When your partner loses a job, it can be a body blow to your marriage or relationship – but it can also be a chance to re-evaluate your lives. Suzi Godson spoke to couples in the thick of it, and the experts looking on

When my husband quit his job in the City last summer I was outwardly supportive of his decision. The firm he worked at was going under and he wanted to get out before it sank completely. I know he isn’t the kind of guy to sit around, and Lord knows, if anyone deserved a lie-in it was him – he’d been getting up for work at 5.30am since we first met – but even so, despite my best intentions, within a week I was standing over his sleeping body, brandishing the recruitment section and hissing “the job isn’t going to come to you, buddy”. With no reason to get up in the morning, he was going to bed at 2am, but I still had to get the kids to school and meet my newspaper deadlines. Our conflicting routines left me feeling resentful and brought on a severe case of cabin fever in my husband. After our 50th “constructive use of time” argument, he made a list of the buildings he had always wanted to visit and set off on a series of cultural day trips. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, so instead of joining him, I stayed home and did Excel spreadsheets so that I could forecast how long we had left before the bailiffs arrived.

Looking back, I am, at least, comforted to discover that my behaviour was gender appropriate. According to Professor Jackie Scott, head of the sociology department at Cambridge University, women worry more about unemployment than men, and they are also more risk averse. It’s a brain thing. Although male and female embryos both start out with the same basic brain, when the developing fetus is “marinated” in testosterone at around eight weeks, the female brain sprouts connections in areas that govern communication and emotion, while the male brain prunes the cells concerned with communication and grows extra cells in the areas of sex and aggression. The fact that we use both sides of our brain equally (men are left-brain dominant) also makes us better at multi-tasking, but we also tend to be more anxious about everything so we allow issues like unemployment to turn us into neurotic banshees.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE MARCH ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW.