Dear Dave:

You are welcome. My objective in this post is to understand your wife better.

How you met: “She worked at a horse farm and I was delivering hay”.

Taking on the horse boarding business: “her partner decided that she didn’t want to do horses anymore.. so the boarding part of the business was.. given to my wife to run as her own business.  Now she was making no money, because everything she made, she was putting back into the business”.

Her work hours: “she leaves around 5am, comes back home so I can leave for work around 8am, then she .. (leaves)..  She gets home around 8-9pm”.

Yesterday, you added: “she can’t change her hours because of her job, and she has no help, and she took on another client this week, and didn’t tell me because she knew I would get mad about that… She is very messy at home.. her side of the room has clothes, shoes, books, and other things strewn about. At work her feed room is very organized… My son.. doesn’t have a lot of time with his mother”.

Overall, what is most important to her by far is working with horses, currently boarding horses- which is an extremely difficult job that requires many, many hours of hard physical and mental effort and dedication. Far, far.. far less important to her is being a mother to your son and a wife to you.

Diana S. Fleischman, Ph.D.,  is an evolutionary psychologist who on December 2020, wrote an article that applies to your wife, “Why So Many Girls and Women Adore Horses”. She wrote: “In both he USA and Great Britain, over 90% of horse owners are women. Three out of 4 students enrolled in riding schools in Europe are women.. One question people have asked me many times, as an evolutionary psychologist interested in human-animal relationships is why are women and girls so into horses?”

She goes on to explain that from nature/ evolution standpoint, men exert power over their environment through physical force: hunting, fighting enemies (other men, wild animals), etc. Women who are physically smaller and weaker than men exert power over their environment by .. taming and training a man, so that the man will hunt for her, protect her from enemies, etc.

She goes on to say that girls/ women  taming and training horses is a form of play, preparing the woman to train.. men.

Back to your wife: she feels that the place where she has influence/ power over her environment is not at home but outside the home, with horses. This is why she works so hard and long there. I think that she feels powerless at home and everywhere else, in regard to having influence over others, that when at home, she feels that she has no use, that she is making no difference and that she is not influencing anyone or anything. So, she stays away from home, spending the majority of her time and effort where she feels that she has use, where she feels that she is making a difference.

There is also the Habit Factor: she’s done horses for so long, way before she met you: that’s what she did, that’s what she still does, that’s what she is used to be doing, and out of sheer habit: that’s what she is strongly inclined to keep doing.

anita