My company announced its back-to-the-office policy a few weeks ago. It’s really affecting my relationship with my partner.

I haven’t always been a believer in working from home. When remote work first became a part of my life, I resisted it. I missed the structure of the office, the separation between work and everything else. Home seemed like the wrong place to work hard.

Then, slowly, it didn’t happen. I found a rhythm I didn’t expect. The morning is mine. I cooked real lunches. I thought more clearly.

Most importantly, my girlfriend and I have been living together in London for a year and have built a life around being at home together that feels like a choice, not a coercion. I stopped seeing remote work as a compromise and started seeing it as the best version of my day.

So when I got the email from work saying I had to return to the office, it wasn’t just a schedule change. It was a disruption of something we had spent months building, a routine that had come to feel like the foundation of everything else.

It’s only been a few weeks since the announcement, and almost nothing has been the same — especially my relationship.

My partner and I worked from home, so we had to rethink everything

The first thing we had to face was practicality. Two people working from home occupy a shared space in a very specific way. This balance has taken time to calibrate. We never sat down and designed it. It just formed, organically, around our needs. The return-to-office policy revealed just how intentional that casual life was.

My girlfriend is still working remotely, so the transition hasn’t been the same. I now leave every morning for a version of London we rarely encounter during the week – the commuter version, the structured version – while remaining within the life we ​​have built together. This asymmetry requires a more honest conversation than any of us expected.

We’ve had to redesign things that we didn’t explicitly design in the first place. What does the morning look like now? Who deals with what and when? The small, invisible agreements that bind shared lives together suddenly need to speak out loud. This process, which is still ongoing after only a few weeks, has been more revealing than devastating. But it required real effort.

Getting around in London comes at a price, and it goes beyond the cost of a train ticket

The financial reality quickly set in. Commuting to London isn’t cheap, and the daily bills of transport, lunches and small expenses that pile up when you’re away from home add up faster than expected. We’ve saved money by being at home – on food, on travel, and on the general inefficiency of city life when we commute there every day. This buffer began to shrink almost immediately.

But the most important cost was time. Commuting is taking hours away from the day we once had. Mornings that once seemed spacious have become logistical, and evenings are now shorter. The long, late, romantic dinners that had been such a peaceful anchor to our week were starting to require more effort to protect. It turns out that time was our most abundant resource when we were at home. We didn’t notice it until it started running out.

There is also the cost of energy, which is difficult to measure. Offices are stimulated in both beneficial and stressful ways. I now come home different, more exhausted and less present. Just a few weeks later, my girlfriend noticed this transformation before I called it all my own. My version of walking through the door at the end of the day isn’t quite the same as the one used to simply shut the laptop down and be done with it.

Going back to the office asked something new from our relationship

What surprised me most wasn’t the logistics. It was about how much our new relationship depended quietly on proximity: a shared lunch, a casual conversation in the kitchen, the low awareness of each other that comes with being in the same place. Those things weren’t dramatic, but their absence was.

We are now trying to be more intentional. Dinners that used to occur naturally now need to be protected. Check-ins that were once done organically require more intentional effort. It’s not exactly a breed. It’s a recalibration.

The back-to-office policy hasn’t hurt anything between us. But it reveals how much of our relationship was built on the life we ​​created around being home. Losing some of that structure forced us to be more conscious about what we actually wanted, and more honest about what we weren’t willing to give up.

We’ve only been doing this for a few weeks. Something tells me the real adjustments are still ahead.

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