Folks on this board continue to amaze me -- lots of well thought out, sensible suggestions and good questions.
I suspect the root of the problem here is that you can envision this new life and she cannot.
Encourage her to talk about her current ego gratification.
Whatever you do, get out of this either/or, zero-sum-game mindset. It will lead to one or the other of you being miserable and eventually bitter.
Footenote, yes, I agree completely. We need to work on this.
Villanelle
But has she actually articulated why she doesn't want to quit, and that it is the loss of purpose and uncertainty about her time? Or is that just your guess?
Yes, she's voiced exactly this. "If I don't get some sense of importance out of my job, I don't know where else I'm going to find that." It's a completely valid concern. If she wants to continue to work, that's OK with me to be honest. My #1 problem is that she wants me to continue to work in the formal office-slave model and has indicated that if I retire before her it will spell serious relationship problems. So there's work to be done to assuage her fears here. Of course I'd really prefer that she retire as well -- work has many negative effects on her and only one positive that I can see at this point (sense of ego gratification and identification). I'm certain there's a better way to manage life that will make her (us) more vibrant and happy. (We've been together 13 years and she was much happier and energetic a decade ago... the work grind has definitely been wearing us down and, in some ways, even reducing our sense of possibility. Nothing like being in the same routine for a decade and a half to make you feel like living any other way is crazy talk.)
It seems to me like she used to be excited about the prospect of doing something different but now, the idea terrifies her. I am not sure how to make her enthusiastic about it. I can't give her dreams and alternate goals -- I think those have to come from within, right?
After mulling over the comments, I've decided to take a phased approach. This is not an emergency situation and is something that will take time and effort to overcome.
Phase 1:
Agreeing on FI. I have to admit, I'm much more into the finances of this thing than she is. When I say things like "we're OK with a conservative 3% pull on our assets" it doesn't really compute for her and she doesn't always trust my research and conclusions. I'm a little hesitant to bring in a financial planner to validate our readiness, because s/he might start spouting nonsense like "you need 80% of pre-retirement income in retirement" which everyone on this board knows is bunk. But there is, no doubt, work to be done here so that she's comfortable.
Phase 2: Post ER life.
SO knows most of the details of what I'm planning on doing. And there is some resentment against me for "being ready" and "having a plan." It's her fear that she'll come home every day tired and miserable after another day of office drama, technical issues, outage management, etc and want someone to commisserate with, when instead of sitting down for a bitch session, I tell her that I'm really happy and she could be too.
So a big part of this phase is working on her end of the plan. Does she want to volunteer? Or move to another field where she would find the work more rewarding? What did she want to do with life before the corporate grind reduced her sense of possibility? We need to restore her sense that leaving her job and moving to something else is a good thing -- the sense that she had 7 or 8 years ago.
I also really like the idea of taking 2 weeks off work and trial-running it. Not right away but somewhat down the road, maybe toward the end of this phase.
Phase 3: Producing concrete exit plans
This could probably be done in parallel with Phase 2. We will need to move and this means selecting a timeframe, picking a new house, selling the old one, all that jazz.
To answer some of the other questions:
-We're both in agreement that we're not having children. Actually she's very opposed to having kids. We take our parenting instincts out on nephews, which can then thankfully be returned to the humans that originated them.
-Yes, I do think that she's concerned about perception of friends/family if she's not working. Or I'm not "officially" working. We need to work on this. I don't care personally -- I know I will be busy, and I know that I'm the opposite of lazy, so it doesn't matter what other people think of me. But I recognize it's important to her.
-There's little or no concern about the division of assets. We earn roughly the same amount of money and have been working the same # of years so we feel like our contributions have been very close to 50/50.
-She does like the city more than I do. We can take that into account as we work on the move. I'm willing to compromise on this in order to do something that works better for her.
I'm also going to see if I can work part-time at my employer to help the transition. This would be somewhere in phase 2. Might suggest she do the same, also somewhere in phase 2.
In my head I think I'm going to target 2016 to make the final jump (phase 4: execution of plans!) but this could change based on how discussions go.
Thanks for all the advice, much appreciated. We'll get there.