Keeping love alive — despite a layoff

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Jim and Renee Fellows, who have been married for 20 years, won’t be going out for a romantic dinner this Valentine’s Day.

Jim lost his job three weeks ago as a manufacturing manager for Pearson Education, a job he held for more than a decade. Renee, who runs her own firm, called ClearPoint Marketing Communications, has seen her client load fall off recently given the economic downturn.

“We’re not going to pay $65 for a babysitter and $65 for dinner,” said Renee. “That’s just not going to happen right now.”

The Fellows — who live in Derry, N.H., and have two boys, 11 and 7 — acknowledge the loss of Jim’s job is definitely creating some stress, but they’re determined not to let their marriage suffer.

“Being the one that’s let go, you feel miserable,” Jim said. “You just have to communicate with each other.”

“It doesn’t have to be diamonds and roses,” added Renee, who says they were not living extravagantly before the layoff. “That’s not what a marriage is about.”

The Fellows have weathered layoffs in the past. But for so many couples, this recession and the mass layoffs that have resulted will test even the best of marriages.

When a spouse suffers a job loss, the strain on a marriage or relationship can cause not just financial but emotional problems as well.

“The romance tends to go down the toilet, not just because of the financial stuff,” said Thierry Guedj, a professor and workplace psychology expert at Boston University. “People just aren’t in the mood to celebrate anything, whether it be Valentine’s Day or their own birthdays.”

Divorce rates go up during a recession
Some studies even point to a higher rate of divorce when one spouse, or even both, end up on the unemployment line. A British study released late last year by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex found that couples who experience job loss are more likely to divorce within a year than their employed counterparts.

As Nobel laureate Gary Becker, a University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economist, told Time magazine in October: “Recessions tend to raise divorce rates.”

This particular recession has begun to hit couples hard.

The jobless rate among married men was 5 percent in January, up from 4.4 percent in December of 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. The rate among married women jumped to 4.7 percent, from 4.5 percent over the same period. Although lower than the overall unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, the jobless numbers among married couples are rising substantially, reaching levels not seen since the early 1990s.

And that’s wreaking havoc on wedded bliss.

Nicholas Yrizarry, a financial planner from Reston, Va., has seen a growing number of couples in his practice worried about how they’re going to survive after a layoff or cuts in pay and bonuses, and many have allowed the worry to impact their relationships.

“The extreme I see are couples who were already overextended with credit cards maxed out and big houses, and now, if one of them loses their job, there’s tension in unspeakable amounts,” he said.

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