Thread: She worked too much - what do you think?

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can offer me some advice please?

It is a bit of a long post.

I went out with a girl for 14 months. We didn’t live together.

She worked in retail as a manager and always worked hard and quite long hours, but we still had a great relationship for the first half of the relationship. Then in the last six months she got another job at a much larger store further away with more responsibility and lots of stress. She worked 11-12 hour days (even though she was scheduled to work 8) + more travelling. Sometimes she didn’t get home until 9.30pm and may have to be up at 5am the next morning for another shift working until 5pm that night.

For six months she really worked 6 days a week. On her one day off she was shattered and was keen to do all of her chores, washing, tidying, etc. Leaving less / little time for us.

If I saw her when she got home at 9.30pm – obviously she would be really tired.
If I saw her on another day when she’d been up at 5am, she would be really tired again on the night.

After a couple of months in her new job, I sat her down and very calmly and in a non-needy way said that I was concerned about the number of hours she was working and that I started to feel single the last few months. I said I loved her lots and I was concerned about the affect on her health, etc. She got upset and said she didn’t want to lose me. I was very careful how I did this, as I know she went out previously with someone who tried to control her – and she told me previously she would never stand for this again. She told me after that I had said it and approached it in a really nice way.

A few nights later she wanted to talk again, & said that she’d been thinking and:-

i) She would rather know now, if I didn’t want to go out with someone who worked shifts.

and

ii) She would see me more, but I would just want sex when she is tired.

I just calmly said that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go out with someone who worked shifts (she worked shifts the first 6 months and it was no problem), I said it was the number of hours she was working. I said that obviously sex should a compromise – we had been having a lot less sex anyway, because she was always exhausted.

Then over the next 3 months, she got more exhausted. She started taking phone calls on her personal mobile phone about work on her day off and before or after her shifts started.

She rarely saw her friends. On her day off, she didn’t seem to be able to relax with me and was snappy.

She did go out with her friend to a bar for a drink one night. Her friend went to the toilet and she fell asleep whilst she was gone – this is how tired she was.

About six weeks ago, she said she was stressed with work, etc. and said she just wanted a week tp herself to get her head right at work, she said really she felt she needed time off from work, but didn’t want to take it. I said yes, no problem, I understand the effects of stress, etc. She said that she started to realise the effect it was having on her & her health and was considering asking take a lower position at work.

I gave her advice all week on the phone, about stress, etc. The night before she was going to speak to her manager, for the first time in the relationship I lost my cool, I wanted her to be in the full picture when she spoke to her manager, so I said: if in a few months, you feel that you want to work these hours, and that’s what you want in your life (i.e. to work extremely hard, make yourself ill), then I couldn’t see it working between us – I said it over the phone as well. I said it calmly but had no way of keeping it in. I totally regret dealing with it like this.

When she came to see me next, she said she hadn’t talked to her manager about taking a step down, mainly because what I’d said to her. She said she realised that she needed to be independent in her life and that you can only rely on yourself.

A few weeks later she told me that it wasn’t going to work between us and she thought she saw us more as friends. She said to me ‘I love my job’. I was totally gutted because I love her and still do. She said I was one of the nicest people she ever went out with.

We’ve had 5 weeks of no contact and I was considering calling her next week.

I query if she may have come to her senses about work, or had a revelation, or if she is destined to be a workaholic.

Myself and a best friend were once in situations with jobs like this, where we worked very long hours and went in on weekends unpain, bt after a period we snapped out of it and realised that we wanted to work to live not live to work, although I do appreciate some people are workaholics.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading this long post,
Dan