My partner “Mark” and I are both essentially unemployed right now. We own a formerly successful business in a nice creative field and seem to be part of a bubble bursting. For the last five years in January (including 2021), I’ve had hundreds of leads that turn into dozens of sales calls that become 30-40 bookings for the year. This January we had five leads and zero calls, despite continuing to market and employ best practices. I don’t fully understand what’s going on here, but it’s clear we need to find outside employment.
Last year was a rough year too, and we only have about four months of savings, which I’m scared won’t be enough. We have access to credit and home equity we can tap if things get really scary, but no other safety net. Every single person in our families lives paycheck to paycheck and has no assets besides their homes. When we run out of money, we’re out of money, and we do live in a HCOL area.
The problem is that Mark and I cannot get on the same page about how much of an emergency this is. We’ve both been broke before and worked it out, but there’s a difference between having to scrape together $800 for rent when we were 25, and now looking at a minimum monthly budget of $3-4k just to keep things current.
I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs in multiple fields, and have been tapping my personal and professional networks for opportunities. I kept us from dipping into our emergency fund by doing gig work last year. Mark just can’t seem to make it work—he really isn’t truly qualified for a whole lot, but still isn’t maximizing the applications he’s putting out there. He hasn’t talked to his friends about opportunities and he abandoned a certificate course he started. He only works about five hours a day, often working on projects that don’t get finished or ultimately don’t make money. He’ll spend hours and hours working on a new page for our site, and even when it’s finished, it just isn’t that important to the big picture.
I get that he’s grieving our creative and fulfilling career, but I have been asking him for two years (including in therapy) to change his relationship to work and just try harder. To work more hours in the day, to be more ambitious, and to cross-train on different skills. I considered divorce at one point, but we truly can’t afford it. I love Mark very much, but I feel extremely burdened by being financially tied to a person who can’t provide for themselves. It worked for a long time when I could run a successful company with his help, but now we both need to pull out ALL the stops to make sure we have enough income, and he just can’t do it.
There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to make him change, I’m already working as much as I possibly can, and we can’t get divorced, so I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have any.
—Stuck