Pregnant woman wonders if she’s wrong for not supporting her husband’s Survivor audition dream, here is how to weigh a dream against the family’s timing

She turned to Reddit after her husband announced he wants to audition for the reality show this summer, and the timing could not be worse for anyone except him.

She knew that her husband had long dreamed of being on Survivor. What she did not expect was for him to bring it up now, while she is pregnant with their second child, due in January, and a three-year-old is already running around the house. If he gets cast and filming follows the show’s usual summer schedule, he would be away when the baby is around five months old. By that time, she would be back at work as a dentist, managing both kids, the household, and a full patient load, largely on her own.

She is not trying to kill his dream, just cannot figure out how to support it right now, and she took the question to Reddit.

As a dentist, she spends her days thinking about what neglect does to the human body, and watching her husband walk into weeks of near-starvation, harsh sun, no medications for his allergies and eczema, and no toothbrush. If something went wrong out there, he would be far from any real help, and she would be home with a newborn and a toddler with no way to reach him.

She knows the odds of getting cast are low, and she even says so in her post, almost as if she’s trying to talk herself into being less worried. But the question that keeps coming back to her has nothing to do with the casting odds. Survivor has been on the air for over forty seasons. He could have applied years ago, before they had kids, or he could wait a few more years until the children are older. He is choosing to bring this up now, while she is pregnant and the family is at its most stretched, and she would be the one carrying everything he left behind.

The most upvoted response in the thread took a pragmatic line: “Let the show disappoint him, not you.” With roughly 12,000 to 15,000 people auditioning each season and only a small fraction receiving callbacks, the odds are heavily against him. Opposing the audition now, the argument goes, only creates resentment without changing anything practical.

Several others pushed back on that logic directly. If she signals she is fine with the audition and he somehow gets cast, she ends up in a worse position. Telling your partner you were only okay with them trying because you assumed they would fail is not a conversation with a clean ending.

One commenter shared a personal story that resonated with many readers. Her former husband had gone on a different survival reality show when she was four weeks postpartum, leaving her at home with a newborn and three children under six. She described it as awful, and her advice was straightforward: do not be a pushover about this. The timing is the real issue, not the dream.

Another response offered what may be the best single line in the thread: “Remind him that he’s already playing a game of Survivor, but it’s a more extreme version where you’re responsible for other people’s lives at the same time as your own.”

When a dream collides with the wrong moment

One detail keeps surfacing in the thread: Survivor has been on the air for over forty seasons, and it is not going anywhere. He could apply next cycle, or the one after, or when both kids are old enough. The fact that he is raising this now, during his wife’s second pregnancy, is what deserves the most attention.

Every couple eventually faces some version of this. One person has a goal or an opportunity, and the timing is bad for the other. The question is what the timing reveals about how that person weighs their own desires against their partner’s reality. Wanting to spend a month on a reality show while your wife manages a newborn and a toddler and returns to full-time work is a statement about priorities, whether it is intended that way or not.

Several commenters raised a comparison. Would a postpartum mother asking the same question get the same benefit of the doubt if she wanted to leave a newborn with her husband for five or six weeks to pursue a personal adventure? The answer in most households is no, and that double standard does not resolve the argument.

The more useful question is whether this couple has had an honest conversation about what partnership actually looks like during the newborn phase, before the audition process goes any further.