Reply to how many trips is normal?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "how many trips is normal?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do you have basic math skills? OP says they can't afford it, that the trips are too expensive. I agree with the immediate PP that $120k a year doesn't go that far in this area. You're not going to buy 4 $1000 plane tickets by cutting the cable.[/quote]

I'm not the PP who made the "I think its sad" post, but I agree with it. "Can't afford" is certainly relative; OP strongly implied that they had in fact been making the trips four times a year for at least the past few years. Presumably, if they have managed to do this in the past, the issue is not that they literally can't afford it, but that OP thinks it is a waste of money she would rather spend in other areas. Obviously, I've never gone through OP's budget, but I can't help but be a little skeptical of the fact that she's fixated on this particular expenditure as the thing that is preventing the family from being financially secure. I think she probably didn't love the trips to begin with and is trying to give teeth to her complaint by focusing on the financial burden. I seriously doubt that if their HHI jumped by $4,000 tomorrow she would suddenly be ok with the trips because it was now clear they were not impacting her previous budget. She just doesn't really want to do them to begin with.

I also can't help but feel there is a gender component at work here, because I'm very confident that if OP had posted that she wanted to visit her family more often but her husband insisted that it would kill their budget even though they make in the low six figures, there would be at least a half dozen posts in this thread saying that if DH doesn't care about her family he doesn't care about her and she is better off without him.[/quote]

It sounded to me like her husband had a need for them to have exactly equal time with his family who is not local as they do with her family that is local. It also sounds like for whatever reasons, they have recently put together a budget, and spending thousands of dollars a year on travel to see his family is not in that budget. She said that he won't even have a conversation about her not going on one of the trips because he thinks that means she doesn't care about his family.

Maybe she doesn't. Maybe they could afford the trips by cutting down on expenses in other areas. But it sounds to me like the basic issue is that he believes that his family should get equal time when it is logistically much more complicated and impractical for that to be the case. When I was first married, we lived in the same town as my mom. We saw her every week. My husband's family lived 900 miles away. Sometimes you see more of one side of the family due to proximity. It's not about equal time all the time.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics