Dear Dr Victoria,

I’m in my mid 30’s. I work hard and have been successful professionally. I’m also married with two lovely children.

I work in the banking sector, not as a broker but in IT and as you can imagine there’s been a considerable amount of turmoil over the last 12-months. Thankfully I still have a job although I spend much of my working week in London.

I had planned to take two weeks off over the Christmas period, which had been approved by my Director. Then a few days ago I discovered I have to work between Christmas & New Year. Apparently this is the only time feasible to implement new changes. My wife has gone completely ballistic and says that unless I take the week off I might as well not bother coming home at all. She has even threatened divorce, saying this would be the final straw. Although the bad times are hopefully behind us, there is still a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding our jobs, and let’s face it, there are no jobs in Ireland and certainly not in investment banking IT.

I really do love her but surely an unemployed husband is much worse than a temporarily absent one? How can I make her see that the good times will soon be here again? I’m now worried that maybe she doesn’t really love me and this is just an excuse. How should I deal with this awful situation?

Dr Victoria replies:

You still have to go to work and you still have to earn money, no matter what your wife is saying about Christmas. Did she really mean that she’s going to divorce you if you go to work between Christmas and New Year or was it something she said in the heat of the moment? Surely if she’s going to divorce you, it’s not going to make that much difference to your relationship if you refuse to go to work for a week. If you end up losing your job, it’s going to put an even bigger strain on your relationship.

If you want to make a token gesture, offer to talk to your boss again to see if there’s anything that can be done – maybe you can take at least some time off, maybe you can do some of the work from home or maybe you can delegate some of the work and supervise from home. Your boss may not give you the thumbs up but at least you can say you’ve tried. But you might actually be surprised. If it’s a large company you work for and you’re a permanent employee, they undoubtedly have policies in place about annual leave. The fact that your previously approved annual leave over Christmas has been cancelled at short notice may give you some room for negotiation. If there changes that need to be made to your IT systems and Christmas is the only time to do it, this should have been, and probably was planned in advance – at least more than two weeks before Christmas.

But clearly I’m not going to tell you to simply put your family first and not turn up for work. Yes - your family should be your number one priority but part of your responsibility to them is to provide for them. Your wife really should try to understand this.

You need to keep your job but obviously not at any cost. If you regularly have to work away from home all week and it’s not what you want, then you may need to give this some thought in the medium to long-term and maybe you should discuss all this with your wife. But walking out of your job over Christmas isn’t going to make everything ok.

Tell your wife that you don’t want to have to work at Christmas either and that you’d rather be at home and find out what else is bothering her. You mention she said this was the final straw, implying that there are more significant issues that she’s not happy about. Reassure her that you love her and you’ll always be there for her and that doing the right thing for her and the children includes going out to work. Tell her that you’ll try to find ways to improve your work-life balance, that these changes can’t happen overnight and that changing your job at a later date might be possible but you can’t hand your notice in if you don’t have another job to go to.

Finally, don’t let doubts and insecurities destroy your relationship. Maybe your wife has had thoughts about leaving you recently, but you worrying about whether she’s looking for an excuse to divorce you, while you work longer and longer hours away from home isn’t going to help. Whatever your working pattern, you still need to make time for your wife and spend quality time with her. Make time to talk, help out at home and go on dates together whenever you can – and tell her this is what you intend to do.