To ask if your DH has a highly stressful but we'll paid job how's your work/life balance because mine's not great

[rEallifeisbest]

DH has gradually worked his way up his career ladder to the point he is at now. He was offered a job just over a year ago with a big salary. At the time I said don't do it if the stress is going to take over, but he thought the money would counteract all that and we'd have nice evenings/weekends etc. If course the job is extremely involved, his workload is huge and he invariably brings his work home - if not physically then mentally. This then impinges on our supposed great evenings/weekends to the extent I feel I am losing him😢He knows how I feel but says he can't leave or he'll burn his bridges, what a great opportunity this is, he'll relax more but he is extremely conscientious and can't. How do other families manage their lives when one works in a really high pressured job?

Ours is good , he works from home and finishes at 5 slot of the time . Travels every other month for a week to two but it's great . He does feel the stress sometimes but is very very good at his job so finds it easy . He could earn more in London or starting his own business for sure but we have plenty to live on and it works for us without a horrid commute or hours out of the home .
I don't work and we see each other a lot and have time in the day while the kids are at school.

What does his week look like usually?

Ie home time / work on the weekends?

My lovely friend is in almost the same position, and what works for her - outsource absolutely everything you can.

She has a housekeeper / cleaner who comes in 4 days a week and does everything from changing beds to stacking dishwasher to laundry. She has an au pair who picks the kids up from school and feeds them dinner. A guy comes to her house and valets the cars once a fortnight. All ironing and bedding goes to the launderette so it comes back perfect. She gets meal kit delivery boxes for her and her husbands dinners and gets the kids food shopping ordered online and delivered. A gardener comes once a week in the summer and once a fortnight in the winter so it's always immaculate.

They take nice luxurious holidays and get weekends away together as the au pair will stay with the children.

In other words she makes the most of the good income and makes sure that whatever time they do have as a family is not spend on domestic stuff they can pay someone else to do.

Lowering expectations. And getting my social needs met mostly by other friends.

It’s tough as DP uses it to avoid family life too really. He’d never, ever admit that. And unfortunately we don’t see a lot of the money as the mortgage is so huge. Damn!

I go away with the kids on holiday by myself too.

I just don’t have a very family unit life with DP, it just doesn’t happen. So I act without him, take the kids to stuff, go to classes, have quite involved hobbies. It’s a different life from the one I wanted, and we are breaking up, but that was over step kid issues - which also were impacted by his working, as I became a resented step mum which I didn’t want to be (DP at work, full time residence).

There’s an adjustment, see how far you think is okay or not.

You cannot get large salaries keep weekends and evenings (and often holidays) consistently work-free.

You certainly can. It depends on the industry. DH is on between 800 and 1k a day. 9-5, 3-4 days a week from home with absolutely no stress and he really enjoys his work. He worked completely from home up until the children were school age.

My BIL on the other hand is never there, ever. Earns roughly the same and I can't recall the last time they had a family holiday. They lead pretty much separate lives.

Myself and the CEO still draw these lines, the other member of senior management does not, despite our active encouragement. It causes no end of problems at work.

I have a friend, who works for a large bank in Switzerland, and the bank turned off their ability to send or receive any emails when they are on holidays. If their managers also find out she logged in to her PC while on holiday, she will be faced with a lot of disapproval.

My boss chooses to work late but he cuts his PC off from the internet to make sure that none of his emails get sent to any of his team late making people feel like they have to reply.

Unfortunately not all people and not all companies are like that. However I am quite certain that most people, who work around the clock, do so because they choose to do it that way. There are, of course, some exceptions and most of them are not.

I was the one in our relationship who had the high paid high stress job (though exh also had a high stress long hours job)

it definitely impacts your relationship I think - very hard not to. It's the emotional headspace a job like that takes up more than anything else.

best way to deal with it is to force him to segment times (much like Xenia did, I also did the same)

so we used to agree on holiday, we needed an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening to do emails (so an hour before the kids were up then an hour after they were in bed). Outside those times, phones were off. Weekends we treated much the same.

During the week, work interfered as much as it needed but we'd always make sure we had time with the dcs and time with each other.

He needs downtime as much as you need time together. If he doesn't learn to carve some out for himself, he will lose a lot more than he thinks this fantastic job will give him (losing you, having a nervous breakdown etc.)

Do facilities my career. He even moved to nights so he was at home to do the morning school run and, on occasion, the afternoon one.

I am eternally grateful to him.

However, I do make sure that I only keep an eye on emails until 6pm. This is to make sure I am present with my son and dp. I do check my email and respond to any that just need something quick when I get up at 5am. But others

As pp said, those that work all the hours god sends, often aren't any busier than the rest of us. I have noticed that alot of these people actually make more work for themseleves by making more work out of small things or handling things they should have been delegating.

The head space thing maybe that he worries about work and being good at because he is the main earner.

All my fears about work come from, what would happen to us if I lost my job.

You cannot get large salaries keep weekends and evenings (and often holidays) consistently work-free

Yes you can. Both me and DH manage it. We occasionally do some work on a weekend but it is rare. Emails get switched off over holidays.

We choose to put family first. It doesn’t make us poor employees.

My dh is hugely busy and very successful but he also takes the dc to school in the mornings, takes the bins out, vacuums, cooks, helps with their homework and plays games with them/us: board games, rugby, running, family trips (weekends are sacred family times) etc.

He had an emotionally absent father and did not want that for our dc.

He is their role model and he takes the role very seriously.

We all love him to bits because we know how hard he works hence massages from me when he comes to bed ( he reciprocates!) and lovely home made food ( he is really appreciative).

Basicallly, if you do it all your dh will feel a spare part. I never do everything around the house as the dc help out too.

I work too but it's a team effort to have a happy home and family life.

"lack of a rounded perspective means he blows work issues out of proportion as they're his whole life"

Oh God yes, we've all worked with/had Managers that, that's true of. They're a pain in the arse.

OP, my DH was the same, but it started when I was a SAHM. I coped by having a life/going on holiday without him. It meant I didn't go to Venice/Florence etc, though.

It impacted on my ability to work.

We had lots of plans for what we were going to do in the future.

He had a Heart Attack, then bad health, then Cancer and died.

Is never get into a relationship with a workaholic, or even someone who doesn't value time together.

We wasted years. When you get onto your 50's, you realise how precious time is. You do experience things differently at different ages, have different energy levels.

In truth, you can't put things off. You've got to be honest and think, "we aren't doing that because of work" amd weigh up if thays what you really want, without future plans coming into it, unless they are within that year.

I no longer work in the corporate field but when I did, and I was starting out, I worked my contracted hours and no more. I was told by assorted people I would never get anywhere by doing that, that I needed to show my commitment to the company by doing extra hours, then I'd get more opportunities and promotion. I never went to the office Xmas party and was told "you won't get anywhere by not showing up to these things, management won't like it". Once a year the firm paid for everyone to go to a hotel on a Saturday night, dinner and disco, paid for buses to wherever if you never wanted to drive. I never went and was told "management really won't like it".

I was 19 at the time and as far as I was concerned it was a job. They didn't own me, they had no right to my time outside of what they were paying for. But I worked hard during my contracted hours.

Guess who became the youngest assistant manager in the history of the company (a household name and with some 20,000 employees) by the time I was 23 (next youngest at my level was 31). Oh, that would be me. Most of those who did all the outside working hours or working extra hours hardly ever got anywhere. And even when I was at that level I still worked only my contracted hours.

Sorry but work life balance is all very well, and it's all very well earning huge sums of money but you never get the chance to spend it or devote proper regular time to your partner and children. You are not married to the job. People who work those sorts of hours are idiots and if their job is seriously that important that you need to work evenings and weekends and never switch off, don't get married or have kids.

Really sympathise with you OP. My DP is a head chef. Well paid but unbelievably unsociable. It's only 5 days a week and his 2 days off (mid week) are completely his, but I'm in work.

4 days a week 9am-9:30pm with a 2 hr break in between, those two hours I'm usually in work since I work 3 jobs. When he gets home I'm in bed.

Day 5 is a breakfast shift 7am-3pm on a Sunday, but then I work in a pub 4-10. We have a DS together and I'm 6 months pregnant. It's really starting to get to me as we spend no time together and anytime we do have together is spent shopping, chores, etc.

What is the point of earning loads of money if you have no time to enjoy anything and never see each other?

The other thing about over workers is that they begin to lose an understanding of the world at large because they do nothing but work.

Their instincts get slacker - they don't experience normal life, so they have no insight or intuition that helps them understand consumer needs.

(This is the problem with our products team - we want users to have an easy time so they can sod off from work, the designers want to make something really fiddly and precise, because they don't see that people just want something to quickly do the job!)

Bit different in that my DH has his own business and is sadly not very well paid so we don't have the money to make up for it .

He works very hard and can get very stressed. I manage by a) knowing that this is what I was getting into when we got together b) having my own life. Admittedly this is easier because we don't have kids, but I rarely make plans with him during the week so am not let down and just don't really expect him home any time.

It works for us.

*All these women facilitating men’s careers and allowing them to opt out of their household responsibilities....... so incredibly depressing to read.

Where are all the women whose careers have been facilitated by men? Oh wait.....very few and far between.*

Alternatively, all these men facilitating women's lives and allowing them to spend time at home without working, by working long hours and earning money.
PS. I am one of these women.

If your partner is on 6 figures, I'd definitely be paying for domestic help though.

I think there's a difference between an accountant (as example of random job that is office based and straightforward working hours, albeit long) who works only in the U.K. ie office based and only U.K. time zone, to someone who has to regularly change time zones, or work with offices/posts in timezones that are different. The type of work too - a UK based chef vs U.K.based accountant will be very different types of time demands.

It's all very well for people to say that they turn their phone off but if a) your company culture isn't like that and the company is rolling in such a way that people actually need a reply during office hours for clients in their location, as well as are available to you outside their own working hours you can't.

And it's a great idea to be the person who makes a stand, but it's far easier to do that when you're early on in your career than more specialised (less opportunities elsewhere) and you have a family depending on you. Especially if they've moved house for your job, which in DH's industry is expected.

Alternatively, all these men facilitating women's lives and allowing them to spend time at home without working, by working long hours and earning money

Not all women want this and some aren’t really given the choice. If your job means your wife is treated like a housekeeper and you don’t get involved in the day to day running of your children’s lives you’ve really got to be questioning your priorities. It is possible to have a job which allows you to earn a decent salary and spend time with your family. So much of this comes down to choice.

There are people in the world who genuinely have no choice but to work very long hours and rarely see their families - most people would pity them and think it's a terrible thing that they are forced into that situation.

And yet, there are millions of others who do have a choice and yet choose the same situation.

Many people who are on lower salaries envy those with big jobs and high salaries, but the people on big jobs are really no better off than poor people who are endlessly tethered to corporate oppressors, what is there to envy? To choose to waste your life like that is a really special kind of madness.

NC for this. DH earns a significant amount and I work too. In some ways I feel as if his career takes precedence because we moved here for it (Middle East). I earn a quarter of what he does and together we've done very well.

I still do the mental load (of which he acknowledges and is grateful for, because in truth things like sorting out petcare, airline tickets, holidays, seeing friends etc) just wouldn't get done. In return, we outsource the cleaning, ironing, driving etc. I can totally see how tiring it would be with two children. I absolutely refuse to engage with DH when we're out at dinner and he's on his phone - and he knows he should switch it off.

I know I'm lucky because he recognises when he should be present. His mantra is 'train your employer' and to an extent, he's done that. I know that's not always the case for everyone. to you.

Not all women want this and some aren’t really given the choice.

Agreed, but there are two sides to it. Not all men want to work stupid hours and not see their family.

Where are all the women whose careers have been facilitated by men? Oh wait.....very few and far between. my dh paid for me to go and do a degree after we were married, and then part funded my PGCE when I gave up work to do it.

There was a limit to how much he could do in facilitating otherwise, as he was at sea or elsewhere, as he was HM Forces.

As a poster near the beginning said "he was physically home but mentally absent". It happened to us gradually and I got lonelier and lonelier and more and more unhappy with it. He had a nervous breakdown. He couldn't work those hours, never switching off, without it having a huge impact on his mental and physical health.

He had a year off - went a bit mad - found a new job that pays less well but is keeping him busy.

But he can't see that he didn't have to work those hours he worked in the job that drove him mad...a lot of it was he was addicted to it.

How did I cope with it all - not very well - but I tried having my own life, planning holidays and weekends away. Kept up with my friends. But it was kind of half a life really....

We both worked very hard although it was husband who moved hundreds of miles for my career and eventually I earned 10x what he did. Both of us found time at work was easier than being alone with the baby, 1 and 3 year old by the way -that is not a walk in the park if you are also trying to clean the house at the same time and clear up as you go.

I can see that day after day in my 1998 diary I was resenting his long hours (he is a teacher and basically did two jobs, full time teacher job at school until 6pm as it was that kind of long hours school and lots of evenings too and then a separate work private teaching, m usic etc and then also out an awful lot with his friend, home at 1am etc.). However we both did a lot domestically and both worked long hours.