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agonyaunt2021-04-16 12:29 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2021-04-16 12:29 pm
Entry tags:
Dear Prudence: My Wife Disapproves of My Career Change
A chunk of a transcript.
Dear Prudence, I had an almost 20 year career in finance. I never loved it, but I was good at it. And I made a lot of money. I tried shifting my role at this company to a lower intensity one, but I found the work so dull, yet simultaneously stressful, I realized it was only a matter of time before I made a really costly mistake. My wife and I have been married for ten years and have an eight and a six year old. Over the last few years I’ve taken on some alternative energy projects on some of the properties we own and in so doing, got to know the owners of one of the companies we work with quite well. I learned she was looking to retire and wanted to sell his small business to someone. We struck a deal where I worked with him for a few years and then bought the business. I loved it. I feel such a sense of accomplishment when we complete a complicated project and after my workday is over, I still have lots of time and energy for my kids. It’s not much money compared to what I used to make, but we’ve got plenty. So what’s the problem? My wife hates it. She seems ashamed of my clambering on roofs, digging trenches and pulling wires. She would prefer I be retired instead of, quote, "playing with oversized toys." I’ve tried to get to the bottom of what’s really bothering her, but it seems like there’s no deeper agenda here than anxiety about social standing. She’s always professed to be progressive. It is bewildering that she would look down on manual labor, particularly when it’s better for the environment. I’m afraid that my kids will pick up on her scorn and I am out of ideas.
I think you’re right, letter writer, I think you’ve tried to get to the bottom of this, I don’t want to speculate like, oh, maybe she’s worried about your safety, but she’s so embarrassed about being worried about your safety that she’s pretending to have contempt for you. I think this is one of those things where, like, you’ve learned that sometimes your wife acts in a way that is at odds with her values. And so the question is just like, how do I tell my wife that she needs to keep her thoughts to herself? I think that’s it here. I think all that needs to happen is like you’ve made yourself incredibly clear on this front. I am in no danger of thinking that you like the work that I do. The good news is you don’t have to do any of that work. I no longer want your input.
S1: And I guess in terms of the kids, I think it’s worth saying, like, you are free to have scorn for what I do and and to talk to yourself about talk to your friends about it if you want. But, you know, I don’t want it communicated to our kids. And I don’t want I don’t want the idea that manual labor is somehow contemptible to be passed down to our children like or the
S2: danger of not always having the job where you make the most money, even if it makes you miserable.
S1: This this one hit me really hard, this letter, because I feel like I’ve seen so many people brought to misery by the idea of what they should be doing as opposed to what they want to be doing. And even to the extent like I was talking to a woman who did my makeup today for this lovely shoot, and she was like, I didn’t want to go to college. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But my parents, my parents didn’t want their kid to have not gone to college. So I was like, wow, thanks. Congratulations. You’re not going to be entering a competitive field saddled with that. But that’s not an uncommon theme. And I felt for this guy and I felt like a lot of people aren’t lucky enough to find something that they really love to do and that they find gratifying and that they get paid for, even if it isn’t as much as and. You know, clearly, they’re doing fine. I wonder I don’t know, I’m so bad it that’s I’m like, don’t say terrible things, but I wonder if if he said to his wife, I feel disrespected by you. Is that what you’re trying to convey to me? It’s one thing to say, like, do you have a deeper agenda? And is this about X or Y or Z? But to maybe step away from what she’s feeling and say, I we have a marriage, we have kids and I’ve worked my whole life to to help contribute to the household. And and I feel like you really don’t respect me anymore. I, I would be shocked if if the person then was like, you don’t respect you don’t want you to feel respected like or maybe I’m wrong. That’s exactly what his wife will say.
S2: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it’s like a situation where it’s like I’m so glad you asked. I think you should
S1: allow me to unload with both barrels. Now that you’ve opened this opportunity to me, I hope that’s not true. I think feeling content from your partner or disrespect from your partner is just such an undermining and depressing thing. And yeah, I respect that this person has even tried to be like, you know, what could be going on here. But this is just mean. What does it mean? Like, this is bizarre and I don’t know anyone who it seems like such an antiquated notion to be like, oh, his hands are filthy with the dust of the blue collar. Like, it’s a very weird way of looking at life and goals, especially when you see so many people who are like I just about my job in finance and then go to Mexico, you know, hydroponic vegetable garden like this is a very common thing now. Yeah, I just think.
S2: You’ve tried to get to the bottom of this, I think all you need now is like I don’t really know what’s been going on with you. I haven’t liked it. I’ll tell you one thing. Like, it doesn’t make me enjoy spending time with you. It doesn’t make me feel especially like loved. I was just, you know, if I was just meeting you for the first time and you talked about somebody else’s job like this, I would not want to hang out again. But, like, whatever. You’ve made your point really clear. So at this point, let’s just say I know very well that you don’t like my job. I have heard your feedback. I have declined to quit my job. You know that this work makes me really, really happy and then I’m going to keep doing it. So all I need from you is to stop saying this shit. Hopefully she can do that if she can’t. You know, I think those are the moments where you get to say, like, I’m done with this conversation, walk out of the room, take a walk, cool down, come back later, talk about something else. But just. Yeah, really, you can at least even if she’s not meeting you in the middle here, you can really draw a line and say, look, I’m done having conversations where you, like, denigrate my job 100 percent. You know, hopefully that will shame her, not like shame her. Like, you should be ashamed, but like that will recall her better nature.
S1: I think a little shame would be OK here. This is really unkind. And I keep wondering and I know we’re not supposed to speculate, but I’m like, does she have a secret compulsive shopping habit where it’s like they need the money and he doesn’t know they need the money? Like I it’s such a strange way to behave to somebody you’re supposed to love that I find myself looking for answers that are probably completely off base.
S2: I love to speculate as long as you know, you’re speculating. Yeah. And I don’t know if there’s even like a particular debt issue so much as. Yeah, she may have just been like actually I really liked those 20 years where you had a job you hated. And I kind of don’t care that you’re happier now because I liked the prestige and the cash and I don’t like this. And again, like it could be one of those things where she’s just been in kind of like a snooty mood for a while and is not acting like a better version of herself. And you can eventually move past it. Or this may feel like I’m starting to think this is just a character, in which case it makes me sort of I mean, that’s I don’t see that like as a as a ploy. Don’t do that to, like, bait her into saying, oh, my God, I’m sorry. I just mean, like, just this kind of make you think less of your wife. Do you do you need to re-evaluate how highly you think of her because she knows you love this? Apparently. I mean, I assume like I assume at some point you communicated to her that finances didn’t make you happy. Right?
S1: I mean, I think we’re seeing sort of that that teetering on the brink of like I do not want to believe that the person I’ve chosen to spend my life with and build a family with and have home with is not a good person or doesn’t want to see me happy. And I’ll say this to, you know, my dad, my real dad, not my bio dad, worked at a very high powered, challenging job. And his whole goal was to work his butt off so that he’d be able to retire at a certain age. And almost immediately after he got sick, he got cancer and he ended up dying in his early sixties. Like, I’m not saying that that is like, you know, that these things are connected. But what I am saying is like it is a good your job, your work takes up such a huge amount of your life like it is so much of what you do. And to pretend that you should, you know, that that you should make yourself unhappy for every minute of the day until you come home and you get to see your family is really a thing nobody should be able to ask of you. Huh?
S2: Good luck. I’m really sorry. I hope she knocks it off, too.
Dear Prudence, I had an almost 20 year career in finance. I never loved it, but I was good at it. And I made a lot of money. I tried shifting my role at this company to a lower intensity one, but I found the work so dull, yet simultaneously stressful, I realized it was only a matter of time before I made a really costly mistake. My wife and I have been married for ten years and have an eight and a six year old. Over the last few years I’ve taken on some alternative energy projects on some of the properties we own and in so doing, got to know the owners of one of the companies we work with quite well. I learned she was looking to retire and wanted to sell his small business to someone. We struck a deal where I worked with him for a few years and then bought the business. I loved it. I feel such a sense of accomplishment when we complete a complicated project and after my workday is over, I still have lots of time and energy for my kids. It’s not much money compared to what I used to make, but we’ve got plenty. So what’s the problem? My wife hates it. She seems ashamed of my clambering on roofs, digging trenches and pulling wires. She would prefer I be retired instead of, quote, "playing with oversized toys." I’ve tried to get to the bottom of what’s really bothering her, but it seems like there’s no deeper agenda here than anxiety about social standing. She’s always professed to be progressive. It is bewildering that she would look down on manual labor, particularly when it’s better for the environment. I’m afraid that my kids will pick up on her scorn and I am out of ideas.
I think you’re right, letter writer, I think you’ve tried to get to the bottom of this, I don’t want to speculate like, oh, maybe she’s worried about your safety, but she’s so embarrassed about being worried about your safety that she’s pretending to have contempt for you. I think this is one of those things where, like, you’ve learned that sometimes your wife acts in a way that is at odds with her values. And so the question is just like, how do I tell my wife that she needs to keep her thoughts to herself? I think that’s it here. I think all that needs to happen is like you’ve made yourself incredibly clear on this front. I am in no danger of thinking that you like the work that I do. The good news is you don’t have to do any of that work. I no longer want your input.
S1: And I guess in terms of the kids, I think it’s worth saying, like, you are free to have scorn for what I do and and to talk to yourself about talk to your friends about it if you want. But, you know, I don’t want it communicated to our kids. And I don’t want I don’t want the idea that manual labor is somehow contemptible to be passed down to our children like or the
S2: danger of not always having the job where you make the most money, even if it makes you miserable.
S1: This this one hit me really hard, this letter, because I feel like I’ve seen so many people brought to misery by the idea of what they should be doing as opposed to what they want to be doing. And even to the extent like I was talking to a woman who did my makeup today for this lovely shoot, and she was like, I didn’t want to go to college. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But my parents, my parents didn’t want their kid to have not gone to college. So I was like, wow, thanks. Congratulations. You’re not going to be entering a competitive field saddled with that. But that’s not an uncommon theme. And I felt for this guy and I felt like a lot of people aren’t lucky enough to find something that they really love to do and that they find gratifying and that they get paid for, even if it isn’t as much as and. You know, clearly, they’re doing fine. I wonder I don’t know, I’m so bad it that’s I’m like, don’t say terrible things, but I wonder if if he said to his wife, I feel disrespected by you. Is that what you’re trying to convey to me? It’s one thing to say, like, do you have a deeper agenda? And is this about X or Y or Z? But to maybe step away from what she’s feeling and say, I we have a marriage, we have kids and I’ve worked my whole life to to help contribute to the household. And and I feel like you really don’t respect me anymore. I, I would be shocked if if the person then was like, you don’t respect you don’t want you to feel respected like or maybe I’m wrong. That’s exactly what his wife will say.
S2: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it’s like a situation where it’s like I’m so glad you asked. I think you should
S1: allow me to unload with both barrels. Now that you’ve opened this opportunity to me, I hope that’s not true. I think feeling content from your partner or disrespect from your partner is just such an undermining and depressing thing. And yeah, I respect that this person has even tried to be like, you know, what could be going on here. But this is just mean. What does it mean? Like, this is bizarre and I don’t know anyone who it seems like such an antiquated notion to be like, oh, his hands are filthy with the dust of the blue collar. Like, it’s a very weird way of looking at life and goals, especially when you see so many people who are like I just about my job in finance and then go to Mexico, you know, hydroponic vegetable garden like this is a very common thing now. Yeah, I just think.
S2: You’ve tried to get to the bottom of this, I think all you need now is like I don’t really know what’s been going on with you. I haven’t liked it. I’ll tell you one thing. Like, it doesn’t make me enjoy spending time with you. It doesn’t make me feel especially like loved. I was just, you know, if I was just meeting you for the first time and you talked about somebody else’s job like this, I would not want to hang out again. But, like, whatever. You’ve made your point really clear. So at this point, let’s just say I know very well that you don’t like my job. I have heard your feedback. I have declined to quit my job. You know that this work makes me really, really happy and then I’m going to keep doing it. So all I need from you is to stop saying this shit. Hopefully she can do that if she can’t. You know, I think those are the moments where you get to say, like, I’m done with this conversation, walk out of the room, take a walk, cool down, come back later, talk about something else. But just. Yeah, really, you can at least even if she’s not meeting you in the middle here, you can really draw a line and say, look, I’m done having conversations where you, like, denigrate my job 100 percent. You know, hopefully that will shame her, not like shame her. Like, you should be ashamed, but like that will recall her better nature.
S1: I think a little shame would be OK here. This is really unkind. And I keep wondering and I know we’re not supposed to speculate, but I’m like, does she have a secret compulsive shopping habit where it’s like they need the money and he doesn’t know they need the money? Like I it’s such a strange way to behave to somebody you’re supposed to love that I find myself looking for answers that are probably completely off base.
S2: I love to speculate as long as you know, you’re speculating. Yeah. And I don’t know if there’s even like a particular debt issue so much as. Yeah, she may have just been like actually I really liked those 20 years where you had a job you hated. And I kind of don’t care that you’re happier now because I liked the prestige and the cash and I don’t like this. And again, like it could be one of those things where she’s just been in kind of like a snooty mood for a while and is not acting like a better version of herself. And you can eventually move past it. Or this may feel like I’m starting to think this is just a character, in which case it makes me sort of I mean, that’s I don’t see that like as a as a ploy. Don’t do that to, like, bait her into saying, oh, my God, I’m sorry. I just mean, like, just this kind of make you think less of your wife. Do you do you need to re-evaluate how highly you think of her because she knows you love this? Apparently. I mean, I assume like I assume at some point you communicated to her that finances didn’t make you happy. Right?
S1: I mean, I think we’re seeing sort of that that teetering on the brink of like I do not want to believe that the person I’ve chosen to spend my life with and build a family with and have home with is not a good person or doesn’t want to see me happy. And I’ll say this to, you know, my dad, my real dad, not my bio dad, worked at a very high powered, challenging job. And his whole goal was to work his butt off so that he’d be able to retire at a certain age. And almost immediately after he got sick, he got cancer and he ended up dying in his early sixties. Like, I’m not saying that that is like, you know, that these things are connected. But what I am saying is like it is a good your job, your work takes up such a huge amount of your life like it is so much of what you do. And to pretend that you should, you know, that that you should make yourself unhappy for every minute of the day until you come home and you get to see your family is really a thing nobody should be able to ask of you. Huh?
S2: Good luck. I’m really sorry. I hope she knocks it off, too.
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I admit I read the letter twice, looking carefully for signs of unreliability in the narration. I'm just... acutely aware of the tilt of privilege that runs through heterosexual relationships. (I say this as someone currently in two.) But the LW has his own business which he loves. He spends time with his kids. His family isn't hurting for money. His wife's only objection seems to be that he works manually now.
In other words, classism. So yeah, LW, I think you're entirely in the right here.
I just don't think it's a loving way to treat someone to demand that they be unhappy day in day out for decades in pursuit of the most money possible. If the LW had a different career every 18 months and they all lost money I'd think differently, but this is one career change, to stable work which fulfils him emotionally. I can't see anything wrong with what he's doing and one big thing wrong with his wife's perspective. (At least two, actually. I'm not a big fan of minimizing things that are really important to one's SO and aren't hurtful.)
Am I missing something?
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Does she not realize how much his previous job was making him unhappy? Can she not focus on the fact that he's now a small business owner, and be happy with that? Could she be anxious about saving for the kids' futures, or for future retirement? because that might be impacted by the change of career.
I mean, that's really all I can think of. I can't imagine my husband making this kind of arrangement where he works for someone for a couple of years before he buys their business and me not knowing about it until the deal is done (my husband wouldn't DO that; he'd talk to me about it incessantly). But I CAN see how someone might be really hurt if their spouse took this step without them knowing.
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But, if LW communicated with her that this was the plan, and it didn't force her to make major life changes that she's resentful about, then it's just classism, contempt, and shitty behavior from a partner.
(Even if it DID make a big difference in the family's finances, that wouldn't have obligated the LW to stay in a career that they hated!! I am just trying to see if there's a missing piece of information, like "wife is now the primary breadwinner," or "major future plans got canceled and the family is dealing with financial insecurity.")
With the letter as written, the wife is clearly the asshole.
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Oh, absolutely agreed. I was stretching to try and find a plausible not-the-whole-story angle, here.
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I also think something that goes mostly unacknowledged in the letter and Prudence's answer is that classism isn't just a system of belief, it's also a system, that can have clear material effects on people's lives.
It's hard to say from the letter, but she might have spent those ten years working hard at being A Wealthy Financier's Wife, a job she may not have liked any more than he liked his job but took pride in, but wasn't given a choice about whether to quit. And thus she may have most of her life and identity inextricably tangled up with other people who are all unashamedly classist, and what's hidden under the husband's comment about "anxiety about social standing" may actually be that people she thought were her friends are suddenly treating her like she's dirty, doors that were open to her are closing, even things like charity projects or community leadership she had her eye on are evaporating. And it sounds like she married him after he'd been in the high-status job for years, so the people who are treating her differently because of his job may even include her family, if they're part of the classist system. That's the kind of thing that someone can spend a long time believing isn't important, until suddenly it starts to make their life worse for the first time. Losing social status can be a bigger loss of privilege than a reduction in finances once you are at that level of wealthy!
And it sounds from the letter like he's the kind of man whose social circle consists of work, wife, and kids, so he may not have even noticed any of this part of her life at any point, or may not understand why she would care about it if she tries to explain it. And if she didn't really have any say in his change of job, I can easily see it coming out as resentment against his choices instead of resentment against the shitty people in her life who think his job defines who she is allowed to be.
I mean, I don't think that would at all excuse anything the wife is doing, she's still clearly in the wrong here. But I think that might be something that makes the letter feel like it has holes in it, without it being Husband deliberately hiding part of the story.
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And thus she may have most of her life and identity inextricably tangled up with other people who are all unashamedly classist, and what's hidden under the husband's comment about "anxiety about social standing" may actually be that people she thought were her friends are suddenly treating her like she's dirty...
That is a very good point. Losing one's social circle because they turn out to think one's not really human because they're prejudiced twits hurts like hell. If one can't/hasn't conceptualized the wave of rejections in this way, one can think the blame belongs to what people decided to be bigoted against rather than the whole passel of them for being bigots.
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the other one is married to a very sweet woman who met & married him in his late 30s. she comes from Money. what she knows how to do is Socialize Around Money People. she's very good at it! and is a great person, generally, but if he decided to become (say) a carpenter or small business owner, or -- anything else but what he does, really -- she would have no idea what to do, and might well lose most of her social circle and friends in the bargain. Very different calculus.
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You come home at the end of the day sweaty and dirty and have to shower. Wife sounds like a middle-class liberal not as down with the blue collar reality as she expected. But it’s exhilarating getting a house set up to be powered by clean energy. Almost everyone I’ve heard of in finance who’s at all a decent person bailed out sooner or later. Solar installs are orders of magnitude more rewarding in both the “physical accomplishment” and “creating a better world” realms.
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I think I psyched myself up into imagining something more involved because my three biggest construction fears are falls, trenches, and electricity! So in my mind it was like, scary stuff (not that solar install is cake - you still have to be skilled and careful but... 'go get in that trench' is a different kind of scary, at least for me)
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It sure is depressing when the letter doesn't seem to have any solution and the conclusion is just "One of the people in this situation is probably just incurably an asshole. What now?" It feels like we've seen a lot of those lately.
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Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I really hope...
... more than once in my life someone I cared a lot about told me that I was being a bigot. And I had to sit back and think about it. Sometimes they were wrong and using my desire to do good as a weapon, and it broke the relationship. Sometimes they were right and I had to change what I was doing and what I was thinking, and also that I had someone I could trust enough to tell me this. I really hope LW's wife can see her way through this to doing better by her husband and herself.
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He's really specific about a lot of timeline things: worked in finance twenty years, been married for ten years; they have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. What he's NOT specific about is how long this "few years" was (when did this new venture start? Was it p/t or what?) and how recently he bought the business. He doesn't say anything about what his wife's take on his grand plan was when he first brought it to her (was she supportive? skeptical?) and I have a hunch that he didn't float it to her in any meaningful way or he would have known what her feelings were before he put their money into this business.
He says that "[s]he would prefer I be retired instead of, quote, 'playing with oversized toys.'" Damning! but! Was that their original plan---that he retire after gritting his teeth for twenty years in finance? And now instead of say traveling around their multiple properties and having a good time with the kids, he's committing to contracts with deliverables? I would really like to hear from the wife on this.
There is missing information here, but if they can both go to counseling separately and together, they can probably work this out.
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I think they're similar in that neither LW is approaching the columnist with a good faith rendering of events, and differs in that in this letter, the wife kinda sucks as well.
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