This has been a very interesting thread. I can understand why you want to travel and it certainly sounds like you have a stressful job, but candidly, I think you are being pretty cavalier about your wife's views on this. It may not be that she is "fearful" or that she doesn't get your need for me time: it may be that she is the one who is feeling resentful and feels that any additional time away from your home and your family is just too much. Right now, you are away in stressful places 70% of the time. I am guessing that you are a number of time zones away from your home and that getting home in the event of an emergency, or even just a problem, is not easy or quick. Thus, it is probably unlikely that you and your spouse/family can talk on the phone as often or as easily as if, for example, you were on a one week business trip from LA to SFO. I know from traveling about 70% myself that keeping in touch by phone can be helpful but is much harder if you are eating dinner while they are having breakfast, or if something happens at home at a time that is the middle of the night where you are. You sound like you are pretty far away and probably not able to be in "real time" contact. If the plumbing springs a leak, if the family pet is sick, if your child is running a a fever, you are not available to help with that situation; you may not even be aware of it for a while. More routinely, you aren't there for meals, for school trips, for local events your wife might like to attend, to have dinner with friends, etc. When you come for 30% of the time, arriving from a far distant time zone, stressed out from a difficult job, and probably on a bit of an adrenaline jag, you are arriving not as a person who is fully integrated into the day to to day life of the family. There's always a period of reentry in that sort of situation.

Now you are saying that you feel constrained and limited because you want to up your time away from your family by an additional fairly significant percentage and your wife is not supportive of that. I think you may not be realizing the message your wife may be hearing, which is that despite any efforts she puts forth to welcome you back and include you in family life, you really would rather not be in a place where you are not very often anyway. You would rather go somewhere far away amongst strangers than spend your limited time with her, doing things she might enjoy (perhaps a concert with friends, for example, that might be something that could be planned for). Whether or not you MEAN to send that message (and I am sure you don't) this is what she may be feeling. And speaking as a traveling spouse, it doesn't matter one bit how much you talk about it and try to persuade her that no, it's not about not wanting to be at home, it's about your own needs, that talk will not be persuasive if from her perspective you are avoiding time at home.

Personally, if I were in your wife's shoes, the more you tried to persuade me, the more resentful I would become, because I would conclude that you considered your own views to be the "right" ones, and that talking more might sway her views. She may ultimately conclude that she doesn't want to keep having the same discussion and may agree to your travels, but I would be concerned that by doing so, she may be the one who becomes resentful, which is always a strain in any relationship.

Just one more viewpoint, from someone who also likes to travel....and best of luck. It sounds like in many ways you have a great thing going!