My company announced a return-to-office policy a few weeks ago. It's already affecting my relationship with my partner.

• I loved working from home alongside my partner; we've built an easy routine together.
• But now I'm forced to go into the office due to a work RTO policy.
• Our relationship is different now because I'm more exhausted, and we have to be more intentional.

I hadn't always been a believer in working from home. When remote work first became part of my life, I resisted it. I missed the structure of an office, the separation between work and everything else. Home felt like the wrong setting for serious work.

Then, slowly, it didn't. I found a rhythm I hadn't expected. Mornings became mine. I cooked real lunches. I thought more clearly.

More importantly, my girlfriend and I have been living together in London for a year, and we have built a life around being home together that feels chosen rather than forced. I've stopped seeing remote work as a compromise and started seeing it as the better version of my day.

So when the email came from work that said I'd have to return to office, it wasn't just a scheduling change. It was a disruption to something we had spent months building, a routine that had come to feel like the foundation of everything else.

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

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

The first thing we've had to confront was practical. Two people who both work from home occupy a shared space in a very specific way. That balance had taken time to calibrate. We had never sat down and designed it. It had just formed, organically, around our needs. The return-to-office policy exposed how deliberate that accidental life actually was.

My girlfriend still works remotely, so the shift hasn't been symmetrical. I now leave each morning to head into a version of London we rarely engaged with during the week — the commuter version, the structured version — while she stays inside the life we'd built together. That asymmetry requires more honest conversation than either of us expected.

We've had to redesign things we never explicitly designed in the first place. What do mornings look like now? Who handles what, and when? The small, invisible agreements that hold a shared life together suddenly need to be spoken out loud. That process, still ongoing after just a few weeks, has been more revealing than disruptive. But it has required real effort.

Commuting in London comes with a price, and it goes beyond the cost of a train ticket

The financial reality surfaced quickly. Commuting to London isn't cheap, and the daily arithmetic of transport, lunches, and the small expenses that accumulate when you're out of the house adds up faster than expected. We had saved money by being home — on food, on travel, on the general inefficiency of city life when you're moving through it daily. That buffer has started to shrink almost immediately.

But the more significant cost has been time. The commute is carving hours out of the day that had previously been ours. Mornings that once felt spacious have become logistical, and evenings are now shortened. The long, unhurried romantic dinners that had been a quiet anchor in our week are starting to require more effort to protect. Time, it turns out, had been our most abundant resource when we were both at home. We hadn't noticed until it started running out.

There is also an energy cost that is harder to quantify. Offices are stimulating in ways that are both useful and exhausting. I now come home differently — more depleted, less present. After just a few weeks, my girlfriend has already noticed the shift before I fully named it myself. The version of me that walks through the door at the end of the day is not quite the same one that used to simply close the laptop and call it done.

Going back to the office has asked something new of our relationship

What surprised me most wasn't the logistics. It was how much our new relationship had quietly depended on proximity: a shared lunch, a passing conversation in the kitchen, the low-level awareness of each other that comes with being in the same space. Those things weren't dramatic, but their absence has been.

We are now trying to be more intentional. Dinners that used to happen naturally now need to be protected. Check-ins that once occurred organically require more deliberate effort. It isn't a strain exactly; it's a recalibration.

The return-to-office policy hasn't damaged anything between us. But it is revealing how much of our relationship had been built on the life we'd 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 have only been doing this for a few weeks. Something tells me the real adjustments are still ahead.