Recently, Arun Kumar, an HR director at a multinational bank, sneezed during an official call. "Bless you," said the person on the other line. "That's not the reaction we normally get when we sneeze these days," quipped Arun. A forced laugh echoed from the speaker phone. It made Arun's wife, Rajni, wince.

Over the last few days, Rajni, a content writer, has been cringing often on hearing her otherwise strong, silent husband subject many of his colleagues to tedious punchlines on conference calls. "I've just discovered he is the king of dad jokes," she says of her spouse of 17 years.

Turns out many strong marriages have been waking up to similar revelations.

Even as the lockdown-enforced work-from-home status turns houses into overstaffed co-working spaces, it seems to be unmasking the professional alter-egos of the significant other in curious ways.

The office joker, the internet-hogger, the motivational guru--the alternate layer peels off as quarrels break out over access to the desktop, islands of work time are cordoned off and unprecedented quirks, punishingly noted.

Ruchita Dar Shah, who runs a global online community of mothers called First Moms Club, has gathered insights that could serve as ammunition for a lifetime. Besides the fact that her banker-entrepreneur husband, Manish, is "quite useless at household chores", watching him preside over video calls in which he comes off as something of a self-appointed "business cum life coach" has exposed all the traits he accuses her of. "For someone who claims to be the silent type, he is quite a chatterbox. And though he blames me for being a social media junkie, these days I find he is also glued to Twitter."

If the marriage isn't built for endurance though, quarantine can be a sentence. Psychologists will tell you of fraying marriages straining further under the forced proximity.

Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Seema Hingorrany says she has been consulting a couple who indulged in a screaming match with each other during her video call.

"Past issues resurface during isolation. Also, affairs have been caught," says Hingorrany, who worries about the impact of lockdown on dysfunctional couples and advises couples to cordon off me-time to avoid smothering each other.

When the spouses sidestep the bad jokes and investigate the cute quarrels, it seems, a new form of marital empathy emerges.

As she watches her husband carry on his official calls, Rajni Kumar gets why he sometimes yells: "I am trying to keep people from being laid off here."

"I understand why he is so quiet when he comes home from work," she says. "It's because his work involves so much use of his voice."