Soul Sucking Job or Wife Stressed About Money?

Athol: I edited out the looooong backstory of the reader email. Before anyone paints the wife as a money hungry bitch entitlement princess… she didn’t come across that way to me. Seemed quite normal and hard working, just stressed by the bills.

Reader:  I am happy with my job – even if it is much less salary and prestige as before.  I have settled into it and don’t have a burning desire to look for bigger and better things – especially after 6 years of my previous high-paying but sucked-the-life-out-of-me job.  On the other hand, she is stressed and it makes me feel I should be constantly on the lookout for more money – even at the cost of my current job satisfaction.

My feeling is that the Alpha response is to do what makes me happy while the beta response is to constantly look for more money so she can be less stressed.

Does the married man constantly need to be looking for more money?  Is settling a bit (instead of trying to be CEO) wrong as the married man?

Athol: I think you’re asking this as one of those damned if you do and damned if you don’t questions. Work extra hard and you be unhappy, or work normal and watch her get unhappy.

My feeling is the natural order works best for most couples when the husband is the higher earner, but also gets better treatment at home for doing so. So in other words, it you are super-husband and doing the long hours and soul sucking thing at the office to provide for your family, her job is to make all that worthwhile for you.

It’s not the soul sucking job that does men in. It’s the coming home and no one caring about you having to do that.

My choice has been to chart a path to a higher earning job that I want to do. I’m still working the nursing job, and the MMSL stuff is around 40 hours a week all up. So 80 hours weeks of “work”.

Jennifer has been quite supportive of it all and I get more of her pampering/catering to me than I ever did before. Both because I deserve it, and because I simply couldn’t do what I do without it. She’s always been pleasant and helpful to me, but it’s a different level now. The main difference being that I’m dong something worthy of support and needing support. It’s the Captain and First Officer thing.

Being able to be Beta as a husband is a good thing, but you can’t allow yourself to be taken for granted for doing Beta things.

Perhaps finding a little side job that brings in a little extra cash would be a good idea – but you frame it as “I’m willing to do this for us, but it is more work. So I think it’s fair that I get supported in doing this and get something more from you.”

She’ll have to ask what that something more is of course.

She’ll start figuring you mean blowjobs of course, which means she will immediately do the math for how much you working an extra shift equals in cash, and decide if that’s tempting enough to induce her into blowing you. If the cash value is enough, she’ll agree, if not she’ll complain that she isn’t a hooker and won’t have sex for (that much) money.

So cut her hamster accountant off before it gets up to speed.

Watch her hamster try and find a way to be mad at that. Just say thank you. How hard is that? And it’s free.

The trick is that by getting her to say thank you, it will start making her thankful. Saying words has meaning and they change us. Naturally wives thankful to their husbands are highly pre-disposed to giving up the goods easily. Plus if she can’t even be bothered to say “thank you” when you work your ass off for the family, it means she doesn’t appreciate your effort, so you may as well just stop trying so hard and head to the couch with a beer.