I'm specifically looking for help with supporting my partner in finding a new job/career and if/when it's time to apply some tough love here in regards to that and in regards to his gaming.
We've been together for 10 years. We're polyamorous (this is relevant to the beginning).
About 2 years into our relationship, he broke up with his other partner, who was incredibly abusive. They'd been dating before we got together, for context.
After their break up, his gaming went way up. He used to game a few hours a night, a couple nights a week. He started gaming nearly all the time when he wasn't working. While I wasn't exactly OK with it, I fully understood that it was a coping mechanism. It's one I've used myself. So I figured, I'll give it six months to a year, and then see where we are.
He never went back to pre-break-up gaming levels. Since a year-ish past the break up, he games a probably a minimum of 3-4 hours a day, any day he is not working (when he works, he usually works a minimum of 10 hours, so on days he works, he is basically ONLY working). I don't actually know, because I'd be at work 10 hours a day, so maybe he was gaming the entire day. What I can say for sure is that 1) he was doing his share of the chores while I was at work and 2) in the evenings, I personally saw him gaming that 3-4 hour minimum.
I wasn't wild about it, I could live with it and while it did bother me, I'd think to myself "if this was any other hobby that he did this much, would I care?" and the answer is no, I don't think I would.
Now comes the pandemic. It destroyed his industry (he does something related to live entertainment and live events). He has faithfully job searched but we're in Brooklyn and I don't think any coffee shop or grocery store or big box store has any interest in hiring him when there's a lot of other people way less over-qualified and likely to stay looking for jobs. He does stay up on getting unemployment. And he's finally started working a tiny bit again (a few days in February, and he has a few jobs lined up for March already).
He was depressed and just starting to make headway on it when the pandemic happened. But now...he games all day every day. It's the first thing he does in the morning. It's the last thing he does at night. I have no idea how much he games, but I would say a minimum of 10 hours a day. Probably as many as 12-14 regularly.
Meanwhile, I work from home (office job). Some days I only have about 4 hours of work to do. Some days I have 12.
When I'm not working, I spend a lot of time on my side hustle. I'm working on building a business that bring in passive income that can help make up for the income shortfalls with his job and/or get us (at this point mainly me) to retirement early.
Ironically, I am a gamer too, or at least I used to be. But you know what? Since the pandemic, I don't really feel financially secure enough to lose myself in a game for hours at a time once a week, much less daily.
I have encouraged him to look for a new career, because we don't know if his industry is ever going to come back. Right now, I suspect that it'll come back to maybe 50% of what it used to be within the next few years. Maybe. He loves it, and it used to make really good money, so I have encouraged him to think about careers that can successfully be done on a freelance or do-your-own business level. Like, for example, if he wanted to go to school for being a tradesperson, that's something where he could build up a roster of satisfied customers and do it and if his industry ever fully recovered he could still do it on the side if he wanted and/or when his main job is slow (His main job is very cyclical, with busy and slow seasons every year).
It's really important to me that whatever he does, he doesn't hate and spend every day waking up hating his job. We have enough money & flexibility for him to think this through and figure out (and even try a few things out!) what makes him happy.
In the meantime, I suggested he turn an oversized closet into our house into a workshop for him. He'd expressed an interest in woodwork, but it really needs its own space and door. And depending on what he made and how much he liked making it, that could actually be the 2nd job that he does. That's totally possible. I'd be fine & dandy with that.
The thing is, gaming continues to be the main thing he spends his time on. In theory, he's been thinking about another career for about 8 months now, with no headway. He's been working on this workshop for about a month, but it's literally like, his hobby that he does when he isn't gaming.
To me, he treats gaming like a fucking job. And I'm totally sick of it.
Just to throw it out there, in terms of other house stuff, he is a pretty good partner. He does close to half the chores. He's doing all the cooking & grocery shopping. So he definitely does not sit on his butt only playing computer games and expecting me to do everything (if he tried, I would have thrown him out and/or divorced him the second that shit started).
Now all that said, I am so tired of this gaming and so disgusted with it that I can barely look at him right now. He was going to work on refinishing the floor in the workshop yesterday, but ended up feeling kinda off and miserable and didn't get around to it yesterday (though he did game for, you know, 10 hours). Then today, I ran into our bedroom to grab some of my medication around noon and he was up and sitting in fucking Eve, looked like he was waiting for some people to get on to go out and have a battle together and I screamed in my head because there is no goddamn reason on the fucking planet why he should be playing fucking Eve on Monday afternoon while I continue to work my ass off at my job. There are seriously about a million things that need to be done in our house.
If you're still reading, this is what I think he needs to do, and I want to know if it's reasonable.
Monday through Thursday or Friday, roughly during work hours (I don't expect him to get up at like 8am or anything, let's say 10am-6pm, with a break for lunch, of course) he gets up and he does projects around the house, works on building his workshop, and then starts making things in his workshop once that's done like it's his job. Ostensibly, there will also be some figuring out what he's going back to school to do during that time as well, as well as figuring out what would be needed money-wise, and all that jazz. If he wants to do his chores/grocery shopping during that time too, awesome (I say that mainly because when I'm taking a break during my WFH workday, I often do my chores so I don't need to do them in the evening). The important thing is that he is either working on stuff that makes our lives better/easier in a non-monetary way or he's figuring out (and then doing) the stuff that is going to get him working again and making our lives better/easier in a monetary way. So that we're a fucking team working together and not one person working a full-time job and doing a side hustle while the other person plays games 10-14 hours a day and occasionally dabbles in working towards the future.
In the evening, and on the weekends, if he wants to game, game away. Even if it is all evening, if it's his free time, he should be able to do what he wants with it, even if I don't like it. If I felt like I had a partner who was doing something during work hours on work days to actually make money, I think I'd be way less furious about the gaming overall.
Before anybody asks, we are in couples therapy. I have mentioned the gaming repeatedly before. I plan on bringing it up again this week because I realized today that I am no longer attracted to him specifically because of his gaming. Because that seems to be his priority. Because he does it more than any other fucking thing in his life including sleep and I would have NEVER gotten married to him if I knew he would be so incredibly bad at self-regulating his gaming. I have repeatedly said I think he needs to get one of those activity trackers to see how much he actually games. I think he hasn't because he does know deep down how much he games and if he saw the actual numbers, he'd be sick over it.
Do I sound reasonable? Is there anything I should be doing differently? Any advice on how to tackle this?
TLDR: Husband's excessive gaming while unemployed is ruining our relationship. Is what I want in order to fix this before it can't be saved unreasonable?
Submitted March 01, 2021 at 01:10PM by Celany https://ift.tt/2Prj11O
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