Reply to If your spouse works a lot, how do you manage expectations about your own availability?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My sister’s marriage counselor told her workaholic husband something like the following:

“I don’t know if your wife will divorce you or not. But if you keep doing this, she and the kids are going to create a parallel life that you simply aren’t a part of. You can maybe pop in from time to time, but you will just be a visitor.”

Apparently this resonated with him, and he made some incremental changes.

It doesn’t sound like your husband has a particularly “big” job. Apparently, he either has had a major boundary problem or he just doesn’t want to be at home.[/quote]

That’s a good summation, honestly. He’s made some effort and I do appreciate it. I think it’s hard to portray accurately his level of involvement. Like we might have family dinner 3-4 nights a week but on a weekday I might not know this is one of the nights he won’t be home until 30 minutes before we eat. He does have dinner with us about 90 percent of weekend nights, if he’s not traveling and generally makes it to things like important games and performances. He has a good relationship with the kids but I am the one that they count on, if that makes sense.

When I said he’s missing out, I didn’t just mean the kids and me. I mean he doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t exercise, he doesn’t do any of the things I might be doing instead of waiting around for him.

It’s funny to see the speculation around what kind of work he does. Does it matter? I strongly suspect he has terrible time management skills and that’s a big contributor to so many things being an emergency. But I don’t really know. We have very different jobs. Again he’s actually a good person and very smart and interesting to talk to. But yea things work best when I am not trying to plan around him too much.[/quote]

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