For better or worse

Sometimes it's best not to count certain things.

Just ask Marilyn and Tom Middleton. They no longer tally the number of times he's been laid off when companies have merged, restructured, or failed. Nor do they keep precise track of the job-related moves they've made - 15? 16?

They're not even sure how many years they've spent working in separate cities, commuting to see each other on weekends. She thinks it's about seven. He guesses closer to 10.

What they do know with certainty is that the job losses, moves, and separate addresses have strained their marriage almost to the breaking point at times. Like many couples dealing with unemployment, they have struggled with economic and emotional challenges. They even went through bankruptcy.

"Our marriage has had such incredible highs and lows," says Mrs. Middleton. "But we've hung in there. Now we're enjoying some of the good things."

"Hanging in there" is a skill more couples are honing these days as joblessness rises. More than three-quarters of unemployed Americans say family stress has increased since they lost their job, according to a new study by the National Employment Law Project.

Last month the unemployment rate rose to 6 percent - an eight-year high. In the past three months alone, more than half a million jobs have disappeared. Nearly 2 million people have been searching for at least six months.

In the first rush of pink-slip blues, a couple's concern is typically financial: how to keep the family afloat. As they settle into routines involving résumés, interviews, and rejections, other challenges may test a marriage.

"Work is so important to men in particular that when they lose that, they lose a pretty important part of their life. It affects relationships," says Larry Flaccus of Lexington, Mass., founder of a job-search group for executives called WeWantWork-Boston.com.

At work, he explains, people get positive feedback. But during unemployment, feedback may be negative.

"It's critical for the spouse to fill in some of the feedback that might be missing and say, 'I still love you,' " Mr. Flaccus says. "But it's also difficult for them." Almost no support groups exist to let spouses talk about unemployment issues.

Those issues can include loneliness, a lack of communication, changes in the balance of power, housework, too much togetherness, and not enough money.

When the Middletons exchanged wedding vows in 1970, the promise to stay together "for richer, for poorer; for better, for worse" seemed easy enough to make. Love conquers all, right?

That's the fairy-tale version. What they hadn't counted on was unemployment. In 1987, the company where Mr. Middleton worked merged with another companyand laid off 95 percent of its staff. The couple had just bought a "dream house," and their two daughters were attending private school.

"It was devastating," he says. "You ask yourself, How am I going to provide for my family, a role I take very seriously?"

His wife remembers it as "a really rough time for us as a couple. You just don't think anything like that can ever happen to you."

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