If you’ve ever watched a partner’s phone light up at nine at night with a shift that just got moved to six the next morning, you already know how that feels in the moment — annoying, disruptive, one more thing to shuffle around. What you probably don’t know is that researchers just measured what all that shuffling does to a relationship over time, and the number is hard to shake. Married couples with the steadiest schedules were still together 94 percent of the time roughly nine months later. Couples where a partner worked the most chaotic hours had dropped to 82 percent — a 12-point plunge — according to a new study of nearly 7,000 hourly service workers published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
The Study Behind the Headline
The paper, titled “Predictably Unstable?: Precarious Work and Precarious Relationships in the U.S.”, comes from sociologist Kristen Harknett at UC Berkeley along with Kevin Bruey and Elizabeth Kuhlman, and draws on longitudinal survey data collected by the Shift Project between 2019 and 2024. The team followed 6,918 hourly retail and food-service workers who were married or living with a partner, then checked back in roughly nine months later to see who was still together.
Instead of just asking whether someone had a job, the researchers asked something more specific: how predictable was the job? They built a five-point instability score out of conditions that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked retail or food service — being placed on call, having a shift canceled outright, getting the timing of a shift changed at the last minute, receiving a schedule with less than two weeks’ notice, and pulling a “clopening,” closing the store late at night and reopening it again a few hours later. Workers scoring a 4 or 5 on that scale were living through what the researchers classify as high schedule instability.
Why Men’s Unstable Schedules Hit Harder
One of the study’s more surprising findings is that the effect isn’t symmetrical. When a woman in a marriage had the most unstable schedule, her odds of still being married nine months later dropped by about 4 percentage points. When a man had that same level of instability, the drop was roughly three times larger — about 12 percentage points.
The researchers tie that gap to how unpredictable scheduling still collides with a lingering idea of what men are supposed to provide. As the study’s authors put it, the demands of contemporary low-wage work, built around an “ideal worker” norm, are at odds with the maintenance and stability of marital and cohabiting unions. In plain terms, a schedule that ping-pongs by the week or the day doesn’t just complicate the calendar. It complicates a relationship’s sense of who can be counted on, and when — and that expectation still tends to land more heavily on men.
It Isn’t Just the Paycheck
You could reasonably assume this is really a story about money — that unstable schedules just mean unstable income, and unstable income is what strains couples. The researchers checked for that. Their models controlled for hourly wage, education, race, age, parental status, and a partner’s employment, and the schedule effect held anyway.
Then they went a step further. Because a worker’s own account of schedule chaos might be tangled up with other things going on in the relationship, the team built a second, predicted instability score based only on factors outside anyone’s control — employer, job tenure, age, and education, with no input at all about how the relationship was going. That predicted score still tracked with a higher chance of splitting up, which is a strong signal that the arrow runs from the schedule to the relationship, not the other way around.
Cohabiting Couples Feel It Sooner
Married couples generally needed to hit the top instability bracket — four or five unstable conditions — before the risk clearly showed up. Cohabiting couples didn’t get that cushion. Couples living together without being married saw their odds of staying together start slipping at just three types of instability, and their baseline was already lower: 87 percent still together on stable schedules, dropping to 75 percent under high instability. A less legally and financially entangled relationship, it turns out, has less capacity to absorb chaos before someone decides it isn’t worth it.
What the Numbers Are Really Telling You
None of this means you or your partner are doing something wrong if a chaotic schedule is putting a strain on things. What Harknett, Bruey, and Kuhlman are describing in a peer-reviewed study is a structural pressure, not a character flaw: an economy that still schedules millions of hourly workers week to week, sometimes night to night, and quietly expects the people who love them to absorb whatever is left over. If your household runs on a schedule that changes without warning, the exhaustion you’re feeling isn’t proof that you’re bad at managing your relationship. It’s a pattern researchers can now put a number on — 12 points, 4 points, a threshold that comes sooner than you’d think. And it’s one more reason the fight over predictable scheduling was never just about paychecks. It’s about who gets to keep the people they love.
