To not be more supportive?

[Atthe]

My partner has worked for the same company for many years and they have never treated him well e.g promising pay rises and promotions that never actually happen.

He recently did get a promotion and small pay rise, however is now working ridiculous hours. Currently he goes in an hour early, finishes an hour late and does 2-4 hours from home in the evening most nights.

This is understandably impacting on his wellbeing and the time and energy he has for family life.

We have a 2 year old, I’m employed 3 days a week and look after our daughter the other days. Due to his working pattern I am now picking up more of the child care and responsibilities at home, which means I don’t get much time for a break. (Our daughter is still breastfeeding and often wakes in the night) so can feel quite intense at times.

On the one hand I resent the extra time he is giving the job. I’m quite firm with my boundaries with work and struggle to understand why he would accept the current position as it is. It’s impacting on me, which in turn impacts our daughter.

On the other hand I feel that maybe I am being unreasonable and should support him more and accept that I am just going to have to take on more at home so he has the time to dedicate to work.

Am I being unreasonable??

So some days he is potentially doing 6 hours extra work?

Whatever the pay rise/promotion was surely wasn’t enough to practically double his working hours.

I would find it hard to support this huge change in circumstances for very little reward. Your partner needs to set boundaries with work as it is not fair on you/your daughter to lose so much family time.

Is he using work to avoid child care?

Some days yes! Not usually that high but doing 3-4 hours is probably the norm most days.

The company restructured the roles and he is now doing the work two people used to do! It’s not even like there is an end in sight, he will never be able to keep up with the work without doing unpaid overtime!

The pay rise no way made it worth that so realistically has had a significant pay cut if working it out by the number of hours he actually works.

I don’t think so, he genuinely does have work to do. He does still bath our daughter every night, so it’s not that he does nothing. I know he feels I should do that, since he is going to have to stay up late to finish work after. its times like that I wonder whether I’m being unfair!

Is there any reason why he doesn’t want to apply for other jobs elsewhere?

I think fear of the unknown, he’s been there so long. He keeps talking about looking for another job, but so far hasn’t done anything about it.

He also has some belief that doing all this will pay off in some way, like a bigger pay rise or promotion but there’s no guarantee of that and given how the company has treated him in the past, I don’t really think they appreciate what he is doing currently.