This is Thursday's "Ask the Readers" question. The reader writes:
My wife and I are mostly happy except for after work hours. To be clear, the complainer is my wife. She is friendly with co-workers and customers throughout the day, but be careful after work! I got to hear about the rotten clients she dealt with, all the mistakes her co-workers made, and how she never got the respect of anyone. Now is not the time to talk about it. She just wants to complain and wants me to listen to her. For years I just kept my mouth shut and listened and nodded, and I got tired of it. In 2022, I hope there will be no complaints during dinner... At least there are fewer complaints. In addition to me, my wife needs an outlet for stress at work.
I tried delicately to not waste the evening complaining, but to no avail. She replied that she needed someone to talk to about her own day. I understand this, but especially in the current climate where social gatherings are minimized due to Covid and much more time is spent at home, I am my only source for the day's news. And, to be honest, there are a lot of complaints. This is really a choice. No need to complain about everything (or anything). There is a difference between talking about the past and complaining about the past. So it's difficult. I don't want to deprive my wife of the opportunity to speak, but I want to suppress her displeasure. What I'm looking for are suggestions on how to curb complaints and provide more stress relief at work than at lunchtime.
do you have any ideas? FYI, I honestly have a mediocre job, I don't have much to complain about, and when I do, I have nothing to complain about.
Three quick thoughts from me and then I`ll throw this out to readers:
First, have you clearly told her that the complaining has become too much for you and you need less of it for your own mental health? It sounds like you might have soft-pedaled the message a bit and if that`s the case, try being much more explicit and saying something like, “I care about your stresses but it`s stressing me out to be your outlet for it every night. Can we talk about different solutions?”
Second, some people find success with “we can complain for 10 minutes and then we move on to the rest of our night” agreements.
Third, if things are this bad with her job, it might be time for her to start seriously planning to make a change. (And if things aren`t that bad and she just enjoys venting, it`s not cool to do that when it means dumping a bunch of negativity on you every night.)