What to do
My wife and I have been together for a little over 7 years. I have a job in IT and make a very comfortable salary, she works in billing for a company and makes a decent salary as well. Until my most recent promotion she was making about 80% of my pay, she now makes about 60% of what I make. I have been struggling with the distribution of finances and overall chores. She works slightly more hours than I do but also has a Rover dog sitting business and trains horses/riders. She has shown horses essentially all her life and this is her passion and her hobby. We have a nice house with acreage dedicated to the horses, a barn, and shelters for more horses. In all we have 7 horses on the property with 3 of them paying board/training costs. There are obviously chores that have to be done every day, this comes out to probably an hour or two of cleaning and feeding. I have tried to support her as much as possible, to the point of when her and her mother started having issues and her mother started to take away things like use of truck and trailer I sold my new Audi SQ5 (cars are my passion) to buy a truck so she could still haul her horses around as needed. I also frequently take time off work so I can follow her to horse shows to help out with whatever I can. I have been very lucky in my career that we now have two trucks, a travel trailer, and I was able to get another Audi. We have about $4800 monthly bills that come out of our joint bank account, until recently I contributed $2500 and she contributes $2300, with my latest raise I am now putting $2800. Those monthly bills cover the house, one truck, travel trailer, utilities, and groceries. I pay for the other truck, car insurance, anything else we need around the house (think everything from cleaning supplies to furniture), maintenance on all the vehicles, basically anything else outside of what our monthly bills cover. Calculating this just for last year it came out to me paying $3500/month, and this doesn’t include us going out to eat or vacations (my other passion is traveling). We started talking about finances because a credit card I cosigned for her was several months late and ended up taking a hit on my credit score. I paid it off and she has put both her credit cards on auto pay for the minimum payment at least. This is when I found out her other credit card has roughly $10k on it and the one I paid off was around $1k. I personally have no credit card debt, I use them frequently but pay them off each month. She has said I need to pay more because she doesn’t pay as much but when we sat down to look at her finances she is going in debt about $1300 a month. She has attributed this mostly to vet bills for the horses she owns. She says it is unfair for her to pay more when her expenses are so much higher than mine. Which is half of why I’m struggling. I mean this is her hobby is it fair for me to have to compensate household finances because she is spending nearly $3k/month on average on her hobby? The other half of this is because she has so many horses on the property, shows her own horse, and helps her daughter show I am left with most of the chores around the house (cooking/cleaning) along with project work around the farm (running hotwire, building stuff, upkeep of land, etc). When we try to talk about it we are always civil but I don’t ever feel like we get to a better place. She will cook dinner and maybe sweep the floor after a dog has been over but after a week or two we are back to “normal” and I am doing everything again. She said she is doing her part because she is doing most of the chores that revolve around the horses, which I see this as part of her hobby, not part of our household chores, though maybe my perspective on this is what is wrong. The last part of this is because she is dedicating all her time to her work streams and hobby I rarely get quality time with her. She will come back in the house at 7pm or later sit down to eat some dinner that I made an hour or two previous and then just want to watch TV and scroll on her phone. I can’t recall the last time we went on a real date and even our last vacation (my birthday weekend) she ended up on the phone frequently talking to her daughter or the others that board about the horses making sure everything was ok.
Apologies for this being so long, I think more than anything I just needed to get this out on paper to understand what I’m even feeling, not so much anger but disappointment that I feel I dedicate so much to her, her daughter, and their passion but I can’t seem to get anything in return when I need it. Thanks for listening.
@draekin13
I can absolutely appreciate why you are feeling frustrated and not heard, but I can also hear that maybe you are feeling a little bit like a second priority in the relationship too?
My question for you, if this was any other type of "hobby" let's say a boat because she loved fishing or something like that, would you still feel that she should be more responsible for it financially than you are? Or do you think that this is more because it feels intrusive in your relationship and takes time and money away from you as a couple? I am not sure if these things are connected, but for some reason when I read your post, I could sense that you really care about supporting her, but just really want her to appreciate you more and be more grateful for all the things that you do to support her hobby.
So maybe take some time to think about it 1) is this really about money and would you feel the same if it were another time-consuming, expensive hobby 2) if the relationship felt more emotionally satisfying and reciprocal would you still feel the same about the horses/money 3) if she sold the horses tomorrow, would that positively impact the health of your relationship or would things still be challenging regardless?
Not sure any of this helps, but sometimes approaching from another viewpoint can really help. All the best to you in figuring out how to find balance ❤️
@halcyonCloud2036
Thank you for your comment, truly appreciated.
Thinking about your questions I feel conflicted. I believe having a hobby is important but you should also be able to afford said hobby. With that said I am realizing I make good money and can help so if I can do something to make her happier as it relates to the hobby then I would, however I am also connecting the money I have spent with the absolute consumption of her. I have enabled her to purchase more horses (and actually pruchased hers for her), spent money on the land for things like a riding arena, and more stuff in general that now have turned into us both having more work to do to keep these things up but also consumes even more of her time.
To your second question I really feel if I were more emotionally satisfied I wouldn't feel the same way. She is so busy there is seemingly no interest in me, if I ask her for something it always comes second fiddle to the horses. A good example is I have been asking her for over a year to help me clean the garage as a lot of the stuff that needs cleaned up/out is horse stuff I have no idea what to do with, this does affect my hobby of my cars and ability to keep up the fleet of vehicles we now own along with not having the space for tools that I frequently use for all the other projects around the farm/house.
I honestly can't even fathom her selling the horses, I think if I were to ask her to stop doing the horse stuff it would be the end of our relationship although maybe I am wrong since she wouldn't be able to afford them without me anyway. Very early on in our relationship (may have been before we were even dating) she said something about the horses being so important to her that if she had to chose between a significant other and the horses, she would chose the horses.