Your Job Is Killing Your Love Life

You’re not too busy for love — you’re just exhausted.

There’s a conversation I keep having, over and over, in intake after intake. Smart, accomplished, genuinely good people sitting across from me, or on a call telling me some version of the same story. They’re exhausted. Not just tired. Hollowed out. And when I ask them what’s getting in the way of their dating life, the answer almost never starts with “I haven’t met the right person.” It starts with work.

We live inside a deal that was supposed to make sense. You go to school, you build a career, you earn security, and somewhere in that stability you build a life, including a romantic one. But the institutions that were supposed to hold up their end of that deal have been quietly backing out for years. The universities charging six figures for degrees that don’t deliver the promised futures. The government collecting taxes from people who feel completely abandoned by the systems those taxes are supposed to fund. And the companies, the startups, the corporations, the “we’re a family here” workplaces, asking for everything while offering less and less in return.

When the foundation is unstable, people grip harder. They pour more into work not because they love it, but because they’re afraid. And fear is exhausting to carry into a first date.

The Real Drain Isn’t the Hours

Most people assume work kills dating through time. You’re too busy, too scheduled, too depleted at the end of a long week to put yourself out there. That’s real, but it’s not the deepest wound. The deeper damage is emotional and it comes from something most people don’t have language for yet: work politics.

The professionals I talk to most often aren’t failing at their jobs. They’re actually very good at them. What’s breaking them down is the gap between how hard they work and how little that seems to matter. Skilled, dedicated people are being quietly minimized by administrative leaders who rotate from company to company managing teams they have no real relationship with. People whose value gets measured in metrics no one explained and political capital no one taught them how to build.

That constant low-grade experience of putting in real effort and feeling unseen doesn’t stay at the office. It follows people home. It follows them into their dating lives. It creates someone who either shuts down emotionally to protect themselves or is running on such a short fuse that the vulnerability required for real romantic connection feels completely out of reach.

Managers Are Drowning Too

Here’s the part of this story that rarely gets told: the people at the top of those workplace dynamics aren’t doing much better. Administrative leaders and managers are sitting in a uniquely isolating position. Below them are employees who resent them, complain about them, and hold them responsible for systemic problems they didn’t create. Above them are executives with targets and timelines. And beside them, almost no one. Peer support at the management level is rare. Honest conversation is a liability. So they carry stress that has nowhere to go either.

This isn’t a defense of bad management. It’s a recognition that the work culture we’ve built is grinding people down at every level, and grinding people down is one of the most reliable ways to make them unavailable for love.

The Toll of Feeling Uncared For

What I keep hearing underneath all the work complaints is something simpler and more painful than frustration. It’s neglect. These are people who worked hard, followed the path, did what they were told would lead somewhere good, and arrived at thirty-five or forty feeling like no one is looking out for them. Not their employer. Not their government. Not the institutions they invested in.

When people feel that uncared for in every major part of their lives, asking them to show up to dating with openness and hope is a big ask. It’s not impossible, I see people do it every day, but it requires acknowledging how much is working against them before we can talk about what might work for them.

We Need People to Feel Hopeful

This is ultimately what dating is: an act of hope. A decision that despite everything, despite how depleted you are, despite the letdowns you’ve accumulated, something good is still possible with another person. That hope is genuinely hard to sustain when the structures around you keep confirming that effort doesn’t pay off and vulnerability gets punished.

I’m not in the business of solving corporate culture or fixing government institutions. But I am in the business of helping people find connection inside the reality they’re living; not some idealized version of it. And part of that work is just naming what’s true: the reason so many capable, warm, relationship-ready people aren’t in relationships isn’t a character flaw. It’s context.

The emotional bandwidth required for love has to come from somewhere. Right now, for a lot of people, work is taking almost all of it. That’s not a dating problem. It’s a life problem. But it shows up in dating first, and loudest which is why we need to start talking about it.

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