I no longer admire my wife — is divorce stupid or is it the only option?

**TL;DR** I no longer look up to or admire my wife as a person – am I being an idiot when thinking about divorce or is it the only option?

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My wife and I met in college. We had incredible chemistry and come from similar cultural backgrounds. We had so many firsts together I can’t even count. She taught me what love even means. I thought she was perfect: ambitious, smart, gorgeous, independent, positive, and she really loved me. She’s so special to me because of what we’ve gone through together and the ways in which she has helped me become a better person.But as we’ve gotten older, a lot of this has changed.

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Today, there is a lot about her personality that I don’t particularly like or admire. We both even agree that if we weren’t married, we’re not sure we would have made it past a few dates because our values feel really different.

For example, it really matters to me that my life partner is financially savvy and career-smart. It doesn’t need to be her whole life, but she needs to be able to provide for herself and save for the future, no matter how little, without requiring a man. If someone doesn’t have that mindset, there’s nothing wrong with them as a person (different strokes for different folks) but I’m just not attracted to them. I think partly this is because I come from a very traditional background where a woman’s main job is to be a housewife and raise the kids while the father provides financially. I’ve seen just how often this led to toxic dependencies and power dynamics between men and women in my community and it eroded women’s agency because they couldn’t survive without the men. So now I most admire women who recognize that it’s their imperative to be independent and understand the importance of financial independence in a healthy relationship. Where we live (USA) this is 100% doable as we’re both college educated and work in tech, so it’s not like her skills don’t qualify her to be financially responsible.

Initially, she fit the bill perfectly. After college she was working with some of the biggest music stars in the world because of how good she was, you would honestly think I was bullshitting you if I told you who. I couldn’t believe it myself. And she got there by being incredibly smart, dedicated, and driven. And while yes it was cool that she worked with big names, I honestly just loved her drive and passion, not the clout. But now, it feels like she has given up on herself and her intelligence and power. For the past 2 years she has worked in a dumpster fire of a company that has severely underpaid her by about 30% of market rate. Whenever I tell her to get a better job, the one she deserves, she says she’s scared about moving in the current economy. I get it – the economy is shit and it’s a scary time. But what’s the alternative? Roll over and keep eating shit at your current job? Where the fuck is your sense of fight? And we have savings, it’s not like she’d be out on the street if she lost her job. it’s also not clear to me that she’s even trying at all. Go apply for jobs, go to networking events, ask your professional contacts for referrals, take some courses that would make you a more attractive candidate, do something instead of just sitting around and moping about how hard it is to get a job. You don’t get to complain unless you put in the work. It has been years of her being too scared to even make a move.

Also, the areas in which she does show passion and intelligence are areas I just really don’t care for and sometimes I actively think are dumb. For example she’s a very aesthetically driven person, and spends spends so much time decorating and redecorating the house e.g: buying just the right wreath for the season, changing towels, changing the bedding to something new, keeping the house very clean, getting the “correct” flowers for the season etc.. which is fine but I personally don’t really care about that which sometimes makes her upset because she feels like what she “brings to our life” is not something I value. Which is true: I don’t care about decorations or aesthetics. Another example is that whenever she or we go out, she spends an enormous amount of time (somewhere between 30-60 minutes) taking pictures and videos and then making instagram stories or posts that I think less of her because of how self-absorbed it all feels.

On top of this, our savings or future prospects are not something she ever proactively asks about or has demonstrated care for. On multiple occasions she even expressed that she thinks it’s the man’s job to provide for the woman, even if there are no kids in the marriage. She wasn’t this way before we got married. Sometimes she backtracks when I get into arguments about it, but she always comes back to that view point when really pressed on the topic. I manage all of our savings and finances and I feel so alone in doing it because money and savings to me symbolize the future we’re building together, and the fact that I’m the only one interested in it makes me feel like I’m the one building and she’s just profiting off of that. I think she also has a real or borderline shopping addiction. On two occasions I’ve needed to bail her out of a huge (more than $15k) shopping credit card bill. Before I married her, I used to save and invest 50% of my income. When we got married, she had zero savings, so all our net worth came from me. In the 5 years we’ve been married our net worth has declined slowly every year because of her spending and lifestyle habits (lots of shopping, wants a lot of vacations, a lot of traveling to see her family, wants to live in a bigger house in a better location, etc.. which are all fair things to want as we get older but the result is she contributed net negative financially). It has taken me years and so much effort to get her to just stop spending so much money on shopping and finally this year for the first time since we’ve been married we’ve managed to save some money, but it has felt like pulling teeth, and she is doing it only because I essentially gave her an ultimatum that our marriage has no future without this.

To be clear I don’t need a wife so I can mooch off her income. But I don’t really respect a person in her situation (great education, skilled worker, good family, background etc..) who can’t stand on their own two feet. I just don’t view them as an equal if they can’t handle their shit financially speaking.

Another aspect that I really dislike about our marriage is our communication. She is not a particularly constructive communicator, and it takes so much work to have constructive disagreements with her. With literally any of my friends or coworkers I can hash out disagreements relatively quickly. But with her they drag on for days, weeks, or even months. There are so many ways where instead of just expressing something vulnerable like “hey, I feel bad about X and after thinking about it I think it’s because of Y and I want your support in working on that” or “I need you to change behavior Z because it so and so impact on me” instead she comes out guns blazing and calling me names and putting me down instead of just actually having the productive conversation that I would be glad to have even if it involved criticizing me. This is one of the things I hate the most about our dynamic because it causes us to spend so much time fighting and arguing about the pettiest shit when instead we could just be living our lives and having a good time and growing together.

We have no kids currently, and recently the topic of having kids came up and it made me realize that while she’d probably be great at many parts of caring for children, I don’t feel like I’d want her to be the mother of my children because I don’t think we’d share the same values about how we should raise our kids. I just can’t see myself having a great coparenting relationship with her when I don’t view her as an equal or someone I admire.

I keep hesitating about filing for divorce because despite everything I said above, I love my wife. Despite all of our disagreements and issues, we shared so much together and no one on planet earth knows me as well as she does. It almost brings me to tears thinking about actually ending our marriage. I’m also scared of what comes after. I feel like a divorce would financially reset me back to near-zero. I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone. Going through the process also feels terrifying. What will our friends and family say? We look picture perfect from the outside. I just feel so weighed down by all of this. On the other hand, we just turned 30, so if this isn’t going to work, we need to move on now so we can find someone else and start families.

Any advice from people who have gone through divorce or something similar?