‘90s FAMILY : Too Close for Comfort : At first, working at home together was fun. But it wore off--and fast. To save her marriage, she did what she had to: She left him.

“Bears that are kept together constantly won’t mate,” the zoo official explained. I froze. Did my husband and friends see my face turn bright red?

“In fact,” the guide continued, “all of our pairs here at the zoo need significant amounts of time away from each other to have any interest in mating at all. That’s why we provide separate quarters for them.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my husband talking to his friend and pointing at the baby Alaskan brown bear. He wasn’t getting the speaker’s point. He wasn’t getting any sex either.

About two months before our zoo outing, I had quit my job and converted a bedroom at home into an office to situate my copywriting business. My husband aggressively encouraged me to make this move. Believing that the most fulfilling life can be found in self-employment, he’s been operating various businesses from home for 15 years.

At first, the togetherness was fun. We would shout down the hall to each other, joking and explaining what we were doing minute by minute. Since this was the first time anyone had shared his work space for a long time, my husband was especially excited about the new arrangement.

But soon the songs (“Little Suzannie! Little Suzannie! She looked right up her nose and found a dime! HAHAHAHA”) and the interruptions (“Do you know what the cat just did? He’s a genius”) began to eat away at my fantasy of the perfect balance between work and home.

It was more than the noise, though. Before starting my own business, I usually was showered, dressed and organized before he even made it downstairs. Now in the morning, as I headed to my home office, there he was putting ungodly amounts of whipped cream on top of his Cheerios.

As he likes to watch TV for a little while around lunchtime, when I came down to snatch something to eat, he would be planted in front of--not news shows or even talk shows, but cartoons. Then, just as I’d get started with the afternoon’s writing, he would swing open my office door to say, “That Pinocchio, I can’t stand him. He’s always whining that he’s not a real boy. I think he’s manic-depressive.”

And by nighttime, we had nothing to say to each other, having kept completely updated during the day as I stumbled over him to use the printer and copier, which were in his office.

At about the six-week point, my desires for romantic interaction came to an absolute, grinding, there’s-no-way-in-hell-buddy halt. Not a great development for a couple married only one year. I began to slink around the house, concerned that any encounter would make him feel amorous. I wore my ugliest clothes and let my mascara crust over in its tube.

Hoping that making a few adjustments would help, I turned to women’s magazines to find out how other spouses working together coped. After finishing each article, I was convinced that the author had never been forced to hear the ramblings and bumpings about of her spouse day and night. A common, chipper ending like “working together can help husband and wife know and respect each other more than ever before” always got the magazine winged across the room.

My liberation came that night at the zoo, when in a few simple words, the behaviorist gave me scientific validation for my nights of faked comas. My problem was a natural thing, dictated by 40,000 years of evolution and the infinitely wise chemicals in my brain. My sexuality had not dried up forever. My body was simply commanding me to look under “O” in the Yellow Pages for “Offices.” I found several listings for “enterprise” or “executive” suites, small rooms for people trying to get a dream business off the ground. My body, my chemistry, my evolutionary history could not be denied. I phoned every one.

While rents in San Diego, one of the costliest cities in the United States, ran to $400 for one room, I was able to find an 11-by-14 office with rug problems for $135 per month. I would have my own parking space and secretaries who would put postage on my letters and ask me if I had watched “ER” the previous night. I nearly sobbed with joy as I signed the lease.

Telling my husband was not so simple. I suspected that if I told him his chances of ever seeing me in lipstick and garter belts again depended on my having an outside office, he would have boxed up my files and had them in the car in minutes. But I was worried about how he would react to the fact that it was the overabundance of him that was making me hide in closets and corners.

When I explained that I was doing this “just in case” so we didn’t “in the future” get sick of each other, he asked, “Why do you need to prevent something that has little to no chance of happening?” I managed to pull off the ounce-of-prevention speech without him ever knowing that I was in need of, not an ounce, but a truckload of cure.

Although I’d believed it would take a month to recover from spousal overdose, after only a week of leaving the house at 8 a.m. and returning at 5:30 p.m., I began to notice the rich curls in my husband’s hair again. His specialness, which had somehow faded while we were together constantly, began to reassert its glow. At the end of the day, I was happy to go home again. His bizarre song lyrics broke me into hysterics. I cherished his willingness to share each of his day’s adventures, knowing how silent some husbands can be. I started making some plans: dinner at the Olive Garden, a little Merlot. . . .

When I think about some poor bears staring at each other 24 hours a day, I shudder. Luckily, the enlightened San Diego Zoo realized that it is not cage size or food type or even incompatibility that shatters attraction, but too much of a good thing.