My Husband’s Business Dream Is Killing Our Marriage

What this episode is about

The narrative explores the impact of a husband's entrepreneurial ambitions on his marriage, detailing the emotional, financial, and relational challenges faced as his dreams clash with reality after a corporate setback. The couple, married for eight years and parents to two young children, struggles with the repercussions of the husband's quarter-life crisis and the strain of his unfulfilled aspirations.

Key takeaways

• Chasing dreams is noble, but financial reality can turn a supportive spouse into an unpaid therapist.
• When entrepreneurial spirits clash with economic pressures, even love can show signs of wear and tear.
• Marriage vows can become more complex with debt: 'For richer or poorer' suddenly feels very real.
• Sometimes, being a supportive partner means having tough conversations, not just warm hugs and encouraging words.
• Self-employment: the dream's allure can blind you to the immediate costs—financial and emotional—of chasing it.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dr. John Delony (Host) · 11 min speaking
• Unknown Caller (Guest) · 7 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 3:00 – 6:00: Better Help, construction
2. 12:00 – 15:00: construction

Notable quotes from "My Husband’s Business Dream Is Killing Our Marriage"

• The finances just aren't there yet. and he had a large job. He's in construction and he had a large job that he was still learning how to bid out things and how to charge. and it left us almost $10,000 in store credit card debt for.

  about construction · at 3:03

• This is an ad for better help. I talk to hurting people for a living. And yes, I can help out folks in tiny chunks of time here on the internets, but often more help is needed. That's why I.

  about Better Help · at 4:03

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Companies & orgs

• Better Help — Company · 2 mentions · first at 4:03

Concepts & topics

• construction — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 3:09

Full transcript with timestamps

0:06 How do I move forward when my husband's business dream keeps setting us back? Tell me about that.

0:13 And well, it's it's not only like relational between us. It's financial, it's emotional, it's physical.

0:22 It's all intertwined. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's all intertwined. So, I my husband and I have been together for 15 years. Uh we're high school sweethearts. We've been married for eight.

0:33 Gross and awesome. And we have um two kids under five. And since I've known my husband, he has this he's always had this very entrepreneurial spirit um where like self-employment, working for himself was always the goal. Um, and he kind of did like a side gig when we were in college and it was great for extra money, but we decided it wasn't going forward as a full-time thing. There was just not a lot of longevity there. Okay.

1:03 Um, so he decided to, you know, get the degree, take on a full-time job. He was doing really well there and actually had hopes of um being a partner in the company someday or being part of that ownership um and that leadership role. And unfortunately things took a turn um and they were brought out by somebody different and yada yada it goes downhill from there. Um so then my husband faces some emotional setback

1:30 um and kind of has this quarter life crisis for better lack of better words. Did he get fired or just

1:37 there was just a stop sign like you're not going any further? Right. There was a stop sign of like you're not going any further. It was bought out by a different corporation and and the ladder that he thought was there had been ripped out from under him.

1:48 Perfect. Okay. Um so he was putting all of his time and energy into building something with them for it to be taken away.

1:54 Okay. So he stayed with them for a while to see how it would go. And they on several occasions told him, "You're so great. You're so wonderful, but this is going to be it.

2:03 Um this is where you're at. You can be here for as long as you want to be here, but you're not climbing anymore."

2:09 Perfect. Um, [clears throat] and so that did not sit well with him obviously and I I understood that. So he kind of went back to, well, why don't I revisit the self-employment thing? Um, and so now we're at about 9 months of him um, being completely self-employed. Um, if we were working the baby steps, we had been working them for a long time in the heart of baby step two. And so for the people listening, you all made a commitment to

2:35 Right. to not owe anybody any more money. To get out of debts. Yes. To get out of debt and to not owe anybody money. Um and we had never had credit cards. We had never we'd always paid for everything in cash um since we had graduated college um and moved in together and gotten married. And so now we're at the point where we're 9 months into a new business that he is doing wonderful work and the clients and the customers are so pleased with him, but the finances just aren't there yet. Um, and he had a large job. He's in construction

3:10 and he had a large job that he was still learning how to bid out things and how to charge. Um, and it left us almost $10,000 in store credit card debt for materials.

3:23 Um, and so now we have business debt and I haven't been able to I I manage a lot of the personal finances so that he can help manage the business thing. And we're we're kind of splitting things, which is not how we want to do it, but it's just what is manageable right now. Um, and so now I have personal credit card debt because we're going on eight weeks of not getting a paycheck from the business.

3:49 Okay. Um, I can I can hear your voice quivering. Yes. I'm sorry. Have you No, no, no. Don't be sorry at all. Good grief. This is This is scary.

3:58 Have you said all of this out loud to anybody before? This is an ad for better help. I talk to hurting people for a living. And yes, I can help out folks in tiny chunks of time here on the internets, but often more help is needed. That's why I recommend people go to therapy. And if you're thinking about therapy, try BetterHelp. It's 100% online, so it's affordable and convenient. They've got over 30,000 therapists, and they're great at finding just the right one for you. Visit betterhelp.com/deloney for 10% off your first month.

4:32 Have you said all of this out loud to anybody before? Yes. Okay, it sounds like you're saying it all at once for the first time and it's just it's it's heavy. Here's my biggest concern of everything that's happening. Okay. Everything you've laid out is I get it and I'd even go as far to say noble. Both of you, I can see, I can feel both of you trying to do the right thing for each other and for yourselves. Okay? You're trying to be a supportive wife. He's trying to be a guy that's just scratching and clawing and making it happen. He's actually good at the work he does.

5:15 Right? Everybody's trying. But here's the the big red flag for me. This quote unquote dream, this quote unquote you looking in the mirror and saying, "I'm going to be a supportive wife. I'm going to be a supportive wife." and him looking in the mirror saying, "I'm going to be a guy that works hard for my family." All of that is pulling you away from the values y'all committed to build your marriage on. We are not people who borrow money. We, our family, we are a couple who always works together and makes decisions together.

5:54 I'll go one step further. I am a man who takes care of my family right now. He is doing amazing work at a hobby, right?

6:08 Yeah, you are a I will be a wife who ride or die with this man I've been with since high school. I will be a supportive wife. And that support is causing you to become somebody that goes against who you say you're going to be also. Right? You see where your values are starting to crash into each other.

6:30 Yes. Okay. This is a beautiful moment to turn all the lights on the house and call call something for a second. When's the last time you held his face and said, "I can't tell you how proud of you I am for how you are scratching and clawing for me and this family."

6:49 Not to that extent ever. Okay. But I have told him multiple times, especially when he gets down, I'm a fixer.

6:57 So my initial thought is to come up to him and to say like, I love how you're working so hard. I'm I'm very proud of all the work that you're doing. You know, but then he'll be like, but there's a butt. There's a butt to that.

7:09 That's right. And he can he can hear it in my voice. And and it's it is true. And it's hard for me to not be supportive of something that makes him so happy.

7:19 But he's not happy. He's freaking miserable. Right. He's miserable. And if he gets a steady dose of I love you and I'm I I cannot tell you how lucky I feel with all of the men in the country leaving their families. All of the men who won't work hard. I got one that does. And you can be an amazing hard worker. You can be an extraordinary gifted craftsman and a terrible business owner. I do corporate events for companies. All they do is they go in and coach and help dentists and doctors and lawyers actually run their business because they are amazing dentists and they're they are heart surgeons. They can go cut out a heart and put another one in, but they don't know how to run payroll.

8:22 They don't know how to keep supply chain stocked. They're different skill sets. You get what I'm saying?

8:32 Oh, absolutely. Cuz that's been a conversation, too. And he he's under the belief that, oh well, I'll never make as much money if I go do this for somebody else.

8:41 And in the short term, he's actually right. But he's not ever going to lose as much either. There's two sides to the risk equation.

8:47 Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's there's positives to being his own boss, you know, especially with the young kids. And I work full-time, too. So, you know, we are not home with the kids. There's daycare runs and after school activities and and things like that. um where it's nice for him to not have somebody telling him, "Oh, no, you can't go pick up your kids or you can't, you know, so that there are a lot of positives to being self-employed and to having his own business." And of course, I love those positives,

9:23 but he does but they're not real right now. They're not realized. No, it's a hobby.

9:30 Yeah. We just keep thinking, well, the next job we'll we're going to get another job. It's going to be great. It's going to be better. And he is learning, you know, it's up for him.

9:40 Of course, that's why that's why I'm I'm so like if he was here, I would hug him and tell you, "Thank you for being an honorable man." And you can be an incredibly honorable man and the most honest, graceful thing you can give yourself is the words not right now or not just yet. Those two things aren't incompatible. It's not either I go all in on my own business and I just crash and burn or maybe we get the one. I mean, it's the it's like golf. You get you hit one shot and you're like, "Oh, I can do this." Right? The next job, it'll be the next job.

10:26 It'll be the next job. And you, as the person who's keeping the books at home, are just watching this thing slowly slip and slide. More importantly, you're watching your values slip and slide. You're watching your marriage slip and slide. And you're watching the man that you love and you dedicated your life to come unwound.

10:44 Yeah. Fair. Because this impacts, you said it. This impacts your sex life. It impacts your um just the general laughter and peace in a house, which already is chaotic because you got two kids under five, right?

11:00 Yeah. It impacts everything. And so it's circling back to I need you to hear me say I'm so proud of you with a period. When so many men bail on their families, I got a guy that's scratching and clawing. Period. And you don't have to fix the next thing. So I guess do we just keep going?

11:34 No, I mean it I I always default to a couple of just principles, frameworks for how I live my life and how I coach other people to do it. Human beings are unfathomably resilient, especially the nerd words are in a bounded context when there's a time limit. So, anybody if he had called me before and said, "Hey, I just realized I'm capped. I can't go any further." I would have said, "Cool. You have a 12-month exit." And that 12-month exit is going to cost you every weekend for the next calendar year. I want you and your wife to sit down and count that cost because on the weekends, you're going to miss every soccer game. You're going to miss hunting season. You're gonna miss everything because you're going to be building your own pract your own construction deal on the side.

12:29 One customer at a time. Learning how to bid jobs. Learning how to deal with subs. Learning how to tell somebody a customer one thing and then four of your guys don't show up the next morning cuz somebody else paid him a quarter more an hour. All that stuff. And at the same time, he's got a paycheck coming in. He's got health insurance coming in for his wife and his babies.

12:55 Yeah. Right. And we did have that plan. I mean, and it it worked for about six weeks. We started it in January and he was doing weekends. He'd be gone out of state doing jobs.

13:05 Okay. From Thursday through Sunday night and sometimes Thursday through Monday. And it was getting to the point where it looked positive. And we said, "Well, wow. we've got all these jobs lined up and you don't even have enough time to do them. Um, and I there was this nagging part of me and it's it's partially my fault of when he took his exit because I had this nagging of, well, I'd really like to have a good savings account first or I'd really like to pay off all our debt first. We could do it in 18 months. And I [clears throat] didn't speak up.

13:33 There we go. And hey, listen. And I did say it at some point, but then he would he would just be so miserable.

13:40 I know. And so I gave in and I said, "Fine, just go ahead." You know, so it wasn't that we didn't have those conversations first.

13:48 I I know. I know. But those conversations were always with like he like you said it perfectly with the dot dot dot in the butt after it. Meaning I didn't speak up in real time. I hoped that he just knew. He kept saying he was going to be miserable. you knew that actually he was going to be super miserable if one of these jobs didn't work out or he's going to be winning at work, but he's going to be connected to the most important person in his world, his wife, and she's going to be scared and unsafe. And when I get scared and unsafe, you get scared and unsafe. You nitpick, you point out, you try to fix, you close down emotionally or centrally, like all those things that all of us do naturally. And it just creates this weird figure eight dance, right?

14:40 Yes. Absolutely. And so there's something powerful about you overowning, right? And you saying, "I want to have a hard conversation and I need you to stay present." No leaving the table. No saying, "Oh, I'm gonna I just Let's I want to put everything on the table." Number one, I'm so proud of you. I can't even see straight. Number two, there's multiple moments over the last year that I didn't speak up. And that's on me. And because I didn't speak up, you got a scared shell of a wife. And I'm sorry. Number three, we got to be honest about the finances of this job. It speaks nothing about your skill set, nothing about your dream, none of that. We just have to be honest about the math problem we have right now.

15:38 And if he can't sit present in that, then you all have bigger issues in your marriage I need to go deal with.

15:44 Oh, no, he could. I know he can. I know he can. I I said that for the audience listening because there's going to be somebody listening who's like, "Well, he would never I know your guy sounds amazing. You sound amazing." And I think that's the hard part is you can have two awesome people that are struggling at being married or two awesome people that are struggling at being parents or two awesome amazing people who are both hard workers, both allin and yet the business isn't working out. You get what I'm saying?

16:10 Yeah. And when you make being an entrepreneur your identity instead of I'll be a guy who shows up for my family, that needs to reemerge as the identity. Do

16:29 you get what I'm saying? Yeah. And you reemerge as a wife who I will never not speak my mind again, even in the short term if it's going to make my husband feel uncomfortable. Cuz now he feels your discomfort, you feel his discomfort, and he's trying to do everything he can so you're not uncomfortable. And you're trying to do everything you can for he so he's not uncomfortable and now you're borrowing money. He's bidding jobs under so he can get the job and it loses money and now we have a mess. You get what I'm saying?

17:01 Yes. Yeah. And I I I guess I want you to hear me say on this side of it, this is the best kind of call I can take because I have two people that are all in on each other. It's just gotten cloudy and the sun's going to come back out. Thank you for the call, sister. I see a really bright future for y'all's marriage and for his business and for everything. Cuz for the first time, not for the first time, but forever, you're going to start never leaving the table without having said what you believe and what you want, even if it causes short-term discomfort.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "My Husband’s Business Dream Is Killing Our Marriage"?

Dr. John Delony (Host), Unknown Caller (Guest).

What is "My Husband’s Business Dream Is Killing Our Marriage" about?

The narrative explores the impact of a husband's entrepreneurial ambitions on his marriage, detailing the emotional, financial, and relational challenges faced as his dreams clash with reality after a corporate setback. The couple, married for eight years and parents to two young children, struggles with the repercussions of the husband's quarter-life crisis and the strain of his unfulfilled…

What is mentioned in this The Dr. John Delony Show episode?

2 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including construction, Better Help. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "My Husband’s Business Dream Is Killing Our Marriage"?

The episode runs 18 min; the transcript is about 3,029 words in 48 timestamped sections.

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