How should I (M45) deal with a wife (F47) who would prefer working for minimum wage instead of using her law degree?
7KImportant background: My wife has chronic fatigue syndrome. She worked full-time for a few years after we got married; she is an attorney and was earning ~$75K/year. In 2010, however, her illness became too much to manage while also holding down a job and for the next nine years I was the sole breadwinner for our family. We have paid roughly $500 each year for her to maintain her law license even though she has not been using it. This has been an incredible strain, particularly once we added a couple of kids, but during that time I NEVER pushed her to go back to work because I understood that it might just be too much for her to deal with. But four years ago a mutual friend of ours asked my wife to occasionally spend a few hours per week helping out in a clerical role for minimum wage and she agreed. This gradually turned into my wife working 15-20 hours a week, and occasionally working as much as 35 hours in a week. She would come home utterly exhausted and would sleep through most of the following weekends.
After a few months of this, I pointed out to her that if she can physically manage regularly working in an office for that amount of time, perhaps she should consider doing (MUCH more lucrative) legal work instead. I noted that she could work from home (no need to get dressed up or deal with a commute), and that if she billed just FIVE hours per week – one hour per weekday – she could roughly double our household income. Even so, I only offered this as a consideration – I did not insist. Several opportunities have presented themselves over the past few years for her to resume work as a lawyer; although she sometimes expressed minimal interest, she did not actually pursue any of them. When our friend asks, she continues to do the clerical work at minimum wage.
Last December, after a year of particularly acute financial stress, I finally put my foot down. I told my wife that the family NEEDED her to start earning more. A small wills & trusts practice would be a low-pressure approach that would give her all the scheduling flexibility she could possibly need. I reiterated that I was only asking her to do work from home for five hours each week, and I offered to help her get started. I also started setting deadlines by which I would ask for her to report progress toward the goal of starting a new law practice. Over the first six months of this year I know she has (grudgingly) made some effort to move in this direction, but still does not seem inclined to actually start doing the legal work.
I have about reached my wits' end. I love my wife and divorce is absolutely not an option, but I am starting to really resent her unwillingness to take the steps necessary to help carry the family's financial burden. I have used every gentle approach I can think of to tell her how important this is to me, but to little avail. A couple of weeks ago I was literally about ten minutes away from demanding that she find a marriage counselor for us to talk to (I was rehearsing in my head the exact way I wanted to approach it), but I ended up pulling back at the last minute because I do not think she would take that well and I also felt like that was one of those bridges that, once crossed, can never be uncrossed. And so, Reddit, I am asking for advice. Should I tell her that we need to see a marriage counselor? Should I take some other approach?
EDIT, to provide additional context:I am a public interest attorney focusing on civil rights/civil liberties with a non-profit that my wife and I founded together. Although I am able to take on amazing cases, our organization is much more non-profit than most. We bring in an average of $45K-55K per year and we have two sets of student loans to pay off. For the past decade we have lived in her parents' basement in a rural county and the amount I am able to bring in by myself is just barely enough to keep us afloat, with zero money being set aside for retirement. The twenty hours of work per *month* – not per week – I am asking her to do (which I would be willing to help with) would bring in an additional $15K-30K per year.
SECOND EDIT:
Thanks much to most of the people who have taken an interest in this post and have provided their insight. I do appreciate it. That said, I wanted to clarify a few more points that will address some of the assumptions built into a number of the comments.
First point – Someone could drop a million dollars on our family tomorrow and we would not choose to live somewhere else. My in-laws are AMAZING people, which is how they produced the amazing woman that I love. I feel that many commenters do not appreciate the fact that two people can love each other very much and be mostly very happy, but still have one particular, significant issue that creates tension or frustration. You don't divorce someone you love and are very happy living with over one frustration, even if that frustration becomes quite significant. You look for ways to fix the problem, which is why I wrote this post in the first place. And for people who question having kids even though they're expensive… I suggest a little perspective. For the entirety of human history up until just a few decades ago, pretty much everyone alive was much, much poorer than my family is right now. I believe that children (especially *our* children) are a blessing and a gift. No amount of material wealth or comfort would be worth not having them.
Second point – Where I grew up, suggesting marital counseling would almost inevitably be seen as a prelude to asking for a divorce. It is not something that anyone would take lightly. I am considering this course of action because I recognize that there is an issue in our marriage that we really do need to address and because I am aware that the only ideas I have been able to come up with lately (other than counseling) are likely to be far more harmful for our relationship than they would be helpful. Thus the question I presented: “Should I tell her that we need to see a marriage counselor? Should I take some other approach?” Also, although I see how harsh my phrasing sounds where I said I was near to “demanding she find a marriage counselor for us,” I feel that this is a matter of not expressing myself well. My wife is plugged into a large group of local moms, several of whom have pursued counseling related to their own marriages. In my mind, asking her to choose a marriage counselor would make sense (1) because she could get opinion from a number of people who have experience with this sort of counseling, and (2) because it would ensure that she could select someone *she* was comfortable with rather than someone I just scraped up. I definitely phrased that element of the original comment poorly, and for that I apologize.
Third point – My wife's ability to work is something we have discussed together for several years. For about a decade, her working was absolutely out of the question. I never even suggested that she should work during that time, much less encouraged her to. Over the past four years, however, her condition *has* improved. I did not mention it in the original post, but in addition to the minimum wage work she's done, she has also assumed leadership positions in a couple of different community groups. She invests several hours a week into the planning and financial management of these groups, although none of it is paid. I'm thrilled – seriously thrilled! – that she is now able to do these sorts of things because, as noted, for almost a solid decade there was absolutely no way she could have. But now that it seems clear (to me at least) that she has the capacity for these additional things, both paid and unpaid, my hope has been that she would channel at least part of that capacity into more remunerative work. Again, if it was a question of her feeling *unable* to do what I've asked, I would not be asking it. Not at all. But over the past four years, she has never said that what I am asking is unreasonable or that she lacks the willingness or ability to do it… she just hasn't done it.
Final point – She and I established our non-profit because, although I know some will feel it foolhardy, we care deeply about representing people who would otherwise have *no one* willing or able to take their cases. That's the entire reason I got into law in the first place. Furthermore, in many ways our non-profit is our first child. I would only give up the work and the organization I love if it is an absolute last resort. And, to be clear, I would indeed do that if I felt like we just didn't have any other alternative. But as one commenter correctly noted, taking one of those lucrative jobs would mean not only abandoning the principles and the organization that we worked so nude to build and maintain, it would also almost certainly require us to move to a larger city which would take us away from the community and family members that we love. And so I would hope that the marriage counseling route would allow us to figure out if my wife really is simply not *able* to do more remunerative work – in which case I would *immediately* abandon any expectation of her doing so – or whether for whatever reason she would simply prefer not to. If she *can't* do it, then I may indeed need to consider taking a big-money job and moving the family somewhere else. But if it turns out that she is, in fact, capable of doing this sort of work but either (1) needs additional help to get the ball rolling, or (2) simply doesn't *want* to do this kind of work, that's precisely what I am hoping marriage counseling might help us discern and address.
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