Dear Prudence,
My husband is a yearner. Most of our conversations are centered around something he’s looking forward to, a piece of tech he’s coveting, a social group he wants to start, the city he wants to move to, how we should get a new pet, etc. I used to admire his passion and ambition, but now after six years of marriage I just think of him as a blowhard. He’s always talking about the next thing he wants and is rarely satisfied with the present moment. In fact, even when we’re actively doing something really fun he’ll fixate on “why we aren’t doing this more often?”! I try to humor him and genuinely hear him out without thinking to myself “ok sure, we’ll see about this one,” but it’s getting harder as time goes on and it seems like he’s almost always unwilling to take action on the stuff he’s always talking about.
For example, I’m really happy with where we live. We worked super hard for years to buy a house in a desirable town close to a bigger urban city. I’ve made a lot of friends here, and both of our careers are specific to our region. Our town is progressive, safe, beautiful, the weather is nice and there’s plenty to do. It is absolutely inconceivable that we would move from here without years and years of focused work and savings, even if we *both* wanted to—yet he talks about wanting to live in a major coastal city like New York or Seattle practically every day. And it’s not just musing, he expresses a bitter judgment of our town, the culture here, and lack of certain activities.
I am so tired of it. I don’t feel that I can trust for one second that if we actually changed our whole lives for his plan that he wouldn’t just find some new lifestyle to yearn for. I feel like even if I said “sure, let’s move to NY/get a new cat/replace our sound system,” I would be stuck with all the work while he moves on to the next dream. I’m starting to feel like I don’t know how to talk to him anymore. Our day to day interactions have become a lot of him telling me all about something he wants or thinks would be cool and all I have to say is “mmhmm.” He talks too much, is completely disconnected from our present day lives, and would spend everything we have on whims if I weren’t bearing the burden of 100 percent managing our finances. I’m so bored and feeling like my experience of having slow and steady goals, and being mostly satisfied with life, is boring to him in return. It doesn’t feel like we genuinely have misaligned deeply held goals, it feels like he habitually and pathologically craves novelty. What can I do here?
—Is This Growing Apart?