[RayPowers]

I think his standards don't really count here, but what does count is that she's taking a job that can keep them both living comfortably. If she's taking a job that will barely pay off her student loans, I can see why he would be annoyed.

From his perspective, he just spend a number of years supporting her and making sacrifices in expectation of some payoff later on with a higher standard of living. This of course should have been communicated from the outset so that things like this don't come up, but married couples are just as likely to screw up communications as anyone else.

If she got a job that makes reasonable pay even though she could have had a job that makes fantastic pay, then, well, they just need to work it out and he needs to deal with the fact that her happiness is very important or she'll burn out and end up with no job at all.

If she took a job that doesn't even meet what we'll crudely call her "minimal financial responsibilities" then I side with the husband a lot more. It is extremely frustrating to help support someone financially for years only to come to the realization that it's not ending when you thought it would be, and you may be doing this for the rest of your life because you love the person.

I'm probably projecting a bit on this one because I have similar issues sometimes. My wife is a huge spender. She also, fortunately, does well for herself despite having no college degree. She is a supervisor in an operations department for a bank, and makes a reasonable amount of money, however, she tends to spend more than she makes which of course comes out of my income. I on the other hand am an extreme tightwad who tries desperately to save every penny towards retirement, so our spending habits often come into conflict. Over the years I have had to reconcile in my head that her spending habits are unlikely to change, and I need to decide if my love for my wife is worth more to me than the stress she creates for me when she goes on spending sprees. Obviously it does, and thus I've learned to "deal," much as the husband in this case probably will need to.

But in my case, my wife is at least trying. She has a good job. She helps me with one of my consulting business. She's trying to do her part to bring in the income, and that goes a long way in my book. The few times she's talked about wanting to be a stay at home mom have been the worse times of our marriage because it becomes much harder to reconcile her desire to spend large amounts of money when she's no longer even trying to make any, and I can see my dream of being able to retire going down the drain.

Woo, that was long. Sorry. Just trying to add another perspective to this thread.

Ray