Being married to an entrepreneur has its pros and cons. Much like the life of an entrepreneur, it can be a rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows too.
If your marriage is currently stressed due to your husband’s failing business, you’re not alone – this is a common struggle for wives of entrepreneurs and business owners.
Does any of the following sound familiar to you:
He’s Working All Hours
Entrepreneurs always seem to have an excuse to work all hours they’re awake.
When things are going well, they need to put in more time to keep up and stay on top of things. When things are going bad, they need to put in more hours to try and save their business.
Either way, the net result is less time with you and less time being present in the marriage, right? It puts a huge amount of stress on a marriage, and accounts for a lot of separations.
Your Social Life Starts to Overlap With His Job
When the lines between work and home life start to get blurred, it can be a good thing when business is going well, but a bad thing when business isn’t going so well.
The high-end dinner parties are fun, for a while, right?
There comes a time when you just want to disconnect from his job, his coworkers, the industry, etc.
Going from hearing him talking about work to spending an evening hearing him talk about work can put additional stress on a marriage.
What about weekend breaks, quality time alone, intimacy, and asking each other about your day’s without it revolving around work?
All He Does Is Talk About Work When He’s Home Anyway
In between the long hours, business trips, work-related events, and everything else – if all he does is talk about work with you it feels like there’s no escape.
The more his business is in the dumps, the more he’s going to talk about it too. Regardless if you’re interested or not.
You Feel Neglected and He Doesn’t Seem to Care
All those extra hours, the social events, talking about business all the time, it all adds up to one thing – he’s neglecting you and his marriage.
This is all too common for wives of entrepreneurs. Their men don’t realize it until it’s too late, and well, when it’s too late there’s no going back.
Related – How to calm down when you’re angry at your husband.
His Failing Business Is Causing Him (And You) Stress
Let’s get down to the real heart of the issue here, a failing business is incredibly stressful. Not just for him, but for you too.
Everyone handles this kind of stress differently. But it’s almost impossible to go through this without shouldering a huge amount of stress, both financial and personal.
This is ultimately what flows over into the marriage and causes most couples to split. It’s just too much unless you’re both willing to work at the marriage and possibly seek professional help.
How Can You Save Your Marriage?
The path to saving a marriage that’s falling apart due to a failing business is going to be different for everyone.
As a general guide, however, here are some of the key areas you need to focus on to save your marriage:
Related – 14 Signs a man is done with a relationship.
Remind Each Other Why You Fell in Love
This is the first step to repairing most marriages. Whether it’s due to a business failing, or some other reason – you need to remind each other why you fell in love.
Get back to those magical moments when you used to be excited to spend time together. Was there a life before business? I bet there was, and there could be life after business.
Open up Communication
Communication is everything. If you can’t get to the point where you can both talk openly about what got you to this crisis point and how you see your future, you need help.
You’ll be amazed at how different you feel after being able to pour your heart out and hear back how he really feels.
It’s a shame it has to get to this point for most couples to have a heart-to-heart. But it’s because you haven’t been talking openly about the problems in your marriage that got you here.
Talk About the Business
I know what you’re thinking, you’ve heard more than enough about his business and it’s the last thing you want to talk about as it’s the reason your world is falling apart.
Well, ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away. This is the time to discuss everything you couldn’t get him to hear while he was in business mode.
Set a Plan for the Future You Both Agree On
With everything out in the open, if you’ve both agreed that you want to save your marriage you need to have a plan for the future that puts your marriage before a business.
This is something you might want to do with the help of a marriage counselor. They have exercises and plans to help couples get on the same page with this stuff – it’s part of their job.
In Summary
A failing business will always put a lot of stress and pressure on a marriage. It’s especially difficult if you were already going through some of the issues of a neglected partner as discussed above.
This article only scratches the surface of what most couples will need to do to repair their marriage after such an event.
Don’t be afraid to seek professional help, and don’t try to fix this overnight. The fallout of a failed business will ripple for some time, the important thing is to start communicating and work on your marriage.
Resources
6 Step Guide on How to Fix and Save a Broken Marriage – Marriage.com
Image credits – Header photo by Sandy Millar, photo of man by Tim Gouw, and photo of hands by Shelby Deeter on Unsplash
Phil lives in England, UK, and has around 20 years experience as a professional life, career and executive coach. He started this blog to help others find and define their own self development journey. Blogging about a wide range of topics to help facilitate a better future.
Talk about it? How? He gets angry if I suggest he call it quits (after 11 failing years). He says I won’t give him a chance! Really … that’s what he says after 11 years! He says I never wanted him to succeed … because I always had reservations about starting a business. He has turned from a kind, caring man into a workaholic. Unfortunately, he’s a workaholic but has a failing business.