Marrying a successful and ambitious 20-something in no way commits one to be fine with the same ambitious person uprooting family’s life a decade or two later and moving to the other side of the world. Family is about shared sacrifice for its well being, and sometimes (in fact, usually) one needs to sacrifice their career for the family. That’s life.
I can share the converse example. My uncle had a once in a lifetime opportunity to get training in the US and get a promotion at his company. His wife did not want him to leave for 6 months. He did not get the training or the promotion. He fell way behind his colleagues that did. Fast forward 20 years, and he was unable to give his children a good education, whereas his colleagues who got promoted, did.
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.
> "Always listen to your wife, she is always reasonable"
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree, of course, but I never meant to imply that the answer here is “always do what your wife tells you to”. My point is simply that one should be prepared to sacrifice career for family. Sometimes, as in your uncle’s example, it might turn out that a better decision for the family would have been to make a different sacrifice instead. But that’s just another life’s lesson: hindsight is always 20/20.
>Marrying a successful and ambitious 20-something in no way commits one to be fine with the same ambitious person uprooting family’s life a decade or two later and moving to the other side of the world.
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).
Marrying a successful, ambitious man does not, in any way, mean that a woman should defer completely to every single career decision a man makes. I'm sure this executive's schedule was already plenty demanding without the burden of moving to another country.
Haha the parent post literally said that it was ironic that a woman would marry an ambitious man and then complain about said ambition. The ambition, implicitly,
being wanting to move to Asia for a job. It seems to me if a woman isn't allowed to complain about moving continents for a job, she's not allowed to complain about anything, and this is, therefore, not a strawman.
So with that logic... if he gets a huge opportunity to run the Asian division which he feels compelled to take despite her objections, then she is not allowed to ask for smaller concessions such as "hey, can you turn off the work phone on Saturdays"? You linking those together doesn't make sense.
I don't see any problem with that, I'm not the one who said it was ironic that a woman would marry an ambitious man and then have problems with moving to Asia. I don't see any conflict at all between loving someone's ambition and also wanting other things from the relationship.
Supporting one's spouse does not mean acquiescing to every opportunity afforded the other. Things are a little different when we're talking about matters of shelter/food/health, but in this situation we're talking about an international relocation of an already successful businessman. He was pursuing personal career and experience outcomes, he wasn't trying to drag his family above the poverty line.
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.
I find your comment pretty agressive ("Maybe learn something from the person", "This statement is meaningless")...
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).
> 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 ?
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 get your point better now, thanks for the clarification.
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 thing is, he was likely already providing incredibly well for the household and didn't need to move the whole family to Asia. If I pulled some crazy shit like that, I'd hope my wife reminds me who I'm working for and why.
Money isn’t free. The person earning needs to be supported. Running a house is work but I wholeheartedly reject the notion of someone both working and supplicating their partner. This is abuse.
People also change and / or realize what they thought they'd like turns out to not be what they like. You can't know you will like a situation until you are living it.
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
Believe it or not, some people enter enter into marriage as equals, and view each other as teammates working together and respecting each other’s input into major life decisions.
It's ironic to me when men marry for any reason besides wanting a docile helpmeet and then complain that their partners have real ambitions, opinions, and goals.
People seem to gloss over the fact that while she married an ambitious man, he also married her. If he did not want her to have equal say in their life (note this is his and hers life being impacted!) he should not have married her.
Marrying someone with ambitions doesn't mean the ambitious spouse gets full control over where the other partner lives and the relationships the other partner can have. A partnership is not a contract to have the needs of one partner subsumed by whoever happens to be more ambitious. You don't know what they communicated before deciding to get married. Strange to not be able to imagine being on the other side of it
> Marrying someone with ambitions doesn't mean the ambitious spouse gets full control over where the other partner lives and the relationships the other partner can have.
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?
> 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.
> Approximately zero spouses who complain about glass-dishwasher-alignment will sacrifice by lifting the breadwinner's burden.
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.
This does not sound like trade off for ambitions. More like ignoring her strong preference and then being shocked it turned out to be straw that broke camels back.
