Dear Prudence,
My husband and I met working at a major tech company. He left with more than $2 million at age 36. On the outside, our life looks great. But he hasn’t worked since we got married nearly 20 years ago, and as a result, he’s blown through all our cash. I knew he was selling off stock but was unaware of the extent until a few years ago. I never expected he would not work again. Now he resents watching colleagues advance to senior roles, making good money, and working on exciting tech products. A few friends are starting to retire. That would have been us, too. But now we’re in our 50s with no savings. I’m a best-selling author, and my early books netted nearly $1 million from book sales. Today, I still hustle for editorial projects. He claims he couldn’t work all those years because he was too busy setting me up in my writing career. He has been helpful, no doubt about it. But I never asked him to forgo working for years. Now he’s deeply depressed. He keeps me up at night bemoaning how he’s a loser, and messed up his life, and I should leave him, or blaming me for it. I’m exhausted the next day but work on various projects—while he sleeps all day—and then the cycle starts again. I haven’t sold a book in years, and I know it’s partly due to the stress.
We have a second home that I inherited a few years ago. He’s pressing me to sell it so we have some cash. I really don’t want to sell it. I know we’ll blow through the cash in a couple of years, and then we’ll be in the exact same position. That house is the only asset that I have in my own name, and knowing that I have a potential place to land if we split up is all that’s keeping me sane. He refuses to get counseling. He has started to reach out to places to apply for jobs in earnest, but at his age, with a résumé gap of 18 years, I’m worried it’s too late, especially for the kind of jobs he’s after in the tech industry. He would never consider getting a “normal” job, like working retail or as a bartender, as he’d be embarrassed if his colleagues ran into him someplace. I really feel that I need some therapy, but I know we can’t afford it. I’m now seriously considering abandoning my writing career. I’ve been applying for jobs in part to get us health care, since we have to drop ours, as we can’t afford it. But since I also haven’t had a traditional job, it’s been a real challenge for me, too, and incredibly depressing. Friends tell me to leave, but I genuinely love my husband. He’s a smart guy who can do just about anything. He’d actually be great working for a company. But he doesn’t believe it. The negative voice in his head has become too strong and his ego is too fragile. What am I to do?
—Overdrawn