Rollercoaster ride of a hedge fund wife

Each time I have received a tense, terse response. Tuesday he said: "The market's ripping." Pause. "It doesn't make sense." Click. Wednesday: "The market's crashing." There followed an expletive, not appropriate for print. Thursday: "This market is a disaster."

As a hedge fund wife I am used to such intensity from my spouse. Once he came home and told me without irony that the world was ending (this was in August, when the market was as volatile as it is now).

I try to ignore these pronouncements, figuring that basic economic theory states that all market fluctuations even out in the end. To boot, my husband is good at his job, which means that despite the bad days, he has many more profitable ones, and that, yes, the general prognosis is that we are headed for a recession, but there is no need to lose all optimism. In fact he even made money during last week's mad hurly-burly.

Dealing with intense mood swings, however, is part of being married to a hedge funder. Nothing has annoyed me more than the recent spate of articles about the new uber-rich (hedge-funders are usually cited) with crass taste and tacky wives, who buy art at $10 million a pop, sight unseen, to cover the wall for a dinner party they are hosting.

Certainly such people exist. Even as we read the headlines about bonuses falling and two major CEOs losing their jobs, we also read that Russian real estate magnate Leonart Blavatnik just spent $150 million on a triplex inside Manhattan's Mark hotel. (He already has a house in Kensington worth $120 million, apparently.)

But for those of us not married to Blavatnik, our reality at the moment is dealing with short attention spans, white faces and frazzled emotions. There have been many days my husband comes home smelling of vodka, behaving like a winning footballer; last week he came home smelling of vodka and behaved like someone in the suicide role in a Chekov play.

I have no sage advice on what to do during the latter moments other than to keep up with routine: put the kids to bed, see friends. Life must go on. "It is never the good times that reveal opportunity, but the lows," I remember former General Electric CEO Jack Welch saying. I repeat it to the husband but he's passed out on the sofa, too tired to hear.