My (F41) husband (M38) is demanding that my company hire him but I know now that he doesn't actually support me.

My husband, I'll call him Dave, and I have been together ten years and work in the same field. It is competitive and moves fast. Both of us have struggled to establish ourselves, and done a good job of it, getting good contracts and we are both well respected by our peers. However the contract nature means that there's always the possibility of periods of unemployment between work, and it can be hard to keep your morale up. We've both been at it for a long time now and have lots of experience with that part of the job.

Recently (last couple of years) some colleagues and I made our own start up, one that specifically caters to women's needs. We've worked our butts off to make the business grow and we've established ourselves in the industry to the point where we've been able to enjoy a regular client base and solid to good income.

While this has been going on my husband is still in the regular routine of making bids for jobs, always waiting for client companies to hire him. My steady income has been an incredible boon for us during this time, and I've been paying on average %80 of the monthly expenses. I emphasize average because there are some bills that he regularly pays, and when he's working more he contributes. But it's me and my income from this startup that has been the reliable bulk of the income that makes sure the roof is over our head, the lights are on and there's food on the table.

I want to make it clear that I don't mind being the breadwinner nor do i hold that against him. Certainly after our son was born and I couldn't work he was the one out in the workplace while i was home. (I did go back to work part time after three months because we don't get parental leave in our field). I know that any stability we have is not guaranteed and I'm proud to be able to provide for us and support him while I can. I also think he's incredibly good at his job.

When I was first spending a lot of time getting the business going he struggled a lot with feelings of low self-esteem. It takes a lot to keep morale up at the best of times, and the sight of my business achieving a lot of success while he was going through hard times really got to him. We went through a long phase where he would take his resentment out on me with shitty emails and texts, demanding that I be home more even when he knew that me and my work were what was keeping us fed and housed, complaining about the unfairness of our industry. He would minimize what I contributed to the household, namely all the finances, saying "that's all you do". It was very hard. I sympathized with him because I've been there too, but it was very hurtful to have him dumping on me that way. He is not white, and faces subtle racism at work and in the world. He became focussed on that problem and how it impacts him and others in our profession. He's not wrong about that, but he started blaming any work that he didn't get on race. Again, he's not wrong, but at the same time he's, to be honest, kind of lazy. He spends a lot of his time gaming, not doing any professional development, not doing the hustle that all of us have to do to secure contracts. He would get defensive and petulant and hard to talk to. I struggled to balance sympathizing with tough love, or to figure out when to listen and when to give helpful advice.

At some points it was a 24/7 pity party. I almost left, but decided to stay. At the time it was for the sake of our son, but since then we've been able to work through it to a large degree. He's genuinely been better about dealing with his feelings and slowly has gotten a handle on not taking it out on me. When he's not resentful, he's great. I love being with him, talking to him, and I'm glad I stayed. Watching him work through his feelings and grow is one of my joys of our committed relationship. He's even gotten to the point where he's trying to start his own business, which I think is fantastic. He and his partner have had a few false starts finding investors but their business plan is solid and I think they would be great successes.

During this time I've made sure that our company has hired him regularly when we have large jobs. All of us who started it are committed to lifting our families and colleagues with us and I'm not the only one who has their significant other involved. I try to strike the right respectful balance and not bring him in so much that other people resent him or that he seems like he's getting all the work. He's great at his job whenever we use him and it's been helpful to him to be associated with our company. I know for a fact that other jobs for him came out of contacts he made while working with us.

I really thought we were getting to a good place and I had really begun to let go of the anxiety I feel around my success. I felt more confident in him and trusted him more, and it was great to feel that I didn't have to walk on eggshells. Also he had a pretty good year last year, and I thought he had matured and really started to own his shit.

Well, cut to last night. We have both have laptops that are around the house. We mostly use our own but quite regularly reach for the other person's if it's closer and we want to hop on the interwebs. On his laptop I use Chrome while he uses Safari, so we each have our own pages logged in on the different browsers. So, I'm on youtube when Messages starts popping up replies from the text conversation he's having with a mutual friend while he's in the other room. When that happens i usually notice them but ignore them, that is until one of them says "Yeah that's fucked up you feel you have to beg your wife for a job." Reddit, I am not that strong, I went and clicked on the conversation.

There it was, all the resentment I thought he'd left behind. He was complaining that another colleague's girlfriend works with us because he thinks he is more experienced than her. I'll call her Melanie. I can't agree with his take on her working with us because a) he has it wrong, she works with us occasionally, and it works out to just as much time as he does and b) yes, he's got more direct experience, but she has a related PhD, - and she's a woman. Our business caters to women. Also, and here's where it gets emotional for me, she is a huge supporter of our business. He is not. Unless I'm actually hiring him, he doesn't go out of his way to ask about it and I learned in the bad times to just not mention it because it bothered him so much. I knew all this, but in the text conversation he confessed to his friend that he's never actually read any of the stuff I've sent him, he's never watched the promotional videos we've worked so hard on. (In our everyday life he's even made comments about how he's kind of sick of white women and doesn't, for example, want to go see movies about them. Now I realize, I'm in that category.) Yet in the same text convo last night, while he's admitting he's taken almost no interest in my business, he's complaining that we haven't given him a more permanent job, and that he deserves it.

Reddit, how do I handle this? First, I shouldn't even know all this. I own that I went and read a conversation not meant for me. Do I act on this knowledge of how he really feels? Or does it count more that he is trying to give me his good side? Is that part of how he deals with his feelings, venting to someone?

Secondly, it's very hard not to take this personally. I sympathize with his feelings of being deprived but goddammit, it would be really nice to have enthusiastic support from my life partner. It's very hard not to add up all the times he's completely failed to say "I'm so proud of you" or come out to our events or let me celebrate my wins like I can with anyone else in my life. I don't want to fall into a dynamic of hoarding a list of grievances.

Thirdly, and I'm beginning to think this is the more important, I think I've lost respect for him. What kind of person thinks they deserve to be handed a job at a company they clearly have disdain for and have done little to no research on? A spoiled child, that's who. And now I'm thinking of him that way, that he's a spoiled teen who demands his mom give him a break. And he ALREADY works with us. But now, I'm resenting the opportunities I've given him.

I don't know how to talk to him about this without activating all his old anger and defensiveness. God knows my own anger is activated right now. This time of year is traditionally his worst, what with the sun going away and the shit weather. I don't want to talk to him about it until I'm more calm.

Please help me think this through, give me insight, help me with my perspective. How do I regain my respect for my husband? How do I let him work out his feelings of resentment without becoming resentful myself?

TL,DR: My husband resents my professional success but also thinks my company that he barely supports should give him a job. I am having trouble respecting him now.

Edited for minor spelling

Submitted February 26, 2019 at 07:49AM by boomadley https://ift.tt/2BV3DB1