Relationship-Status and Work-Life Balance Satisfaction: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses

Marriage rates are declining in prevalence in the Western world, and relationship formats are more varied. These significant demographic changes demand new, more nuanced analyses sensitive to relationship-status variations. Moreover, the different groups may have differing work-behavior patterns, influencing and interacting with their work-life balance differently. Thus, using longitudinal analyses of a representative sample of the German population (25,871 observations, 6,280 unique individuals) from the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam) studies, this study disentangles work-life factors and shows their different effects on four marital/relationship-status groups: married people, singles, LAT couples, and cohabitating couples. In addition, four different work mechanisms are modeled here to estimate their separate effect on the four groups: after-hours working, workload, weekly working hours, and meeting colleagues after work. Following this four-on-four matrix, findings show that all unmarried groups are less affected by weekly working hours compared with the married group, singles with a partner are less affected by working after 7 PM compared with unpartnered singles and married people, all groups are negatively affected by workload, and meeting colleagues after work has a relatively positive effect on unpartnered singles. Thus, this study advances the understanding of unmarried people within the labor market.