Hi!
Sorry for my english – not my native language 🙂
Me and my wife been together for 14 years. We had our ups and downs, but we both fight for our relationship so it stays strong. There is a subject that keeps returning on regular basis – my wife's career. Although she has two masters deegres she never felt the need to work in her fields. Insted she is constatnly looking for her true passion. She is not working for couple of years now. We decided that it is better if she resign from her last job, since she hated it anyway and didn't make a lot of money. I am the only breadwinner, which is fine since I can provide for my family. But she doesn't really like being a stay-at-home mom, and to be honest, she is not very devoted to it. House is not very clean, she often get frustrated with the kids and with life in general. She can spend half of a day just watching tv… Don't get me wrong, she does a lot of things at daily basis but so am I, we share the "house" responsibilities equally. She also sometimes helps me in my business but its a very small part. I know that she feels the need to find something to do in her life. And that is totally fine by me. I always encouraged her to do it, to find her path. But I'm starting to be annoyed…
For the last 14 years she tried many different routes. She was a teacher, didn't like it, resigned. She was an office worker at three different jobs, hated it. She wanted to be a sewer, went for a course for couple of weeks, but never really got into it. Once she decided to pursue a career in IT (without any previous experience) – took an online paid course but resign after. I also suggested that if she doesn't have an idea what to do, she can learn graphic design and help me with my work, especially that she draws really nice, but she couldn't get through any Udemy training. She said she can't learn anything without a real tutor. Finally, year ago she decided that she wants to be a psychoterapist. But she do not have a proper degree so first she would need to study for 5 years minimum. She is 37 years old and we have two kids in elementary school, so that would be challenging. We talked about it, I had many doubts and was not very happy with this idea, but I really want her to be happy so I finally agreed. She applied to the university but didn't get in, her high school exams results from 20 years ago were too low. So now she is considering taking the exams one more time, meaning she will have to study on her own for the whole next year, pass the exams (3 different subjects) with hope the results will be better this time. In my country it is extremly hard to get into psychology field of study…
If at any point I am talking about my worries, talking facts like it would be very hard for her to study on her own, that she do not have work ethics strong enough to do it on her own and that generally I am afraid that if she fails she will be devasted – she just says I am not supportive. And that drives me very mad because I support her all the time with her new ideas and at the same time work my ass off to provide for the family.
So I don't really know how to approach this. I want to be supportive, I want her to be happy and to find true meaning in her life but the costs of her constat search is exhausting…