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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

This follow up is way more compelling because it deals with the reality. I'm jealous of the authors communication skills and their partner's: there are some very hard statements in there about feeling worthless and falling behind because of no job. I wonder of those words were spoken calmly, or shouted through tears.

Here are their discussions: https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/

TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn't work out. But he's still got his chin up and it's great.

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> [article author, to wife] ... I thought that what you wanted was to live a life of freedom, with me. We’d talked about this.

> [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing.

> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.

I don't buy his analysis. I don't think she wanted to do those things because others were doing them. I think she wanted to have kids and a classic family and happened to point out, oh, by the way, other people do those things too. Maybe it's easier to think that your former partner is shallow and busy comparing herself to others, rather than admit that the desire to start a family is a normal and genetically ingrained emotion.

Ironically, his new partner has told him she's interested in having kids and they're both working. I know, it's easy to claim to understand from an armchair, and I'm not saying I've necessarily got this right, but it's definitely interesting to consider.

this part is confusing. it seems like she's saying she wanted to be working and have kids the whole time? hard to understand how you could get that far along the path without realizing it's the exact opposite of what you want. a more reasonable way to understand the quote is that she simply changed her mind after realizing the implications of their life path.

which leads to a more reasonable way of interpreting this line:

> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.

I think (or at least hope) the author isn't saying they are special people with some kind of special destiny to FIRE. if I read it as "she couldn't accept our being different [from our friends]", it makes a lot more sense. I think the author is painfully aware that working and starting a family is the "normal" thing to do.

I think she's totally reasonable in saying this, and I think it's normal that after you've achieved the goal and finished a project you've been working on together, you would move on to the next project. And the big project in a heterosexual relationship is naturally having a family, and I think it IS weird to insist on continuing with a "life of freedom" when you don't really have any thing particular that you're working on. And in the end, he also found out that what he needed to be happy, was actually to buy a house and start a family, so he ended up at the same point himself eventually with his new partner.

It is ultimately his perspective but I agree, he was one layer of abstraction away from calling her a "normie". She had goals and ambitions he didn't share; that doesn't mean she "doesn't get it", it means they're different people.

What it tells me is that there are two really important and serious things you need to consciously commit to in order to be compatible with this lifestyle. 1. Set aside that urge to keep up with the Joneses, and 2. Stop deriving life meaning from employment. These habits can be deeply ingrained in someone's personality, like an addiction in remission, and may rear their heads even if you agree to deliberately try to fight it. I don't think this is genetic. It comes from a lifetime of social conditioning, from watching your parents and friends do it. I'd actually like to read more about the strategies people have successfully used to deprogram themselves and help their loved ones also move past these things, helping them make the jump to FIRE (or regular-retirement).

You seem to be saying exactly the same thing as the author, which is precisely what I was disagreeing with. I can think of THREE reasons to want to continue working past the point the author of the article did:

1. You derive meaning from work.

2. You want more shiny material stuff all the time for shallow "keeping up with the Joneses" reasons

3. You want to raise a family, which was not possible in the financial plan of the article's author.

You and the author both focussed on 2, but to me it sounds like the wife mainly wanted 3. Reason 2 may or may not be genetically ingrained, that is besides the point; wanting children definitely is, at least in some people. (A sibling comment suggested that they may not have been able to have genetic children for other reasons, but that doesn't necessarily stop the desire.)

I think a serious problem here is that he thought he was free from the treadmill, but it wasn't true. He just so happened to be at a certain rung of the ladder along with all of his peers and as he retired, it felt like he climbed even further and had "made it" in a way they hadn't. But he had really hit the pause button on his accomplishments, so as his peers entered the next life phase of increased career security and financial options, he was left behind and suddenly found himself low on the ladder looking up. Much of his personal angst came from this.

Yeah I feel like he has a fairly dim view of a typical lifestyle based on some faulty assumptions. He seems to think that “staying on the treadmill” would be done by most people primarily for vain or frivolous reasons. That might be a part of it, but many people want or need these things out of necessity. Withdrawing from from working life and living like an austere hermit is not going to fly for a family of 4, for example. Hell, he was not even able to make it work as a couple. Very few mothers are going to tolerate raising a family on 30k a year when they damn well know their partner can go out and make 5x that much.

I also really question the whole living on 30k thing with 950k in the bank. That could be invested into some monthly paying income ETFs that would easily pay double if not more what he was taking out. Without even touching the principal.

Yep. Author is avoiding the hardest realizations and emotions here. I don’t necessarily blame them, but they’re gonna need to confront that to have a healthy relationship in the future.

Odd, I was going to comment on how poor the communication with his partner was in the updated post. I realize he'd written the 2021 update after their separation (hard to tell if these individual sections were real-time but even worse if so) but what was happening was so obvious when he first started to mention the issues, and he described her so harshly and without empathy, like she had some bug that needed to be "fixed" and he wasn't bothering to relate.

In the post-FIRE relationships disconnect post, it was jarring how he went from having what I saw as a reasonably well communicated discussion to "she couldn't get her head around us being different." Seems like the understood each other, but had different priorities. Each also seemed to have a bit of disdain for the other's way of thinking.

He saw her desires as vain and felt like she didn't understand his ideal of freedom. She saw his freedom as stagnation.

I think the communication was good and the understanding was lacking. Talking != understanding. And sometimes talking is really really hard when you know it might lead to a minefield.

Always beautiful to see people comment on the realities of these situations.

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