I am really looking forward to the job change. He loves his coworkers and has a very charismatic? personality. But I feel that his work environment contributed to a lot of issues in our marriage (affair aside).
He worked second shift. I worked in the mornings. This alone caused issues because we saw each other mostly in passing except on his days off.
Most of his coworkers are young, single, and none have kids. They would routinely do drinks and hang out after work. Lots of meeting up outside of work. Then the guys started doing gym nights after work. Originally I thought this was great for him to have so many friends... yeah it got old real quick. Pre-affair, he justified the late nights (3-4 hours after work) as "well you're just sleeping" so it didn't hurt anything and didn't seem to notice that it affected our daytime life ad nixed any chance I'd get to see him from the 12a.m.-1a.m. window that we used to have where I'd wait up for him. He'd nap all day when I was home and took forever to get to engaging with his kids while i was at work. His coworkers are all nice (except AP obviously) but they are at a very different point in their lives than him. He wanted and chose to go act like a bachelor in his middle-of-the-night life.
During the affair, this gave him a nice cover for why he was out so late... and he extended it to be 5-6 hours after work. Slept 2-3 hours before taking care of our daughters, obviously quickly became snappish and defensive and distant to me, etc. Everything and everyone suffered.
We were talking about this last night. I was in one of my angry cycles and he talked about how our marital distance seemed to have started slowly about 2 years ago. We talked about how his late-night life with his coworkers PREaffair definitely didn't help.
So one thing that I'm excited about with his new job as we try to work through all of this - all this ginormous mess that's become of our lives - is he will be home *every* evening and we will get evenings as family time. And since he will be working a standard day shift, it's probably much more likely he will be working with families who share his priorities if he befriends them.
Of course, this has completely thrown our childcare plans in disarray, but we're trying to sort those out.
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” - Dumbledore