I’ve posted before so apologies for crowding the feed again. Just to vent since I’m feeling like a bad husband but also a bit helpless.

For context, in the lead up to the 2024 election my wife brought up that if a certain someone won, she’d want to look into moving to another country. Regardless of your politics, I will just say that it is not an enjoyable time to be a person of color, particularly a woman of color, and I understand and empathize with her feelings around seeing what’s going on the US today. My wife served and is a successful woman, but it’s a real fear for her that she might get mistakenly stopped and put in a van regardless. As her husband, I don’t want her to live in fear, nor do I want her feel like she can’t enjoy life.

Fast forward and moving out of country has come up several times but I’ve maintained that I have reservations. Quitting our jobs and cashing out to move, likely without jobs lined up, and forfeiting things like future years of my pension, gives me a lot of anxiety. This is separate from us having issues that make the timing of diving headfirst into emigrating not seem wise. We also live in a blue area of a blue state. So this may be my privilege talking, but I think the reality is that while there are awful things happening around the country, our lives to this point have not changed and I don’t see it happening in our area. Making this massive decision out of reaction to avoid the next few years here doesn’t make sense to me.

It came up again today and she said it was likely a reason this wouldn’t work out because she was serious about not wanting to be here. I think it’s been brought on by a work trip she has coming up which reignites those fears. But it’s just a helpless feeling because I feel like a shitty husband for not just leaping in headfirst with her, but we have existing issues on top of how monumental that undertaking would be. We’ve been separated a couple of months, and had actually had some really positive progress lately. It’s just heartbreaking that not wanting to move out of the country could be the straw that breaks the camels back on this.