When stress in marriage is linked to job discrepancy

I run a business and my spouse expects me to take care of most errands because my schedule is more flexible. How can I get my spouse to understand that I am working too?

From your question, I must assume that your spouse is employed on a regular job, say working between 8 a.m to 5 p.m, and that he/she feels that in the family only one of you is truly employed, the other is still a job seeker or at the very best employed in the less glamorous field of jua kali.

In either event, the nature of your inquiry suggests that yours is an occupation of lesser value than his/hers.

On this understanding, let us proceed to see why your job gives the impression of being of less value or consequence, and hence the requirement that you leave your job to run “personal errands”.

Several reasons for this come to mind, but we will examine only a few. For example, if your spouse has a high flying job in a big company where they are entitled to a large number of perks, then whatever you do in your jua kali job will appear to be a dim light in the face of the great brightness occasioned by her job.

I use the female gender to emphasise that this challenge exists for both and the challenge can be big, whether it is the female or male who is the “culprit.”

To illustrate, let us take the example of a 37-year-old female, a mother of two children. Let us further examine her job and career.

She completed her MBA in finance at the age of 32 and now heads the regional office of a newly established financial institution in which her job demands that she attends many early morning and late night meetings with all manner of people, including handsome 40-year-old men.

Most of these men are equally busy and are themselves going through challenges with their young wives.

Their wives, who seem to behave as though they are the first people to discover the art of being housewives, seem to decide to model their family life in conformity with their view of life as is experienced through third rate glossy magazines from South Africa and Australia.

For these types of bored wives, the most exciting point of discussion with the tired husband, who has to reluctantly leave the company of the beautiful well spoken sophisticated woman at the board meeting, is the number of times each of the twins “nearly ran out of control today”.

All this as the tired young man ponders the consequences of runaway inflation in global markets. His mind is then required to concentrate on the challenges posed to his wife by the twins running all over the new sofas and making them dirty.

More time
Ordinarily, his wife would not have had any contact with an adult since morning (other than through the TV and the neighbour’s house help who came to tell her she was heavy with the gardener’s child).

Her wish therefore is to tell all her stories quickly before the poor chap collapses on the sofa (out of boredom and frustration), this while he fears that this woman might never shut up.

She continues to speak oblivious of the fact that the man has already dozed off and is dreaming about the regional manager with whom he has found himself spending more and more time, at both official and non official functions.

The high-fliers find each other’s company after work interesting and engaging and soon coffee engagements lead to dinner and so on!

The female regional manager who insists that her partner run all the “personal errands” is similarly bored to death in her marriage.

Her husband, who insists on being treated with respect and dignity, might be running a small money exchange bureau in Westlands, totally overwhelmed by the big boys in the area, who seem to attract all the business.

At the infrequent social gathering the couple goes to these days, (church, family weddings and funerals) both insist they are in the “financial world” with the poorly groomed, dusty shoed man who now wears oversized jackets, trying to outdo his wife who after all — is only a woman!

He must establish his authority as a husband particularly in public. The poor woman is bored at home and longs for “intellectually stimulating company”.

The man who runs a kiosk he calls a “forex bureau” is much like his sister who spends all day with the twins. The most exciting thing in his orbit are stories from city council askaris who explain to him the challenges of being underpaid, exploited officers who are only able to survive in the city by extorting money from mama mboga and sometimes motorists.

Lacking sensitivity
The story of how the askari arrested and brought to the city court a mama mboga from Murang’a is frequently repeated to her with undying enthusiasm, lacking in sensitivity of the fact that the wife has heard this story many times before.

She has in the meantime switched off. Her insistence that her husband run small personal errands is her futile attempt to try to increase the sphere of his experience, such as one can get from engaging a bored pregnant clerk who had a fight with her husband the previous night.

Her job at the local power & lighting company pay-in counter is designed to kill with boredom. She therefore welcomes a fight with anybody who dares cross her path.

If only the man would change his stories and talk about the post office, or even his experience at the M-pesa counter in Westlands! Anything but the story of mama mboga again.

In short therefore, the discrepancy between you and your spouse with respect to the experiences of daily life must be considered a possible cause of marital stress which could manifest as your spouse thinks that your business is nothing but a waste of time.