In line with the boundless working life, it has become increasingly difficult to create a balance between working life and personal life. The Swedish expression “life-puzzle” and how we are able to create enough time has become a central part of the public debate. This essay will focus on what it means for cohabiting couples with children to make the life-puzzle come together and what happens when it does not. The purpose of this study is to understand the couples conceptions of the life-puzzle with regard to equality, gender contracts, negotiations and strategies and how this can be understood through a gender perspective. Significant questions are how the couples mean they are dealing with the conflicts of getting the life-puzzle together and what negotiations and strategies appear in their statements and how they express gender. Previous research on aspects considering the life-puzzle has shown that it is primarily women with infants who take the greatest responsibility at home and usually perform double work. Most of the research done on work-life balance lacks the gender aspect we are interested in, why we include relevant gender studies. This study, based on qualitative interviews, illustrates family strategies and negotiations and shows that there are unspoken gender contracts based on gender roles in the allocation of responsibilities and tasks. The study also shows that the problem of the life-puzzle is complex and that many different aspects need to be weighed in in order to create a full understanding.

In the present study, the relationship between work identity (emotion and cognition components) and work-related stress was investigated, and if work-life balance (WLB) and its components family-work conflict (FWC) and work-family conflict (WFC), might mediate this relationship. The study included 104 participants recruited via Facebook. The results showed: (1) Positive relationship between the cognitive component in the work-related identity and work-related stress; and (2) Negative relationship between the emotional component of the work-related identity and work-related stress. WLB was also shown to mediate the relation between the cognitive component in the work-related identity and work-related stress, accounted for by the WFC-component of WLB.