The article focus on China’s rising number of divorce registrations and the crude divorce rate in recent years, and the increasing prevalence of overwork in the labor market. Using the 2010-2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper discusses the marital impact of overwork from an internal family perspective, and reveals the possible mechanisms and heterogeneous effects of overwork on family marital stability. Studies have found that overwork by family members increases marital instability. In particular, the impact of overwork on the wife’s side on the stability of family and marriage is more significant. The effects can be explained either by independent hypotheses based on rationality and economic advantage, or by time-limited work-family conflict theories and gender structure theories. The overworked status of workers in the current period is matched with the marital status of different interval years in the later period. The results show that the destabilization of marital stability by overwork is persistent, and although the negative effects decrease, they persist for a certain period of time. Relatively speaking, families with shorter marriage age and rural families are more vulnerable to the impact of overworked marriage, and living with parents can effectively alleviate the risk of divorce caused by overwork. Further mechanism analysis found that the effect of family division of labor is the possible impact path of the wife’ s overwork facing the impact of marital stability. Under the constraints of gender roles in my country, the traditional division of labor within the family has not been broken. The conclusion of the study shows that the negative impact of overwork on marital stability does exist in my country. Among them, the female group is more difficult to deal with when faced with the impact. How to effectively help employed women deal with marital risks and promote work-family balance has become a key issue.
