My husband (35M) and I (33F) have been together for 5 years. We both work from home and in tech-related jobs, and he is the breadwinner, taking home about 2x what I make.

The only major issue is that his job makes him absolutely miserable, and this misery bleeds over into every other aspect of his life, including our relationship. For a little backstory, his company laid off a bunch of people last year, and now they don’t have enough employees to keep the company afloat. So their brilliant solution was to make him take on the workload of 4 or 5 people when his job is already very demanding. The weight of all of these responsibilities is crushing, and I understand that, and I lend an ear whenever I can to hear and acknowledge his frustrations. I have also encouraged him to apply for other jobs and get the ball rolling on other opportunities. He is very qualified to work anywhere in the industry, and I believe an excellent candidate for any company. He is so hardworking and has the best work ethic I’ve ever seen. He is anxious to leave this company however, as he has spent so many years there, so he hasn’t actually applied to any jobs yet, even though he knows that he needs to.

The hard part is that I feel like I can’t talk to him anymore – when he talks to me he just vents about how awful work is, and I completely understand that, but it can be exhausting after a while to be the only topic of conversation. I try to steer the conversation to other things, but he doesn’t really have much to say about anything else. What’s a little strange is that he wants to be the only one of us to be able to mention his work. For example, if he brings it up unprompted, we can talk about it no problem, but if I’m the one to bring it up in any regard or want to talk about it, he gets extremely upset and asks things like “How can you do this to me? Why are you bringing up the thing that’s hurting me so much?” I feel like he thinks I am purposefully trying to hurt him by bringing it up because he gets so upset and berates me for it, but its the only thing that he is actually talking about these days so I don’t really know what else I can bring up?

I also don’t bring up any of the stressful aspects of his job, I will say something like “I hope you have a good day tomorrow” while he is on a business trip because I love him and do want him to have a good day, and he will lash out at me with “don’t say that to me – are you trying to rub salt in my wound? Don’t you realize I won’t have a good day until I’m not here anymore” etc. It’s just very jarring and upsetting because I feel like I am constantly walking on eggshells, and if I mess up and say the wrong thing then I don’t get any grace, only the assumption that I am purposefully trying to hurt him.

He says that he is going to put out applications for new jobs this week. I just wanted to vent a little and see if anyone had any advice on how I can best support him during all of this. I love him and I know that he is only lashing out because of the immense stress he is under. He never used to be like this. I just feel at a loss for what to do.