This may be a bit long. I am 25 and my husband will be 27 soon. We have been together for 3 years, married for 1. Until recently everything has been pretty good but now we have hit a pretty rough patch. Several reasons:
1. My husband hates his job. Hates it with every fiber of his being. The schedule is grueling and often abusive (being made to work until 2am and then back in at 10am). He is the only one working right now to support me while I am in cosmetology school full time. My program is intensive, 5 days a week 8 hours a day like a full-time job. It is draining and stressful and I have another 8 months to go before I finish. Due to his schedule being different every week, we rarely get a day off together and when we do we are so broke it's not like we can do much.
2. He is unable to really look for a different job as we have only one car and I need to take it to school which is much farther than his job, which is 5 minutes away. He takes Ubers to work but finds this inconvenient and demoralizing. We can't afford another car, let alone insurance and gas for two cars so getting another one is out of the question. We are left to try to make it work as best we can, which is very difficult.
3. He is from the UK where he did not need a car to get around and he is feeling like he's lost all independence as an adult, having to rely on me to take him for haircuts and stuff like that, when we can work it around my schedule. If I am ever irritable at having to take him somewhere when I'm tired and stressed from school and I think it can wait, he calls me selfish.
4. His degree is in political science and he feels it is completely useless and he will hate every job he ever has. He thinks, at 27, that his options have run out and it is too late to do anything with his life. He is incredibly pessimistic and hopeless about it and when he gets into a 'mood' about it, nothing I say can cheer him up or give him any hope and he becomes very quiet and cold and unaffectionate. Sometimes he is a bottomless pit of negativity and it is really difficult to be around. I struggle with depression and anxiety and intense negativity aggravates my symptoms and then we're both even worse off.
5. We live at my dad's house. My dad spends a few nights a week with his wife about an hour away but commutes to work down here so he is here 2 nights a week usually. We both absolutely hate it. We have no feeling of privacy or marital intimacy. My dad doesn't seem to care how uncomfortable it makes us and is aware that we are too poor to move out. He charges us $600 a month which is the absolute maximum we can afford. And the house is full of all his crap that my stepmom won't let him bring to her house and clutter the place up with.
6. His job will not let him socialize with sales associates (he's a manager). So he has made zero friends in the entire time he's lived here. No one. I am all he has. He has a really close group of friends back home that he talks to on Whatsapp and he's heartbroken and disappointed all the time by all the fun things they're doing at home that he can't be part of. He is horribly homesick lately.
We are stressed, sad, broke, and drifting apart from each other. I love him and he loves me but sometimes the misery of being at home is just soul-crushing. I feel like I ruined his life by bringing him out here. He has nothing and is totally stuck and it's my fault. I think he is deeply depressed and who wouldn't be in his situation? What do we do here? How can we make this better? I feel like I'm losing my mind and I've fallen into a bad depression recently as well and started going back to therapy. I just want my husband to be happy but it feels like there is nothing I can do for him. Please help.
1. My husband hates his job. Hates it with every fiber of his being. The schedule is grueling and often abusive (being made to work until 2am and then back in at 10am). He is the only one working right now to support me while I am in cosmetology school full time. My program is intensive, 5 days a week 8 hours a day like a full-time job. It is draining and stressful and I have another 8 months to go before I finish. Due to his schedule being different every week, we rarely get a day off together and when we do we are so broke it's not like we can do much.
2. He is unable to really look for a different job as we have only one car and I need to take it to school which is much farther than his job, which is 5 minutes away. He takes Ubers to work but finds this inconvenient and demoralizing. We can't afford another car, let alone insurance and gas for two cars so getting another one is out of the question. We are left to try to make it work as best we can, which is very difficult.
3. He is from the UK where he did not need a car to get around and he is feeling like he's lost all independence as an adult, having to rely on me to take him for haircuts and stuff like that, when we can work it around my schedule. If I am ever irritable at having to take him somewhere when I'm tired and stressed from school and I think it can wait, he calls me selfish.
4. His degree is in political science and he feels it is completely useless and he will hate every job he ever has. He thinks, at 27, that his options have run out and it is too late to do anything with his life. He is incredibly pessimistic and hopeless about it and when he gets into a 'mood' about it, nothing I say can cheer him up or give him any hope and he becomes very quiet and cold and unaffectionate. Sometimes he is a bottomless pit of negativity and it is really difficult to be around. I struggle with depression and anxiety and intense negativity aggravates my symptoms and then we're both even worse off.
5. We live at my dad's house. My dad spends a few nights a week with his wife about an hour away but commutes to work down here so he is here 2 nights a week usually. We both absolutely hate it. We have no feeling of privacy or marital intimacy. My dad doesn't seem to care how uncomfortable it makes us and is aware that we are too poor to move out. He charges us $600 a month which is the absolute maximum we can afford. And the house is full of all his crap that my stepmom won't let him bring to her house and clutter the place up with.
6. His job will not let him socialize with sales associates (he's a manager). So he has made zero friends in the entire time he's lived here. No one. I am all he has. He has a really close group of friends back home that he talks to on Whatsapp and he's heartbroken and disappointed all the time by all the fun things they're doing at home that he can't be part of. He is horribly homesick lately.
We are stressed, sad, broke, and drifting apart from each other. I love him and he loves me but sometimes the misery of being at home is just soul-crushing. I feel like I ruined his life by bringing him out here. He has nothing and is totally stuck and it's my fault. I think he is deeply depressed and who wouldn't be in his situation? What do we do here? How can we make this better? I feel like I'm losing my mind and I've fallen into a bad depression recently as well and started going back to therapy. I just want my husband to be happy but it feels like there is nothing I can do for him. Please help.
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