Reminds me of a class I took at the University of Illinois, it was a seminar in entrepreneurship for engineers, if I remember correctly.
I believe a CEO of a $100M+ company came in and gave a speech. His first slide had a PowerPoint, on which he put something like, "3...2...1." Then he said, "3 wives, 2 divorces, and 1 heart attack. That's the real cost of entrepreneurship." I've remembered it ever since.
Plenty of people who were never entrepreneurs suffer the same or worse.. and do so while earning a tiny pittance of what CEOs make.
Lack of money causes all sorts of additional stress on families as well... including health issues from not being able to afford health care, or only getting poor quality healthcare, or not being able to afford preventative care, eating poorly, living in dangerous/polluted areas, not being able to afford to send your kids to college, not being able to afford vacations, etc..
Not to mention the stress of being treated like shit or replaceable cogs by the people above you in work environments that are unhealthy or unsafe.
CEOs have it easy.
There's a scene in the book where the author is interviewing the thief in prison during one of his (several) custodial sentences, and the conversation goes something like this:
Author: You're intelligent, erudite, charming. Why don't you become a lawyer or something?
Thief: It takes about 10 years to become a lawyer, with undergrad, law school, articleing, etc. I don't want to do any of that. But say I did, a partner at a top firm makes what, $600k? That's around what I'm alleged to have made this year
Author: But what about the strain on your family?
Thief: Because lawyers don't get divorced?
It continues like this for awhile as the thief very persuasively argues the risk adjusted returns of high-end larceny
So let's say a partner at a top 100 firm in 2008, latest?
No one has nor should have a monopoly on sympathy.
Did it, though? That sort of misfortune can and does happen even without entrepreneurship, and might well have happened to him anyway.
Of course he did, as it made his enormous wealth seem like the result of great sacrifices.
You see this all the time.
Why do the rich deserve all their money? Because they made such great sacrifices and took all those tremendous risks. It's self-aggrandizement and self-justification.
Low wage workers make sacrifices and take risks just as great (or greater) all the time, but no one is going to pay hundreds of dollars a plate to hear them give a keynote speech humblebragging about how they worked so hard they had 3 heart attacks during their minimum wage jobs (from which they probably got fired for having to miss work), or how their marriages broke up... which happens all the time.
That's not to disagree with you, we often overlook the struggles and challenges of people in lower economic classes or less prestigious positions. More just to say I didn't get that humble brag vibe at all.
Oh, and I also don't know if he got paid, as I think he was an alumnus and it may have just been a volunteer speech. Again, I know there are other speeches in which people do get paid and follow the pattern you outlined, just saying I don't think this was one of them.
One of the biggest problems is the fact that anything you can do can be done better by paying someone else to do nothing but the thing you want to do yourself.
“I went through girlfriends (who threatened) — ‘It is your business or me,'” the Shark Tank investor recalled. “And I was like — ‘What is your name again?’ It was just non-stop.”
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/shark-tank-star-mar...
I'm not endorsing that comment. I just thought it was interesting to see how a notable entrepreneur approached relationships. He did later get married after achieving financial success, and presumably knows his wife's name.
In the US our culture tends to really emphasize dating as a step towards finding the mythical "one" and getting married, and it's "bad" to have sex or really any form of intimacy unless you are in a relationship. When you are younger this is normally the assumed basis for a relationship, and complicates having any form of companionship that is not based on "Maybe we should tie our lives together forever!".
Obviously as we get older and gain experience with the varied forms relationships can take it's easier to realize (and even admit/discuss!) that one partner is really looking for more of a good friend with benefits situation than a "life partner audition".
I translate "It is your business or me" as "I require more of your attention than I have been getting to continue investing myself in this relationship" - which is also very valid.
If sex work was not so stigmatized, arranging the attentions of a high class escort for a year would probably leave everyone involved much happier. (I am not talking about simply sex here, but talking, attending parties, all the normal early date stuff, but starting from a position of "I want a companionship, but I can't invest my time in a relationship right now. I do happen to other assets I can invest instead if you are interested? )
Anyway, I'm grateful for you showing another side to this, thank you.
If you find your worth from within, or perhaps from without in a very broad sense (making something big that the world needs/wants/admires), then 1:1 is not so important.
It took years, several jobs, and therapy before my eyes were open. Nobody cares, you are a human and have a life, if your employer does not understand that you need a new one.
I am lucky enough to have savings and a very supportive partner, and even so it is stressful. Certainly without either or both of those things I would likely still be sticking it out at the current job (especially with the various things that were offered when I handed in my notice). I sympathise with those that feel trapped.
He gets really sad and jaded when he talks about that decision.
I put this real-life story in contrast, just to prove that it's not just about "Always listen to your wife, she is always reasonable". For the trivial stuff like putting away your shoes or your socks, fine. But some decisions make a career and determine the future success of your offspring.
My father gave me one specific piece of advice that stuck with me through the entirety of the time I can remember, and it also helped me out quite a lot in life. The advice wasn't directly related to marriage or anything like that, it was about making major decisions in general. I didn't truly understand what it meant at the time, but once I realized it, it hit me like a truck and put a lot of things in perspective.
He said "Always listen to everyone's opinions, but always make your own decision."
Being a teenager at the time, I misinterpreted it as "listen to what everyone else says and then do your own different thing." A very typical non-conformist teenager take. But much later on, I realized that it meant something entirely different.
What he actually meant: "You should consider others' opinions when making a major decision, as it can let you make a better and more informed one. If you picked a decision that aligned with what someone else advised, that's absolutely fine. But, in the end, you own that decision and the consequences. You cannot hide behind a 'so and so advised that, which is why I made it' excuse. You are responsible for it, and you cannot blame people who provided their perspective for the resulting outcome."
Thinking about this piece of advice when making major life decisions helps me a lot. Both with pulling the trigger on it in a more informed way and accepting the eventual outcome.
The advice is good but is lacking. It should have been
"Always listen to your wife, she is always reasonable. But in the end, you have to make the decision yourself and take responsibility for it".
I remember reading about this in David Deida's The Way of the Superior Man.
Oh please. The writing was on the wall. If he's playing the "climb the corporate ladder" game nobody should surprised when he draws the "manage the Mongolian division" card. Expecting him to give that up when climbing the corporate ladder is the life he's chosen is somewhere on the spectrum from foolish to selfish.
Likewise if your boyfriend is mechanically inclined don't wake up one day complaining about the fleet of project cars and the heavy equipment that are cluttering up your property. You knew that was the life you were signing up for looked like.
There's a reason literally every culture has a litany of proverbs for women about not trying to change their men (and there's similiar but different proverbs for men).
You're making a straw man argument here... none of the comments above say "defer completely" or "every single decision".
Everything changes all the time without exception. Getting used to change serves everyone.
And besides, it's pretty clear HE regrets the decision. Maybe learn something from the person who lived the experience.
> Everything changes all the time without exception. Getting used to change serves everyone.
This statement is meaningless. Change in life is constant, but everything doesn't change all the time. You weaponize this statement as if to say we - or at least one spouse - should abdicate their agency in their own or their shared life.
Which is pretty ironic because if saying "everything changes constantly" is meaningless, what about your advice to "learn" from a comment on the internet about a man he doesn't know at all that "regrets" something neither of us really know about ?
One example has zero value as a "life changing lesson" and one can regret objectively awful things (regretting the feeling while high on drugs, etc).
The OP's statement was a truism used - in this instance - to critique the wife for not "adapting to change". I think I made that pretty clear in my comment. If you can apply that BS truism here, why not elsewhere? Why not just always go with the flow, never have desires or motivations of your own? Why ever object to undesired life changes?
It bothered me, as you can tell. It's not advice based in the reality of a shared life. Telling someone unhappy with the direction of their life that "getting used to change serves everyone" is terrible, borderline offensive advice. The worst takeaway is to blame the woman for not going along to get along, which dijonman2 sure seemed to be doing to me.
I'll take the critique of my own comment, though my point remains: the person who wrote the article was trying to impart a life lesson they learned a hard way, and I encourage that user (and all of us) to reflect on it and potentially learn something. My "maybe" wasn't passive aggressive by intent, it was meant to be interpreted literally, albeit not expressed in a very considerate way.
I agree we should try to improve things that can be improved, but I guess this example's extreme nature (international relocation) makes it difficult to have a nuanced talk about couples' intra-dynamics...
The marriage still fell apart.
No single decisions is totally all-bad or all-good.
He should be making every reasonable effort to support her.
You're just making stuff up. You don't know this is the case.
Marriage requires compromise on both ends. I don't see the irony.
I think entering a new job is similar, I may think I'm going to really like the job, but then when I'm actually doing the job I realize there are things I didn't consider and don't like it. Luckily, I can quit a job easily. In a marriage - you have to grow together if you want it to work.
There is a book which describes exactly what the author of the article realized too late, it's better to learn it via reading than in hindsight:
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
In this current example we don't know anything about their couple history or dynamics.
And going from "she didn't want us to move abroad" to men not expecting their partner "having any opinion" is a strawman.
Why equal ? Can (s)he have an _equal_ say in the next car purchase when (s)he 1)knows nothing about mechanics 2)doesn't work etc... ?
I don't get some people's obsession with equality in every aspects of life...
Not the OP nor GP, but I think the person who sought after an ambitious spouse is equally responsible for understanding the trade-offs.
The term “married to their career/job” was an old term when I was a child growing up in the 1970 and 1980s.
That ambition comes at a veey well-known cost.
I’ve also read and heard more than my fair share of dissolved marriages, because the main provider was always working; but how many spouses are willing to live far beneath their means, to accommodate for a better work life-balance?
Approximately zero spouses who complain about glass-dishwasher-alignment will sacrifice by lifting the breadwinner's burden. Sorry, folks. Everyone is entitled to self-realization and higher meaning, however, if you're being supported by someone who works 40, 50, whatever hours per week, suck it up and move the glass. Any other position simply is a symptom of major problems further up in the paragraph and has nothing to do with glasses, dishwashers or anything else.
There, the fault lies with the provider in either choosing the wrong spouse; they should have been pickier.
Or being an unaware jack-ass. For the latter, it helps to list out the responsibilities, to make sure the division of labor is equitable.
Or marriage counseling.
> however, if you're being supported by someone who works 40, 50, whatever hours per week, suck it up and move the glass.
An ambitious worker—the topic I’m responding to—isn’t putting in a mere 40 hours a week. More like 60 to 80 hours if not more.
Those workers also face divorce for being inattentive, but they’re also playing catch-up for the house; car; private schools and the general lifestyle that comes so easily to compensate for the extra income.
There is no “sucking it up” unless you have a time machine or don’t need to sleep.
But there are many mundane things that destroy marriages; and is inherent to the ambition territory. Long hours, missed family gatherings, etc.
Conscious memory seems to favor the positives. Unconscious memory favors the negatives. If you quickly raise your hand near a person who has been physically abused a child, even as an adult they may instinctively recoil. But if you ask someone about their lost relationship, they will often speak of the great things of their partner, ignoring the (perhaps incomprehensible or inarticulable) negatives.
Life is hopefully quite long. Relationships involve 2 (+?) people. During one's life, one hopefully changes a lot. Picture vectors in two dimensions. People who pair up are vectors that cross at one moment (brief) or run somewhat parallel for a period. Try as we might, adjusting our trajectories, it's practically impossible to maintain a parallel path without giving up some or all of our own development.
So realistically in our modern times, relationships are based on a period of relatively parallel trajectories. And when the distance between those vectors becomes to great, it's time to stop trying to maintain a connection. That involves some feelings of sadness, but it also offers new possibilities.
I have a good job that I like, but if my wife told me her company was moving her to Japan for a while, I'd jump at the opportunity.
We live where we live because we're 10 minutes from my wife's two sisters, my wife's parents, and 3 cousins our kids love to play with. Generally, I think the only way we're moving is if they move first. Because my wife's whole family is here. And she spends multiple days per week with them. As do our kids.
The idea that she should be supportive of me tearing her away from this support structure is questionable.
Obviously if something came up we would discuss things. But I don't expect her to like it. Even if it involved a pay raise. Even if it involved moving somewhere she would love to live. Because these people aren't there.
It's just as likely codependancy as it would be support.
Financially, sure. In terms of mental health and feelings of isolation (especially for the wife, who won't have a high-flying career to distract her/build new contacts in), it's absolutely a problem.
Do you have kids? What's your relationship with your family like? How good/irreplaceable are your friendships?
For a lot of people, dropping all of these things are inconceivable. I know my aunty was reduced to tears when her son (who is expecting a baby) moved from Woodend to Canberra. To her, it meant seeing her grandkids a couple of times a year rather than spending time with them every week.
I can see it easily. After move, all your friends and all your life are far away. You have to change habits, language, adjust to different culture. You are very likely to be super lonely most of time. And you loose actual support network where you live. You can get some paid one, but that is something different. If she worked or had other ambitions (entirely possible she did not), those are likely gone after the move.
Many people like and have build their lives. And many if not most don't want to uproot and change everything.
At some point, someone asked about his biggest regret. We all expected some business blunder, but he said that he was offered an executive position by Kraft to lead their Asian segment, and that his wife really did not want him to take the job because it would require them to move to that region. He regretted not listening to her, because it ended up being the catalyst that dissolved their marriage.
We were all stunned silent, and you could tell that he was genuinely remorseful and so vulnerable in that moment. There are only a handful of moments in that internship that I vividly remember, but that was by far the most impactful one.