# Am I wasting my time?



## synkka (Mar 8, 2012)

I’ve been reading posts on this site for a few weeks, and I think this is a really helpful and supportive community. I think it might be time to share my situation, and now that I’ve signed up, I’m looking forward to being an active participant in other threads too.

I’m in my mid-30s, married for 11 years, no children (by choice). My marriage hasn’t been perfect (whose is?), but up until the past year or so I would say it has been happy overall. We share several hobbies, have similar views on politics and religion, love to travel together, still find each other sexy/attractive and can make each other laugh on a regular basis. I feel like we have most of the basics of a good marriage covered, or at least that we did until recently. 

When we first married, we had similar work schedules and each put in about 40 to 50 hours per week. Sometimes we had to work different hours from one another for a few weeks or months at a time (mostly due to changes in my husband’s assignments), but we still managed to have a good work-life balance that allowed for exploring interests and hobbies on our own and spending quality time together. Over the years we’ve both advanced in our careers, and I guess that I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to do this without a drastic increase in hours. I occasionally have a crazy work week, but I still average out at my original 40 to 50. My husband’s schedule, on the other hand, has just gotten more and more extreme, to the point that he now often spends 80 to 90 hours each week at work and is still answering calls and emails regularly after he leaves the office. This has obviously taken a huge toll on our personal lives. I feel like work has taken over his life, and there isn’t enough time left over in the day or week for him to have any kind of balance. 

Our relationship has gotten increasingly strained, too, because I am able to spend plenty of time on my own interests (now more than ever, really), so when we do have a rare evening together to talk and catch up, our conversations often don’t go so well. I talk about work, hobbies, current events, etc., and he only talks about work. I try to bring up other things, and will sometimes say things like, “Did you see that story in the news about xyz?” His typical response is that he doesn’t have time to read the news, then he’ll listen to me for a minute or so, but I have the sense that he’s just trying to be polite and is waiting for his turn so that he can talk about work some more. These times together generally end in frustration for me, because I’ve looked forward to spending the time with him, but then I feel like it would have been better for him to spend some time on one of his personal interests so that he could have a chance at maintaining a bit of well-roundedness.

I’ve talked to him about the situation and asked how he feels about it. He says that he doesn’t like working so many hours, but that he has to right now to further his career and there’s no way around it. I asked how long he thinks his schedule might be like this, and he says that it might be years. For those of you who are wondering, he does work in a fairly demanding industry, but there are plenty of people in his profession that work a more reasonable 50 to 55 hours. I very much believe that working for a different employer would make a huge difference, but he won’t hear of it. It’s frustrating, too, because I’ve lost count of how often he’s told me about the coworkers he most respects taking jobs at other companies. It makes me think that they all see that there are better jobs out there, but he either can’t or won’t believe that.

I reached a breaking point last year and told him that I just couldn’t live like this anymore. I suggested marriage counseling because I didn’t want to give up on our marriage, but I felt like our discussions with each other weren’t getting us anywhere. He said that he was willing to go, and that he would try to fit it into his schedule. I made weekly appointments, and went to every one of them, but he missed all of them. One of the reasons I really wanted to go was that I thought that there must be things that he was feeling about our marriage that he wasn’t saying, or that there were things I could change to help us get back on track. But of course those conversations never happened. My counselor was supportive and said that she didn’t think that I had unreasonable expectations of him or our marriage. She suggested that I continue to try to talk to him, but also said that I had some difficult decisions to make if things didn’t change. Following her advice, I had several conversations with him, and each time he said that he was sorry, but that he didn’t see any way to change his work situation and that he needed to do this so that we could have a comfortable life and achieve our goals. I told him over and over again that I felt like we were doing more than okay financially, and that I would be happy to live on a much lower income if it would mean that we could go back to having a balanced life again. Each time, he told me why maintaining his current income and increasing it was so important to him. He feels that he never has enough money to do all of the things he wants to do, and that climbing the ladder at work will lead to the success and financial rewards he wants. He asked me to be patient and said that he was sure that it would all be worth it in ten or twenty years. I said that I appreciated his hard work, but that I couldn’t wait a decade or two for things to change.

So, I gave it some serious thought, and five months ago I told him I was moving out because I could not live that way anymore. I told him that I loved him, but that I couldn’t keep waiting. He was hurt and angry, and we had limited contact during the initial two months of our separation, but now we’ve been seeing each other a couple of times each month for friendly dates. I was hoping that the time and space apart would cause him to reevaluate his priorities, but nothing has changed. It sinks in a little deeper every day that he really is choosing his career, money and material things over our marriage. Am I crazy to think that he will someday regret this? Am I even crazier to think that he’ll regret it soon enough to make a difference in the outcome? As things stand, I feel more and more foolish for waiting to file the papers and move on, but it’s also so heartbreaking to think of divorcing someone I love for something that might just be a case of temporarily mixed up priorities.

Thoughts? Advice? Anyone else in a similar boat?


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## In_The_Wind (Feb 17, 2012)

Hi synkka sorry you here I feel that it takes efforts on both parties to have a successful M one area that people tend to forget is making time for their partner they say it takes a minimum 10 to 15 hours of quality time per week and I am not talking about sitting in front of the tv half hearted listening to one another 
It seems thst you either accept what's going on or not. Decide what you want qand make the decision to get there. By setting boundaries he can either meet yr needs or not if not you should consider going to the next levelin my opinion nothing changes nothing changes

Good Luck
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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