Husband mulls unemployment as preferable to ‘step down’ job
Dear Carolyn: My husband has been offered a job (hooray!) with a decent salary, but he doesn’t want it. I’m trying to be sympathetic: It is a step down, the boss is a bit nuts, and it really doesn’t capitalize on his incredible skills (PhD plus years of cutting-edge research). He’s awfully bummed this is his only option and feels like he’s letting everyone down who supported him in his career. He’s considering not taking the job.
I want to be empathetic, but I just feel anger. Everyone I know (including me) thinks they’re the lone sane person in a dysfunctional office. It’s bringing up old angst: He’s from a privileged background and never had the awful minimum-wage job. I’ve cleaned toilets (and everything else) to put myself through school. I know that through his eyes, it looks like stepping down, and there’s a bit of an identity crisis here; I see his reaction as entitled and smug. If I share these feelings with him, I think he’ll feel wounded and pressured into a deadend job. If I don’t share, I feel like I’m being dishonest. I want to be supportive, but I also want to give him a swift kick.
We’re in a small town with very few job options. I think declining this job means a long bout of unemployment. He would fill the time beautifully (he’s not prone to laziness), but I have a healthy amount of money anxiety and prefer the security this job will afford us.
No Name, Calif.: You don’t say whether you and he can afford a long unemployment, and that’s too bad. It’s really everything here.
By your account, you and your husband have two very clear, very different motivations: He wants fulfilling work, and you want security. Before you push to have your emotional need filled, it’s only fair to see whether he can realistically get his need met, too. If you two have the savings to manage it, his holding out for a job that offers more prospects, fulfillment and money might be worth the extra months of lost income. In fact, this “dead-end job” could hurt your security more over time if it slows his career and/ or drains his soul (and consequently strains your marriage). That’s just one possibility, of course. This decision involves everything from your savings to his marketability to the local job market to your mobility as a couple. And if you’re flirting with financial ruin, that shoves all other variables aside. But if your need for his paycheck is more emotional than financial, then expressing your anger now would only SEEM more honest; it wouldn’t be the capital-T Truth. You’re seeing his reluctance to take this job as an exercise of his vestigial privilege, and that hits you right in the toilet brush. Meaning, you’re responding emotionally – so you at least have to consider that you aren’t reading his motives clearly.
Find out what he’s planning, right down to the details of where, how, for how long and for how much he expects to seek this more suitable job. If his “plan” genuinely consists of entitlement and expectations, then by all means say how you feel about that. If he has ideas and money and discipline, though, then he deserves your faith and support.