Does overhearing your spouse’s work calls put you on edge? Me too. I found out why | Sophie Brickman

A couples therapist told me: It can be very shocking to encounter a person you're unfamiliar with, especially if we don't like that version'

Daddy, you workin'?" my two-year-old daughter asks throughout the day, as my husband saunters around the living room in a fugue state conducting back-to-back business calls, AirPods locked and loaded, eyes fixed to the middle distance.

Charlotte turned one a couple months after New York City entered pandemic lockdown, so for the majority of her life, her parents have been around. Work-life boundaries are so blurry that unless Dave removes his AirPods, which he rarely does during most daylight hours whether or not he's on a call, she assumes he's doing da business", as she calls it. When she wants to get his attention - like when he's, say, talking passionately about robots who mow the lawns of commercial spaces and not reading her the book Yummy, Yucky - she'll occasionally take his AirPods out of his ears, put them in her own, backwards, so she looks like she's trying to commune with Little Green Men, then walk around the room saying: Nice to do da business with you!"