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If your wife is too busy, your only loving choice is to expect less from her.
Of course, you should get more and better than others, but too busy is going to impact every area of her life, including her marriage. And her sex life. Expecting from her what would be reasonable if she were doing half as much is unkind and selfish.
If you’re not happy with what you should expect given how busy she is, then it’s time to find ways to help her be less busy. That could look like you doing some of what she is doing. And while that is appropriate, unless you have a lot of time on your hands, it’s not a long term solution. For most of you, the only real fix is both you and your wife having less busy lives.
If your lives are too full, many things will get short-changed. And right or wrong, your marriage and sex will be on that list.
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I’ve told my wife before, I admire the life of the Amish. I don’t share all of their beliefs and for reasons I won’t get into here, I couldn’t live completely low tech as they do. Still, as hard as they work, there is something about the simplicity of their lifestyle that truly appeals to me.
What has helped me greatly is to learn to understand why she is so busy. Over our 20+ years of marriage I’ve experienced my wife as a stay at home mom for many years. I understood that raising a handful of little children is more than a handful of work and while I was working more than full time as the sole provider, I still always tried to help with dishes and specially with bath and bed times with the kids. My wife still thanks me for that! For many years I thought, the more I would do, the less busy she’d be and we would have more leisure time together.
But eventually I realized I was totally wrong.
After she was done homeschooling our kids for a number of years and they went to public school, I assumed she’d be less busy. Based on how tired she usually is at night, and how often she mentions how crazy busy her day was, I had assumed she wanted to be less busy. That’s when she decided to take more classes at our local university to upgrade her education and started volunteering at the local hospital.
It all eventually lead to her getting back into her medical career and now she’s busier then ever before, often working 12hr days and falling asleep on the couch with her work on her lap, even though I do 95% of all the household (cooking, dishes, laundry, cleaning, yard work) and still work and bring in the same or better income.
Being busy has very little to do with how much there is to do every day. It has everything to do with what is important to us.
Years ago Paul suggested a great book called “Margin”. After reading it I decided to change some things in my life and even though it seems like I have way more to do every day due to my wife’s choices, I feel like I am way less busy, because I choose to be. My wife on the other hand doesn’t seem to be able to handle not being busy. It seems like she has no desire for downtime or leisure. She would never admit that and I’d never say it to her face, I know better. It’s as if she doesn’t know how to relax and have fun, and we usually don’t choose to do things we are not good at.
But she’s great at planning and exploring great projects for the future that will keep us busy into our 90’s, and potentially greatly improve humanity.
I don’t say any of this to be critical of her. On the contrary, I hope this insight will help someone here to understand that they can’t change their spouse, nor should they even try. Do what you can to help them in who they are, but understand that you alone are ultimately responsible for your own choices and actions.
@J – “Being busy has very little to do with how much there is to do every day. It has everything to do with what is important to us.”
Or with living up to the expectations of others. We are taught that busyness is next to Godliness, and we feel wrong, guilty, and lazy if we are not overly busy. It is, as you said, a choice.