How do I tell my partner that 1-2 hours talking about her work every night is too much?

My (29M) partner (29F) (together for 8 years) talks about her work every evening. That’s not a problem. I genuinely enjoy hearing about her day.

But the conversation about her work goes on for usually 1-2 hours each evening. We have a small window of chill-out time in the evenings, between 8 (when our kid goes to bed) and around 10 (when we do). The majority of that, most evenings, are taken up by conversations about her work in which I’m not really an active participant. Either it’s beyond my understanding, or I can’t get a word in. Afterwards, there’s not time to do anything else before going to bed. It usually takes us a week to get through one episode of whatever show we’re currently watching. Some days it’s ok, but some days I’ve had a bad day at work too, or had a down day in terms of mental health, and just need to have a relaxed evening, and as soon as I come down from putting our kid to bed, it’s work chat/rant time until it’s time for us to go to bed.

I’ve wanted to bring it up for a while - “this is taking up all of our free time, can we dial it back a bit?” - but I can’t see a way that it goes well. If my concentration ever lags, an hour or so in, she’ll go “you’re not interested at all, are you?” and won’t talk to me for the rest of the evening. She’s very sensitive to any sort of criticism, no matter how gently worded or tiptoed around.

I miss us talking about other things, having meaningful conversations and debates, rather than one-sided rants. (And yeah, sometimes just spending our downtime watching our shows.) How do I approach this?

tl;dr : vast majority of our free time is taken up by my partner talking about work, how do I gently approach this?

Submitted April 30, 2021 at 02:07PM by change-account-type https://ift.tt/3e4g0ym