‘My Husband Just Keeps Losing His Job’
“If Robert yells at me just one more time - about anything - our marriage is over,” announces Gloria, 33, mother of two and an accountant with a brokerage firm. “I don’t understand what brings on Rob’s sudden explosions, but I’ve had about as much as I can take.”
All Gloria did this time, she reports, was ask Robert if he wanted her to help him fix up the new photography studio he plans to open in their garage. “He’s been complaining for months that my work obligations have been holding him up. Now I found the time, and he’s furious that I’m telling him what to do!”
Gloria insists she’s not trying to boss her husband, but she is worried. If Robert doesn’t get his business going soon, she fears they will lose their house. “I can’t support this family on my salary,” she says wearily.
Robert, who until recently worked in a university’s photo department, has a history of unemployment - and it’s wreaking havoc with their lives. “Each time he’s been laid off, it has not been his fault,” Gloria emphasizes. “He’s just always in the wrong place at the wrong time.” What she can’t understand, however, is why he refuses to even look for part-time positions until the job of his dreams comes along. “He keeps telling me he has to be available for assignments.” Meanwhile, he sits home all day, not helping with housework or child care, and carping about how his wife is deserting her children by being at an office all day.
Robert, 34, feels horrible about the way he blows up at Gloria. “My wife and daughters mean more to me than anything in the world,” he says slowly, “and there’s no excuse for the way I lose control.” But Robert feels his whole life is out of control. “When I was growing up, everything seemed so much simpler. Dad was an easygoing appliance salesman who liked to fish and watch football, while Mom kept the home fires burning,” he recalls.
“The early years of our marriage were so happy. I know it sounds corny, but I think we both pictured ourselves straight out of an episode of “Ozzie and Harriet,” with me working hard and Gloria staying home to raise our children.” That’s why he feels like such a failure now. Starting his own business is his last hope. “But I can’t look for a part-time job at the same time,” he says. “What client would put up with a photographer who said he couldn’t take on an assignment because today was his day to work at the gas station?”
Staying in the game when the rules change
“This couple’s problems are less a result of differences between the two of them than of the pressures each feels to conform to society’s expectations,” notes Martin Gilbert, a counselor in Albuquerque, N.M. Gloria and Robert always believed that if they played by the rules they would be rewarded. That meant Rob as the breadwinner, Gloria as the homemaker. When circumstances dictated otherwise, they both felt like failures and couldn’t get themselves or their marriage back on track.
Many find the going rough when plans go awry and changes become necessary. Here are ways you can better cope with such circumstances:
1. Rewrite the script. Gloria and Robert see themselves as roles rather than individuals. They must redefine their idea of success. Nowhere is it written in stone that the husband must always earn more money than the wife or that a good wife must stay home with her children all day. Yet even today, too many people cling to deep-seated beliefs that this is so.
2. Challenge negative thinking. When you experience a setback, instead of thinking automatically “I’m a failure,” try to see the episode as an isolated or temporary event. Tell yourself: “I didn’t get the job this time, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ever get one.” Consider whether your fear of change is due to genuine limitations or someone else’s evaluation of you.
3. Stop thinking of reasons why you can’t change and start working on how you can. Resilient people don’t think of problems or setbacks as personality flaws but rather as something caused by a specific problem. That’s why they bounce back from adversity better than others.
4. Break down change into doable tasks. As Gloria and Robert discovered, learning to change course when you are forced to is a process of reviewing and altering your perspective as you gradually find your compass. In time, they both learned to concentrate on the positive qualities each contributes to the marriage.