Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
As I told someone earlier today:
This is not an “others have walked so that you can run” kind of situation. This is more like, an “others have run straight into the electric fence, so you should strongly consider walking” kind of thing.
This can apply to many things.
Go slowly. Make careful, measured decisions.
A letter writer in this week’s Hax chat drove me absolutely bananas.
She writes that “our work is equally valuable” – but she doesn’t indicate that she understands the multiple Senses of the word “value.”
Not all work is Remunerative.
Not all work is Emotionally Fulfilling.
These two things are orthogonal to one another. A job that puts a roof over your family’s head is Valuable-like-Remunerative. A job or hobby that makes you happy is Valuable-like-Fulfilling.
The LW needs to understand that she has an obligation to ensure that her children do not go homeless. That doesn’t make her hobby work any less Fulfilling or whatever, but it does mean that the fact that her hobby work is not Remunerative is a HUGE FUCKING ISSUE.
Here’s the text. I’ll go get the full link in a bit.
The end of our beautiful work paradigm
Guest
12:55 p.m.
Dear Carolyn,
My husband and I have always had an understanding that our work is equally valuable, even though his work is more traditional and brings in consistent benefits/salary, while mine is a balance of occasional freelance work that pays and artistic passion projects that usually don’t pay (some years actually costs us money). Getting to the place where we are mutually respectful of each other’s work took years and some therapy to achieve, but until recently we are in agreement that I am just as entitled to dedicate energy to my work as he is to his. (This would come up, for example, in balancing childcare and housework responsibilities—I get equal time to work even if the money it brings in isn’t equal.)
The problem is that with the looming federal overhaul, my husband’s work is more important and more vulnerable than ever. We’re okay for now, but we had a Come to Jesus talk the other day where he suggested (and I agreed) that there may be a point where we have to live on savings. If that happens, he says, we will need to both prioritize paid work, and we will both have to do whatever is possible to keep him employed (even if it means I no longer get my equal time).
As much as I understand why this has to be, my whole soul jumps up in rage against it. Carving out my weekly work hours was such a hard-won victory and one I feel defensive of with everyone outside my home, and now I have to go back to fighting for it with my husband too? His answer to that is “But we have to pay the mortgage.” Yes, but this was a beautiful phase and I am so angry that it’s ending. Any advice?
Carolyn Hax
Advice Columnist
You’re entitled to your anger, certainly. But you’re not entitled to dump it on the wrong person just because this is your personal third rail.
If I read you correctly, any compression to your time window for your work — if it happens — will come from forces outside your marriage. So get angry at them, not your husband.
Then find some healthy outlet for your anger so it doesn’t harm you and your husband through corrosion — which isn’t overtly wrong the way blaming him for his job vulnerability would be, but is an insidious problem that’s within your power to address.
This is all “if”; maybe the chaos fairy leaves you alone.
But related to this: The hard work you did to create and defend this arrangement can make protecting it your emotional default even when your husband’s mental health is the valid priority. If you can’t trust him, yourself and the foundation of your arrangement — enough to leave it “unguarded” while you prioritize him through (literally) newsmaking stress and turmoil — then that could create much bigger problems than whether you preserve the structure of your deal.
A deal that, I do want to note, grants 50-50 value to each of your work when yours apparently gives you passion/soul satisfaction and his carries the family. Any soul/passion payoff in it for him? Okay for me to assume not?
Either way, just on the money front: While I cheer the idea of granting equal value to work for the sake of work and not just for what it pays, it does seem as if your husband took on extra mental load in this deal financially.
While you’re waiting to see what happens and still just talking about this, you can — calmly — make it clear that you want any adjustments to be responsive to the moment only and not a permanent ceding of ground that has been so meaningful to you. Or, if you trust him to knwo this already, say out loud that you trust him. But I would save all that for after you convey to him that you will, of course, not leave him to carry ALL the worries of how the family’s bills will get paid if the chaos fairy does visit him.
Right? You will, if it comes to that, do whatever your family needs?
Something that crystallized recently, for me, is that financial advice from friends seems to come in two basic shapes:
I used to be more the first; but now, I’m striving to aim for the second. It’s less judgemental and more accepting of the fact that not all of us have the same financial priorities, and that’s okay.
I didn’t invent this term, but I think it’s a really excellent one, so I’m going to share it here. If you have an earlier citation for the use of this phrase, please leave it in the comments!
The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well.
The Advice Column Paradox: nobody writes into an advice column when things are going well. When we vent to our friends about our marriages, but don’t share the positive things, they may think things are worse than they are; but sometimes, there just aren’t positive things. (It’s why I always took pains to say “There’s good stuff too, I just don’t need help processing THAT” whenever we had these discussions. I try to be self-aware at least a little bit.)
It is very common to see, on Internet advice boards like r/relationships or r/AmITheAsshole, people complaining in the commenters always jump straight to “omg, divorce!” But what those people miss, I think, is the core of this paradox. If you are writing in to an Internet advice column, it is because something has gone wrong. Something may have gone so very wrong that they are writing in to an anonymous forum to ask for help. There is a strong possibility that they feel ashamed or afraid to ask the other people in their lives for help. The people who say “Modern couples are too quick to divorce” are either not saying that in good faith, or are ignorant of the fact of the Paradox. I don’t have a snappy name for this one; maybe we can call it the “Why So Much Divorce Corollary” or something.
Ultimately, this paradox and the corollary of people being confused by it is an example of selection bias. “You Should Break Up” being given as relationship advice is not overly common, percentage-wise; if half the advice column responses are “Break up!” and 1 in 100 people are writing into an advice column in the first place, then only half a percent of relationships are getting the “you should break up” advice. If you scale that out into the real numbers, it’s even smaller.
So, no: Advice column readers are not “too hasty” to tell people to divorce. And our culture is not somehow “devaluing” marriage by telling someone who is locked out of a bathroom while pregnant, or worse, that they need to leave to protect themself.
Emilybook 