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Potential Move from East to West coast is straining my relationship.
Spawnbroker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Okay everyone, hold on to your butts, it's a relationship thread!
First, some backstory to set the mood:
Girlfriend and I have been dating for about 6 years. We've been living together for 4.5 years. I'd also like to stress that when I say girlfriend, I mean something closer to domestic partner, life partner, or wife. We are not officially engaged, but that's mostly by mutual agreement as we still have a lot of student loan debt that we are aggressively paying down. We have combined finances, our finances have been combined for as long as we've been living together. We live in NY, and we're pretty close to my girlfriend's entire family, we see them often. We get to see my family maybe once a year for holiday trips, usually Thanksgiving or Christmas. We both have careers and jobs we enjoy, but I make about double what she makes, as my career is more in demand.
My parents moved to Seattle last year because my father got a job at <Big_Tech_Company>. I thought this was pretty cool, as I'm currently a consultant developer that works with a technology produced by that company. Basically, my job entails programming and architecting solutions for clients utilizing this big commercial product that is made by the company my father got a job at. I thought this was pretty neat, and I was really happy for him.
Cut to last Thursday. I get a call from my parents. Apparently my dad has a new lady that started on his team recently. She said the team that makes the product I work with is aggressively hiring and looking for new talent. My father told her about me, and she told him to give her my resume and she would pass it around. I asked my girlfriend how she would feel about moving from NY to Seattle, and she is absolutely devastated. She doesn't want to move. She'd be moving away from her family and the job that she loves.
We talked about applying, and I have already told her that I will drop this if she says to. She is more important to me than my career, I'd rather be with her. The problem is, we have a catch-22. If we go to Seattle, my girlfriend will be depressed; we're moving away from her family and her job, and that sucks. If we stay here, I will feel resentment for missing out on a great opportunity to work at a company that I've always wanted to work at, working on developing for a product that I already know. She doesn't want to prevent me from going after my dream job, but that is making her feel depressed. She also doesn't want to move to Seattle without a job of her own, because she will feel like a failure and a mooch.
So, to recap:
I really don't know what to do here. I suggested that we try therapy, but she doesn't want to do that. I'm okay with couples therapy or individual therapy, whatever works. I think her anxiety over leaving her current job is going to hurt us in the long run. The amount of anxiety she's experiencing over leaving her job is troubling me, and I don't know what to do.
First, some backstory to set the mood:
Girlfriend and I have been dating for about 6 years. We've been living together for 4.5 years. I'd also like to stress that when I say girlfriend, I mean something closer to domestic partner, life partner, or wife. We are not officially engaged, but that's mostly by mutual agreement as we still have a lot of student loan debt that we are aggressively paying down. We have combined finances, our finances have been combined for as long as we've been living together. We live in NY, and we're pretty close to my girlfriend's entire family, we see them often. We get to see my family maybe once a year for holiday trips, usually Thanksgiving or Christmas. We both have careers and jobs we enjoy, but I make about double what she makes, as my career is more in demand.
My parents moved to Seattle last year because my father got a job at <Big_Tech_Company>. I thought this was pretty cool, as I'm currently a consultant developer that works with a technology produced by that company. Basically, my job entails programming and architecting solutions for clients utilizing this big commercial product that is made by the company my father got a job at. I thought this was pretty neat, and I was really happy for him.
Cut to last Thursday. I get a call from my parents. Apparently my dad has a new lady that started on his team recently. She said the team that makes the product I work with is aggressively hiring and looking for new talent. My father told her about me, and she told him to give her my resume and she would pass it around. I asked my girlfriend how she would feel about moving from NY to Seattle, and she is absolutely devastated. She doesn't want to move. She'd be moving away from her family and the job that she loves.
We talked about applying, and I have already told her that I will drop this if she says to. She is more important to me than my career, I'd rather be with her. The problem is, we have a catch-22. If we go to Seattle, my girlfriend will be depressed; we're moving away from her family and her job, and that sucks. If we stay here, I will feel resentment for missing out on a great opportunity to work at a company that I've always wanted to work at, working on developing for a product that I already know. She doesn't want to prevent me from going after my dream job, but that is making her feel depressed. She also doesn't want to move to Seattle without a job of her own, because she will feel like a failure and a mooch.
So, to recap:
- We would be moving away from where her family lives for the first time in her life.
- We would be moving closer to my family for the first time in 10 years.
- I've always wanted to work at this company, and it has a great work-life balance.
- I would be making a lot more money. More money than we can ignore without feeling like this is a missed opportunity.
- My job would pay enough to cover the amount she makes while she could look for a new job in Seattle.
- Girlfriend wants to keep her job and career, is feeling marginalized because it's focusing on my career to her career's detriment.
- Girlfriend feels trapped and depressed over this. She doesn't want to prevent me from doing this for fear of alienating me.
- Girlfriend doesn't want to move to new city without a job. She feels like her degree is worthless if we do this.
I really don't know what to do here. I suggested that we try therapy, but she doesn't want to do that. I'm okay with couples therapy or individual therapy, whatever works. I think her anxiety over leaving her current job is going to hurt us in the long run. The amount of anxiety she's experiencing over leaving her job is troubling me, and I don't know what to do.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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-Have you considered putting a time limit on the amount of time you spend there?
-Is her job something that can be done remotely for her current company?
-Have you applied yet? Is there a time limit on doing so?
Therapy would probably be good because it would help you guys talk it out and have a mediator. If she refuses to go to therapy, I would go on your own. Its not exactly a small choice and without a lens into your relationship its hard to tell you what to do other than tell you to talk to each other about it. 6 years is a really long time to be settled in a place and relationship, so I can understand the reluctance, especially if she has a good job.
This is a hard situation for anyone, especially when you are both want the same things for yourselves and each other simultaneously. You want each other to be happy, outside circumstances are making this hard, and you need to make compromises. You really need to make level headed choices and cut a deal with each other. I think therapy is the best way to move forward, personally.
It's possible she's rejecting therapy because she thinks it'll be used to convince her to quit, so you might try to reassure her that you're worried about her career anxiety more than this potential move and see if she's more open.
This would have to be one of the compromises. Would you be making enough that you could save for 5 years and then switch it up, take a lesser job back east? In a 6 year relationship, making a 5 to 10 year plan doesn't seem that crazy to me, and therapy is something that may help you work that. Compromises are going to have to be made, and if it's not going to have to be you now, it may have to be you later. If that's not on the table, its going to be a lot harder for her to meet you half way. You have a lot of questions you need to lay out together, as rationally as possible, if you want to do anything other than break up and leave or stay and be bitter.
If her career is equally location based and she won't be able to achieve the same level of success in seattle, than it's just as much of a sacrifice career wise to leave where shes at. If that's why shes feeling anxious and marginalized, thats pretty legitimate. I think its pretty unlikely that, especially if long distance isnt an option, even a temporary one, you wont need someone to help you talk this out.
As for my personal suggestion: put your career first. Relationships really do come and go, especially if you haven't really settled into marriage, but you only have one of your own life. If she's that important to you, then that's that, but don't jump straight to that answer because you feel like it's the appropriate one. You ARE allowed to prioritize your career if you so choose.
This goes both ways, by the way. I'm sure she loves her job and her current career path, and giving it up would be a tremendous loss, but it's not like those things can't be replaced, ever.
These kinds of things are pretty rough in general. I'm not sure anyone can give you an easy answer here. I've seen long-distance relationships last and turn into a happy marriage with kids. I've also seen long-distance relationships crash and burn (with this one, perhaps, being a slightly more personal perspective). But these problems have less to do with distance and more to do with their underlying dynamics - distance really only exacerbates particular problems that were already there to begin with (trust being the biggest one).
Really this kind of boils down to your respective approaches to your life together. If you think that she's worth more than any job, and you really can let this opportunity go, and she can let go of any guilt associated with "making you choose", then this will likely just be a bump in the road. Similarly, if you decide to pursue the job, and she decides to stay, and you can both handle a temporary long-distance situation without letting any resentment or mistrust build up, then it should pass. Or if you decide to pursue the job and she decides to go with you, and she doesn't resent you for making her leave and you don't feel guilty for doing so. Etc. etc. etc.
All of these possible permutations are, frankly, the stuff of life, and the stuff of relationships. The situations and choices often matter far less than shared priorities and approach. I will say that if one of you has to give an ultimatum, then at that point the relationship is likely over. And if one of you gives in and can't move beyond the resentment, then that will likely cause long-term problems as well.
If your relationship really is as strong as you believe, it'll survive a long distance stint.
I do think a therapist is a good idea, preferably both of you but even if you have to do it solo you can work through your own feelings and learn ways of communicating with your girlfriend to work through this. Even if you feel you are communicating well an outside party can help you get to the root of why you and her feel the way you do and help you figure out what to do.
It sounds like both of you have anxiety over the situation (maybe more on her side, but it applies to both). This is natural and you should try and work out why the anxiety is there and what can be done to relieve some of that.
And be prepared for there not to be a solution that will make both of you happy.
Something to look into with the new position would be if working remotely, either short term or long term, would be a possibility. If she doesn't want to move without finding a job and you could work remotely while she looked (probably with some flights back and forth) that might help relieve one avenue of anxiety.
She also said that she's so anxious about the move because of a lot of things, but a big one is the student loans. My loans will be done in August, but we still have about $90,000 to work through on hers. We should be done with that in 3 or so years, and she thought we would be staying in NYC until all of our loans were gone. She feels very nervous about leaving NYC until we have these paid off, it's a major source of anxiety for her. She said that once our loans are paid off, she would feel a lot better about moving to a strange city with only one of us having a job.
That being said, she still hasn't said no. We are visiting my parents in September, and she wants to see Seattle before she makes a decision. I think that's fair! I get the sense that at this point, she's about 30% yes, 70% no. She seems to feel a LOT better about the situation after I emphasized that it's TOTALLY OKAY for her to veto this, and I won't leave her. I just said that I don't want to be trapped in NYC for our entire lives, and she says that won't happen. She just feels like the move is interfering with our plan to aggressively pay down our debt, and it kind of blindsided her.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Edit: We also agreed that she needs to see a therapist. I told her I don't think she's crazy, and I'm not using therapy as a way to marginalize how she feels. I just think she needs someone to talk this out with, and who can give her strategies for coping with her anxiety. She agrees, I think she's just scared what people will think of her.
This I don't get though. If you got the gig in Seattle, you two would jointly make the same amount as you mentioned earlier. So any job she got would net your more cash (and so could pay off loans quicker).
Also remember, right now you're at the stage where someone someday might remember to look at your resume. This is hardly a guarantee of a position.
Not that I'm trying to talk you two out of a nice Seattle vacation. Just seems a bit early to say, hunt for apartments.
Money can be a very emotionally driven thing for some people, especially if they grew up in a financially insecure or financially mysterious environment. She doesn't see the numbers on the paper, she seems them moving from a stable situation to an unknown one.
I totally get her part. She has a job, and she likes it, and it's not as easy to get a good job in what she does. She's also in her element, and never been out of it so to speak.
So moving effectively stifles her career, kicks her out of her home turf, and removes her financial independence all in one stroke.
It's not really a shock that it would be stressful.
For you however... if this is really a big opportunity, just letting her say no without taking a real look at it isn't a very good idea. Not just because of the actual opportunity itself, but because making a choice like that has a nasty habit of coming back later as some pretty ugly resentment later on.
Money being tight, job being a pain, etc. It can be really easy to just think (or even say), I gave up a chance at a dream job just to make you happy. Even if it's not the truth... sometimes it sort of becomes the truth.
It's a dangerous thing to just give up something like that without really working through it. But it does sound like you two are talking more about it.
Either way... just keep talking it over, and don't make the choice too lightly one way or the other.
― John Quincy Adams
If you need advice on places to go, there are a ton of Northwesteners on the forum that can point you in a good direction. I lived closer to Tacoma and I took trips out to the coast all the time to crab, only took a few day trips up to Seattle.
― John Quincy Adams
God I feel old now...
Anyway, it's good that you have the lines of communication open. Ive seen way too many couples break up over a lack of it.
i am actually compelled to suggest you hold off here. a better job for you is a great thing, a change can be wonderful in itself, but unemployment is worth no compensatory wage on the other side, and if your wife experiences anxiety she needs job security as a matter of mental health. i disagree with financial rationality here, it's not the priority. you need to consider what's going to hurt whom the most, and trust the course of action you come to together. don't regret it.
I had a job I loved and was really good at, I was also being trained for promotion when my boyfriend got the opportunity to go to school for his passion and get away from a job he hated more than anything. We could either live long distance or move together. We moved together. Luckily, my job was able to transfer me to the area of the country we had to move to.
Almost a year in to living in this new place I left my job when I was head hunted by another company for a better position and more money, I took it, I loved it. My boyfriend was also hired right out of school for a job in his field, it was great. Then, 6 months later, my boyfriend finds out he's being transferred back East. Here's the choice again, stay in a strange city I'm not too fond of but in a job I love that is talking to me about promotion or move to stay with my boyfriend... I moved. This time, no transfer, there's no base in the new city. It's also winter there 10 months of the year. I spent 8 months locked in our apartment because I had no job in an unfamiliar city and no chance to explore because I don't drive and there's at least 3 feet of snow outside at all times. I felt like I was in prison. I slept all the time, I baked the rest of the time... then ate ALL the baking and gained like 50 lbs, it was so goddamn awful and even two years later after finally getting to come home I still feel the effects of those choices.
8 months in the frozen wastes and I got a reprieve, my boyfriend was transferred back to our home city. But now it's so hard to find work, it's so hard to work off those cookies, I feel like I gave up my career for my relationship. I don't regret those decisions, my boyfriend is now my fiancé and I love him more than anything, but do I wish things could have been different? Yes. I chose people over career, I'd do it again, but holy hell it was and is still very hard on me. Without my fiancé's supportive nature, and my tendency to work through problems, our relationship wouldn't be entirely possible.
If you both move:
You need to figure out whether you can live with and shoulder her sacrifices if she can't pick herself up right away, or even for a long time. And she needs to figure out if she can live with her choices if she can't find work right away. You both need to talk things out regularly so that resentment can't find a place in your home.
If you move alone:
Many people can't handle long distance relationships. Consider the expense of cross country travel for regular visits. Consider the weight of mutual promises. Ugh, the time difference... You may resent each other anyway for not willing to make sacrifices for the other. There's a lot at stake when you can't just talk to your S.O. right away in the moment and deal with your feelings.
If you stay where you are:
You gave her to option to nix this plan. You can't really take that back. Moving to a new place is amazing, it's also a real test of what your relationship is made of. Be prepared that if she says no, you gave the ok on that. Acknowledge any resentment, own up to those feelings, they're valid, and work it out.
I would suggest taking a trip out to Seattle. It's a beautiful and vibrant city (we spend a week there every year around PAX Prime), so you can familiarize yourself with things, spend some time with your side of the family, and see if it's for you (both). Help her look for work, make thoughtful, productive suggestions. Make sure she's getting out and around the city, if you go, and meeting people. It's too easy to stay where you're comfortable and find reasons to stay around the house, especially if that house isn't mired in snow the entire time (seriously, most snow and lowest temperature in 70 years for my time...). Be prepared to put on your Most Supportive Partner hat and any +1 to positivity gear you've got. West Coast, best coast.
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Basically, could this lead to Seattle just being a temporary area with chances with future expansion to return NY in future?, and if able to learn that would that quell the stress a little if the permanency of the relocation wasn't so definite?
It probably wouldn't end up being a dream job anyhow.
Don't do the long-distance relationship... if she won't go and you won't stay and neither of you is happy with the sacrifice, you won't be happy later either and your relationship is on the way to being over.
Obviously you want to have a possibility of accepting if you get an offer (otherwise you are just wasting your own time and the company's). As your partner seems to have mentioned, going through the interview process and getting an offer doesn't mean you have to accept. On the flip side, if you go through the process and don't get an offer it makes the choice to stay much easier
Another consideration is that most Seattle tech companies of a certain size have other offices around the country / world. Most specifically have offices in NY so if you are worth hiring in Seattle you are likely worth hiring in NY. I have had people I have interviewed for my teams in the past end up declining a Seattle offer but then accepting an offer for Boston or NY, for instance.