Hello! This is my first time posting on Reddit so please be gentle...
My husband and I are both 40 and have been married for 13 yrs with two little ones. In an ideal world we’d both stay in our careers long term.
As things stand, my husband works in a lab almost 1.5 hours away from our current house and he gets up at 5:30 AM to get to work so that he can leave earlier and get home by a decent time. I have an amazing 8-5 job as a pulmonary attending (minimal critical care). I have time to care for both children and drop them off at daycare before leaving for work and my husband picks them up in the afternoon.
I have been under a lot of pressure from both his family and my family to move closer to where he works. When I look into jobs near his lab most are pulmonary and critical care jobs that are standard 7AM-7 PM shifts or vise versa 7PM-7AM (1 week on, 1 week off). Working in a MICU is also highly stressful and frankly some nights I don’t sleep at all due to the acuity of patient care. Most night I get fragmented sleep with 2-3 hours here or there between pages. I’m also making a little more than double his salary but frankly, I don’t care about my salary so much as having a decent quality of life and being able to spend time with the children. As people say back in school, what’s the point of having a big house if you can’t live in it? Incidentally we have 1.5k sq ft colonial built in the 1940s and really do need a bigger house the accommodate everyone.
My husband and both our families would like me to move. He often brings up his commute time during family gatherings and have even begun looking up job opportunities and forwarding them to me. I love my husband very much and am concerned for his safety, but when I asked him why he cannot move instead he says that as a Princeton graduate he can “accomplish more” at his current lab than anywhere else. As far as I know he has made no effort to explore other job opportunities because he wants to retire at his current position.
So in summary if I move I will have to resume a highly stressful job with long hours, poor to sometimes no sleep, and a high burnout rate(48 % per 2018 Medscape survey but lower than some other medical specialities) . The advantage would be that we can probably get a bigger house without spending a ton since the area is more rural. If my husband moves, he may not accomplish as much academically as he would like but at least it will still be a 9-5 job. In fact if he moved we can both have stable 9-5 and family friendly jobs. I’ve told him it’s highly unlikely that any new job for him will require an urgent analysis at 3AM whereas that’s exactly what I I will be doing if I gave up my job instead.
Anyways, am I being unreasonable by not finding another job? Should I just take the plunge, get a new job, sell the house and move closer to his employer? Or should we move so that I drive 30 min and he 1 hr for work instead with me keeping my job? Everyone seems to prioritize his career over BOTH of us having decent job hours or some semblance of quality of life. If he moved closer to where I am working we can potentially be set for years (assuming it works for him), but considering that he refuses to change jobs and said that he’d rather drive than switch jobs I feel enormous pressure to switch instead.
We have a nice house in a safe community, excellent schools, and I like my current job very much. I don’t want to switch jobs, hate the stress and the hours, and end up resenting him for making me move in the first place but I feel enormous guilty seeing him drive so far every day. I keep thinking that if only he’s accept “accomplishing less” and get at 9-5 near me then we’d be set. I know it’s not nearly that simple but any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
tl:dr My husband refuses to consider a job switch and would prefer that I give up my job to take on a highly stressful and physically demanding job instead.
Submitted July 26, 2019 at 10:53PM by Reddituser5100 https://ift.tt/32YdeTQ
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