I'm in this situation now. I'll have a bad day, then my partner comes home and dumps her bad day on top of mine. I don't know to handle it, because if I ask her to stop she sulks. It means I don't care about her bad day.
Oh, THAT part has little to do with profession; my spouse's and my jobs were completely different (or so we thought!), but if your relationship works and you are "each other's 'person'", ranting about work is part of the SLA :->
FWIW, my experience:
- Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win. And it goes beyond work rants; any intimate opening, sharing of concern or anxiety or even admitting past wrongs etc, will impose a burden on the listener. But if you believe or can work it out so that, e.g. "this increased my burden by +10 but reduced your burden by -70, so it's a good thing we did it", it'll help build mutual understanding and trust.
- Show empathy, don't try to solve. Cliche, stereotypical, but a person will tell you when they need active considered advice, as opposed to sympathy and ear. HARD for any of the IT problem solving personalities :)
- As a natural result of first two, you'll figure out who's had a worse day and gets priority; and you'll also figure out how to take some of their burden without becoming overwhelmed with it. Again, if their ask is sympathy not resolution, it's actually a lot less burden upon you than it may feel; or rather, us problem solvers impose burden on us that's not actually there :)
- More personal, but, FWIW... my spouse shared bad stories and rants about their work as a store manager, the drama of customers and supervisors and workers and people and policies etc, for 3 or 4 years. I listened patiently, tried to show support... didn't even realize how much I ingested & learned from it. When I transformed from sysadmin to people manager, after a year I realized that I've been implementing all the hard earned experience, lessons learned, approaches and thoughts she shared. One day, all my work problems were her problems of 3 years ago and it allowed me to succeed in that unforeseen (and somewhat unsought:P) transformation. So as we awkwardly say in my language, you never know what's good for what :)
>Key is to look at sum balance. Yes, absolutely, somebody else unwinding will increase your stress level; but IF unwinding reduces their stress level more than it increases yours (and vice verse when the tables are turned), it's a net win
Disagree here. If the other person is always or even is just mostly doing the unloading that's not fair and you just end up sacrificing yourself to the utility monster following this advice. This isn't to say don't ever be empathetic, but also don't let yourself be victim to an "empathy vampire"
It's unlikely a couple will be able to fully equalize this aspect depending on granularity of time slice: on any given day/week/month, one of you may be in better or trickier or happier or more stressful place at work, with friends, in general.
I agree that if through the entirety of relationship support is strictly one-way, that is explicitly not the way I want my relationship to work (though there are others who do seek a one-way relationship from both perspectives).
FWIW my wife is not in software (urban planner) and when she has a bad day at work it is draining and tough. It has nothing to do with working in the same industry. It is just hard work to be there for your partner and support them. Good luck.
That will not change if you were dating someone who is not a software developer. They will just be talking about how their day organic farming was shitty instead of how their day writing code was shitty.
maybe this is shitty of me but i'm really sensitive to negativity. my wife tends to have moments of complaining a lot, and i've found repetitive but sympathetic responses to complaints helps her realize how much she's complaining and makes her stop without me having to actually ask her to stop. she's even commented some days that it feels like i've said "sorry to hear that baby" about a thousand times. and she's right, I do have days where is say it a ton because she's complaining a ton
