How important is the “right” amount of work at different stages of life?

Well said IceCreamMoon, bravo!

I have been mostly lucky enough not to have to work an excessive amount of time beyond 40 hours throughout the years and have had time outside of work.

However now that I am single I actually start to find myself working more just out of sheer boredom. Really I could just watch TV or movies everynight, but that gets old fast.

Haha of course lately I have been putting in almost 60 hours a week because of work just to keep caught up.

OMGosh - Is it 2012 already? The Froggie getting personal? What is going on here??

I’ll start this one with a personal experience: when I was around 25 – when I first started dating – I worked from 6:00 to 5:15 (overtime I desperately needed, and a work-ethic that surely helped me get a supervisory position soon after – I really can not overstate how important those things were, and are, to my life.)

I was also going to school 6:00 pm to 8:45 most evenings. Add in course assignments and some weekend OT, and I did not have much available time.

This appeared to actually help me get women. Now, I admit that I was also expressly looking for casual partners and not a family objective, so that may have had something to do with it.

Yet, I see on this board a fair number of comments from people not wanting a partner who “works excessively?”

I am curious to see some of those comments expanded on with others’ experiences or reasoning? In particular, anyone whose preferences have changed over time; how and why?

Interesting question Froggie!

For the last year and a half I have been in a funk at work. It is quite unlike me.

I have always put in long hours - whatever hours I needed to put in to get the job done. This includes time when I was hourly. I never claimed overtime for the time; I just did what needed to be done to get it done. It paid off in the long run.

But recently I am finding it hard to put in extra hours (whatever extra means - I average about 42-45 hours a week now). Part of that is I don't really need to put in the long hours anymore but a bigger part is that I am burnt out. For a couple of years, my normal work day was about 13-15 hours with probably one day a week at about 18 hours. It was for a horrendous project that needed to be done. I did not mind the hours (I actually did not really think about the time) but the politics of that project was very distasteful to me. And I think that is where my burnout came from - the politics. It is hard to go back to caring about doing a job well when others do not care or when you have lost the respect of fellow colleagues.

But I hate the funk and I hate not caring. I am slowly coming back out of that and getting back to me - the me that gets the job done whatever it takes. New challenges can be a good kick in the behind.

As for relationships and work, though I may work my arse off - I am good at compartmentalizing and I leave work at work. Even when I worked my obnoxiously long hours, I always did so during the work week and very rarely went into the office on weekends. Only on occasion, if needed.

What I don't like in a person - is when work is all that they are. Or when ambition is the ruling force in their life. That does not mesh with me and quite frankly, I have a hard time accepting that lifestyle since I just do not appreciate the objective. My goal in working hard is to do a job well - no other reason. My objective is to have a happy and fun-filled life. Luckily, achievement and success are the by-products of a strong work ethic in a free market society. Let's hope it stays free!

I was much the same way as you explained yourself to be. I worked full time, took a great deal of work home with me, took classes two nights a week, and studied on the weekends. I essentially had no free time for myself, but I always seemed to have a date or something else planned in that very little free time.

When I finally finished my classes and earned my master's degree, things slowed down a bit for me. That's when I took a look around me and noticed that things had changed while I was busy knocking myself out. The majority of my friends were either engaged or married. Those who were married were having families. We had very little in common anymore. And while my job still demanded a great deal of my time since I only work 9 months out of the year, I was finding ways to become more efficient in the use of my time. I had more time free time as a result, but I didn't have as much to do with that time.

My social life took a dive. The men I did date didn't have much free time, and I began to understand why the men I had dated in the past had become so frustrated with me and my lack of free time. I realized that while I admired the work ethic of these men and their desire to advance in their chosen careers, the lack of time available outside of work was taking a toll on the development of any kind of relationship between myself and whomever I was dating. Then I took a look at myself and my past. I now realize that while I needed to get the degree to advance in my career and make more opportunities available to me, given the opportunity to do it all again, I'm not quite sure I would go about it in the same way.

I also paid a price with my family. I was constantly hearing about how they never saw me (yet they were the very people who pushed me to go to back to school when I first brought it up, though I assign no blame to them--it was my choice), and there was a great deal of tension that developed between us. Once I finally finished my degree and did see them more often, they'd make so many wisecracks about it that it just ended up pushing me away for awhile, but I realized it was because I had hurt them because I was never around.

I think that's when the light bulb finally came on for me and I finally decided that while a strong work ethic is important in a future SO, time is just as important, because you just cannot have a relationship without that quality time together. I don't want to be with a man who is married to his job. However, I don't want to be with a man who is gainfully unemployed and is taking no steps to remedy the situation, either. As ICM pointed out, there has to be a balance, because in the end, if all you have ever done is work and work and work, what is there for you when you retire? Loneliness? Emptiness? A feeling of being discontent because you don't know what to do with yourself since all you have ever done is work? I'll still be young when I retire (early 50s) and I want to have some fun, and preferably, not by myself!

So my priorities are different now. I have a good job that I enjoy, I make a great salary, and I am no longer consumed by my job. I'm looking for something similar in a potential SO. Someone who enjoys what he does, who makes a decent living, and who isn't married to his job. Life isn't just about work, it's about living and experiencing, too.

I think, too, that this shift in priorities has more to do with my experiences within my own life than it does with my age or my stage in life. There are people who are older than me who prefer to work non-stop, and there are people younger than me who understood these priorities long before I did. However, I came to these choices at a time that was best for me in my life, and from my experience, that's all that really matters.