First time posting on this topic - and I'm very sorry, I have practically written a novel but I’m just not sure where else to turn and obviously needed to let it out, so even if no-one reads it has been therapeutic!
I’ll just start by saying that my husband and I have never done things by halves – we always seem to end up doing everything at once and juggling multiple big life changes all in one go, it just seems to be the way we are! The decisions we make are always made together, and as a couple, we are very happy together. We’ve been together 6 years, married for 2.
I am, however, feeling quite worried about him at the moment, I just don’t know how best to support him and feel at a bit of a loss which is why I’m asking for advice.
There are a lot of issues at play here and a big back story, so please bear with me…
Until about a year ago, my husband had a high paying job in oil and gas – we lived a very comfortable life for our age, own a nice house, went out most weekends, had nice holidays etc. But he was absolutely miserable in his job. This started when he spent a year on rota offshore on an oil rig during which time we were both thoroughly miserable, and then the oil price crashed and things deteriorated even further as so many staff were being made redundant and he spent every day sat at his desk worrying that he was going to lose his job, benefits were cut, management were difficult, there wasn’t any actual work to do, and morale was just generally at an all time low. The final straw came when his company told him that they planned to send him offshore on rota for 2+ years (3 weeks on, 3 weeks off) and he just couldn’t face going back on to the rigs again.
He decided at that point to re-train so he could leave oil and gas altogether, and enrolled on a part time MSc in Data Science. He started the course in September 2016 and by May 2017 he’d secured his first job in this field, just weeks before he was due to start going offshore – lucky escape. This was a big decision for us because the job (which he is still in now) is a 60 mile commute each way, and he had to take a significant pay cut (£20k). At the time it was the right decision for us because he was just so miserable that he needed to get out of the job he was in – so the long commute and the pay cut were worth it. We also planned to have children and neither of us were comfortable doing this whilst he was on rota offshore because he didn’t want to be an absent father – so him moving out of oil and gas would allow us to have children.
Fast forward to today and the situation is:
• He is still commuting to his current job every day – approx. 2 hours each way, he leaves the house at 7.15am and doesn’t get home until 7.30pm. It’s costing us about £500 p/month in train fares.
• He is 1.5 years into his part time MSc which he is still studying for in addition to work – he has one semester of taught modules left to complete, then a dissertation. Because his work is so far away, he is no longer able to attend the classes and is having to keep on top of all the work remotely which the university are not particularly happy about. He is making the choice to condense this last part so that he can finish the course sooner – rather than taking the summer off and starting his dissertation in September 2018, finishing in May 2019; he wants to work on the dissertation over the summer and finish in September 2018.
• The big pay cut he took means we are very restricted financially – we can pay our mortgage and bills etc. but we don’t have much disposable income.
• To address some of the issues above, we decided not long after he took the job that we would move house. The city we live in is very expensive, we don’t have any family here and we only really lived here because we were tied to oil and gas. We planned to move back to near my home town which would mean only a 20 minute drive to work for my husband, and a much cheaper mortgage because the cost of living is much lower there. I have a job that’s very transferrable across any industry (HR) so it would be relatively easy for me to get a new job. However, we put our house up on the market in July 2017 and have still had no interest – the housing market here is very slow due to the downturn in the oil industry. So, we are stuck with an expensive mortgage, an expensive daily commute for my husband, and no control over when our house might sell and we might be able to move.
• After a year in his current job, my husband has decided that he wants a new job. Although he is relatively new into his field, Data Scientists are in high demand and he is being significantly underpaid for what he does which is increasingly bothering him. His other Ts&Cs are also terrible i.e. he gets hardly any holidays, and everything is statutory minimum (pension, sick leave etc.). They also give no flexibility in terms of allowing him to work from home etc. which, when he has such a big commute, is difficult. So, he’s currently taking time to submit job applications, taking time out of work for interviews etc.
• To throw another spanner into the works (I told you we don’t do things by halves!) we are also expecting our first baby in July. After my husband got his new job and we knew he wouldn’t be going offshore anymore, we decided to start trying for a baby because all the advice said we shouldn’t bargain on anything happening instantly and it could take up to a year. Of course, I was pregnant after the first month of trying. So, a baby on the way is all the more reason we are keen to move closer to family, have a cheaper mortgage, reduce my husband’s commute so he can actually spend some time with the baby, and for my husband to have a better job so we have more disposable income and so he has better Ts&Cs (the final straw with his current job came when he realised they would only pay him statutory paternity pay so he wouldn’t get any paternity leave without taking a hit financially).
In light of all of the above, it will come as no surprise that my husband keeps on saying that he feels completely overloaded and that everything feels out of his control. He doesn’t deal well with stress and he lets everything build up. He can be very dramatic and ‘catastrophises’ everything in his mind.
This comes out by him having an ‘outburst’ every now and then, which I generally just don’t know how to deal with. Latest was last night – he was working on uni work yesterday, and getting increasingly frustrated and worked up over a problem. It’s not urgent uni work, isn’t assessed coursework or anything, so I suggested he step away from it and go back to it tomorrow – it was midnight by this point and he has work in the morning and also has a job interview so he still had to shave, sort out what he needed to take to the interview etc. – I had already spent the evening trying my best to help him out by looking out his suit, ironing his shirt etc. But he just wouldn’t leave it alone and instead just exploded and started shouting, there was just no reasoning with him. So I left him to it, went to bed, and in fairness to him he came upstairs and apologised to me 5 minutes later – the issue here isn’t that he shouted or anything like that, he’s generally a really lovely guy and we rarely argue.
The bottom line is I don’t know how to help him because when faced with stressful situations or problems, rather than ‘wallow’ or get worked up about it, I am a very practical and logical person who will just take a step back, look at one issue at a time, and say “right, what can I do to make this better?”
So I generally react by trying to offer him practical solutions that will help and because he’s just so wound up in the moment and is in such a negative mindset, he just dismisses them all, and I get frustrated because I think there are things he could do / people who could help and he just won’t reach out and do any of it, so then I don’t know what to do.
For example, he’s really not very good at speaking to people or asking for things / help, and I keep saying to him that the first thing he should do is have an honest discussion with his work about what he’s struggling with and see what they can offer him in terms of support i.e. flexibility with working, study time (they are paying for him to do his MSc), could they give him some paid paternity leave if he asks for it? Basically I’m very much of the view that if you don’t ask, you don’t get and I think he should at least be honest with them and have that discussion – if they don’t know he’s struggling, they can’t do anything to help. If he got some of those issues ironed out, he might not feel so desperate to look for a new job right away and that would take one thing off his plate for the time being.
The other big piece of advice I try to give him that just never goes down well is that he could try to manage his time better. He thinks I’m just telling him he’s lazy when I say this, which I absolutely am not because I know he works hard, but he does manage his time quite poorly. E.g. he spends a LOT of time playing computer games, and every weekend he sleeps in until 12-1 in the afternoon, and then moans that he doesn’t have enough time to do his uni work. I totally get that he needs a break and it’s important for him to take some time out – but although he does have a big commute, during the week we go to bed most nights around 11pm and he gets up at 7am so he’s still generally getting a good 8 hours sleep during the week and therefore I don’t think he really needs to be sleeping in until so late every weekend and he’s just wasting his already limited time. I don’t come at this from a position of ignorance either – I myself have not long completed an MSc which I did on a part-time basis over 3 years alongside work, so I know what it’s like to have to juggle work and studying, and how hard it is – he’s watched me do it.
On previous occasions when it’s been really bad I’ve even suggested he go to the doctor to get some help with managing stress / learning some coping strategies because he’s just not very good at handling the stress in his life and I’m worried he’s going to have an actual breakdown at some point because it’s not sustainable, but he just shrugs that off and says the doctor won’t be able to do anything because it’s not like they can take away any of the problems he has. He also enjoys clay pigeon shooting and is concerned that if he goes to the doctor with a mental health issue, this will affect his shotgun license – although I have tried to tell him that his health should come first.
Obviously we do have a lot going on, and I’m in no way dismissing the way he feels because feeling stressed is completely subjective and his feelings are completely valid; and I’m not saying that my advice is what’s right for him and he should just listen to me.
However, I am struggling to understand how best to support him and just wondered if anyone else has dealt with similar and can offer any words of wisdom for supporting a super stressed out husband! I’ve tried just listening and being there for him, I’ve tried offering practical solutions… but I just wish there was something more I could do!
Well done if you’ve got this far – thanks for reading and any advice would be welcomed, please be nice :)