focus when you should be working.
In the same way that letting work-time seep into you-time makes it hard for your partner to know how to approach you, this half-in and half-out approach means you can never truly switch off.
That’s why it’s crucial to set physical boundaries as well.
If you’re lucky enough to have a spare room you can use as a dedicated office, do so. You do your work there, and nowhere else. Don’t have a spare room? Consider temporarily commandeering a bedroom, a kitchen table or even dragging a typewriter down to the garden shed.
If even that’s not possible, consider buying a separate computer solely for work. All of your freelancing emails and accounts can live on it to ensure a clean separation between work and pleasure.
3. Don’t be too strict with yourself
As much as we might like to pretend otherwise, we’re not perfect.
Every plan or schedule we made is going to fail at some point, and it’s easy to blame ourselves for that. We might miss the deadline on our next writing project, or skip out on family time to meet with a big client.
But blaming yourself for these slip-ups isn’t constructive.
Instead, it leads to self-doubt and working even harder to try and ‘make up’ for lost time. This just throws your work-life balance even further off the rails.
The healthier way to approach things is to build leniency into your plans from the start. Don’t write out your daily schedule down to the nanosecond, and don’t freak out if your five-minute breaks end up more like ten. Accept that you’re going to make mistakes.
Giving yourself some slack like this is an important way to stop work from becoming something you dread or feel ashamed about, which does wonders for preventing burnout.
It also stops you feeling guilty from taking extra time out to be with your partner. After all, why work if not to build a life you can share happily with them?
Starting a freelancing career while married
The advice so far has been mainly for people who are already freelancers. But what if you want to become one? Are you unsure how it’ll affect your marriage?
Here are some tips for getting into freelancing in a relationship-friendly way.
Communication, communication, communication
Every successful marriage is built on honest dialogue.
This is especially true when it comes to important life events. You would talk with your partner before getting a pet or buying a new car, so you should do the same when considering a career change.
Talking it over gives you a chance to assuage your partners’ fears. You can emphasise the benefits of freelancing to give your side of the story:
- You can work from anywhere, including somewhere cheaper or closer to their family
- You’ll be at home more often, which means more time spent with them
- The flexibility of the job means you can treat them to holidays whenever they want
The specific kind of freelance work you do can also make an impact. Writers, for instance, can often get long-term work writing for the same companies or websites. This level of stability is a big bonus – think about what positives your field might have as well.
Balance your finances
Becoming a freelancer means you have to care about your finances much more than you did before. Changing your job is going to affect your finances, and that means it’ll affect your partners’ as well.
Showing your partner that you’re taking the financial side of things seriously is an important way to make them less nervous about you making this decision.
A good way to do this is to set up a proper budget with your partner.
There are numerous tools out there for making this easier, but the most important thing is that both of you can monitor what’s coming in and going out.
Making it a team effort means they won’t feel left on the sidelines, uncertain about whether or not you’re making the right financial decisions. Instead, they can be there with you and give their input. It’s an exercise in mutual trust: a key building-block for happy marriages.
Take it step by step
The best part of a freelancing career is its flexibility.
You can work as many hours as you like, and that means you don’t have to jump into freelancing full-time. Why not start off small? Many people start with little jobs on the side, fitting them around their ‘main’ job.
Even if you want to go full-time, there’s plenty you can do to prepare before you quit your day job. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve started your journey to become a writer. You can spend time building up connections or crafting a portfolio, long before you take on your first client.
The advantage to this gradual approach is that it lets your partner get used to the idea of your freelancing, one step at a time. It gives you an opportunity to prove you can make a serious living this way, and that it won’t affect your relationship with them.
