One crucial part of adulting is paying the bills. If you’re married, you need to make sure that there’s enough income between the two of you to make ends meet.

What would you do if your spouse were working part time but you thought they needed to work full time in order to make enough to pay their share of the bills? Would you tell them that or work additional hours to make up the difference?

In this story, one husband and wife disagree about how they can make sure they make enough to pay the bills, and the husband is wondering if he’s wrong for his reasoning.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITAH for wanting my burnt out wife to get a full time job?

I (34M) work full time, my job pays alright, not amazing, but it provides flexibility which allows our 2 kids to do daycare and I can take care of unexpected things that arise like sick days and stuff.

My wife (34) is a teacher, she has recently finished up her maternity leave (we’re in Australia) and has returned to work as a casual teacher (I guess US equivalent would be temp) aiming for 4 days a week, as she didn’t want to go back full time because she found it very stressful and burnt her out.

This is obviously unreliable work, and we’ve tried it for a month or 2, and now that we have some payslips for reference and have seen how the days of work can fluctuate, we’ve done the budget and have found that it will not make enough money for us to live, especially over the holiday break, unless she gets consistently full weeks.

They disagree about how they need to go about making enough money to pay the bills.

I raised this and said that she’ll either need to find something more secure/permanent, or if she wants to do casual, she will probably have to figure out something in the holidays to make up for the 4+ weeks of no income as we have no savings for that and won’t make enough in the term to save.

She got quite furious, saying that she can’t go back to fulltime teaching because it’ll wreck her, but can’t find another job because none of them will pay as well as teaching.

I said that was fine and I understand, but when I asked for some solution or help with how we will literally pay the bills when they come around, her response was that I should either find a better paying job or get a second job.

It sounds like his wife wants to be a stay at home mom.

I was pretty dismayed at this.

I work full time and do equal or more of the house work and kids stuff, but she was really angry at me for saying she needed to bring in more money.

She then got upset about how other people we know can afford houses and the wives in those couples don’t have to work or can work part time because their husbands earn enough (that’s a whole other thing).

They are not on the same page.

No matter how much I tried to explain that we kind of need 2 incomes to make it work, she just kept getting upset, saying she couldn’t go back to teaching full time, but nothing else will pay as well as casual teaching, and the owness shouldn’t all be on her and that I need to bring in more money to cover those periods of no income.

I got mad at this and said it’s incredibly unfair to expect me to work 2 jobs so she can work half a job, I said things about the economy that she disagrees with, and we just ended with her nearly in tears that I was ‘trapping’ her in full time.

I genuinely do not understand how or why she is so upset and I think she’s being deeply selfish.

She thinks I’m being selfish by staying in a lower paying job that doesn’t use my degree or my skills.

AITAH?

If he really is at a low paying job that doesn’t use his degree or his skills, his wife’s not wrong for pointing that out. He should start looking for a better job, not two jobs though, just one job that pays better and uses his skills.

Regardless, he really needs to talk to his wife about this more. It sounds like she wants to be a stay at home mom, but they can’t afford that right now.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thinks they know the solution.

Here’s another good suggestion.

This person thinks they shouldn’t have had a second child.

That last line got me too. If this is true, it makes a big difference.

Someone who is married to a teacher weighs in.

Someone is going to have to put in more hours or get a better paying job.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.