We all face the challenge of determining how our work fits into our lives and making sure there is a good balance there. Everyone has their own concepts of what work-life balance is, and these have to be taken into account.
One woman took to Reddit to share the very different ideas of work-life balance that she and her husband had that might lead to the destruction of her marriage.
“I’ve worked my (expletive) off for years at my company,” the wife said in her post. “Late nights, extra projects, proving myself over and over. Finally it paid off. I was offered a huge promotion with a significant raise and the chance to move up in my field. It was everything I had been working toward.”
“When I told my husband, I expected him to be happy for me,” she explained. “Instead, his first reaction was, ‘But what about us?’” She couldn’t understand why he would react this way. “The promotion came with longer hours and some travel, but nothing extreme,” she continued. “I explained that, yes, things might shift a bit at home, but we could adjust. It wasn’t like I was moving across the country, just taking on more responsibility.”
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Her husband was having none of it, though. “He wasn’t convinced,” she shared. “He started making comments like, ‘Do you really need a bigger job?’ and ‘I thought we wanted to focus on starting a family soon.’ His tone shifted from concern to guilt-tripping. He even brought up how his dad always provided while his mom stayed home, how their marriage worked because they had clear roles.”
This all came out of the blue to this woman, who thought her husband understood her. “I reminded him that I wasn’t quitting my job when we got married,” she said. “He knew I was ambitious. He knew this was my goal. He swore he supported me, but now that it was real, he was acting like I had betrayed him.”
“Then he dropped the bombshell,” she said. “‘If you really loved me, you’d turn it down. This isn’t just about you.’” This forced the woman to come to some unsettling conclusions. “That’s when I realized it wasn’t about us,” she stated. “It was about control. He expected me to shrink myself for the sake of his comfort.”
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“I took the job,” she declared simply. Unfortunately, this caused more friction between her and her husband than ever before. She’s not sure their marriage can survive.
“Now, he barely looks at me,” she shared. “The once supportive man I married has been replaced by someone who sees me as the villain in his story. His family whispers that I put ‘money over marriage.’ The silence at home is deafening, the space between us growing wider by the day.”
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A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed some very interesting facts about how men feel regarding their partners’ success. Through testing college students in the U.S. and the Netherlands, as well as participants from the internet, researchers discovered “that men’s implicit self-esteem was lower when their partner succeeded than when their partner failed, whereas women’s implicit self-esteem was not affected.”
Men are much less secure when it comes to their partners and what they do with their lives than women are. Although this man seemed to be fine with his ambitious wife, that was before the ambitions actually led to any changes. Now that she is seeing the fruits of her labor, he is upset, as many men tend to be.
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Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
