Washington ? Being rejected for jobs time and time again can rob anyone of self-esteem, but for many men this recession has hit them particularly hard.

That’s the case with Juan Wilson. He and his wife, Bobbie, are participating in this year’s Color of Money Challenge. Since the first of the year, I’ve been working with Juan and Bobbie as they search for employment.

Typically, participants have a goal of getting out of debt, saving and developing better money management skills. This time, I wanted to help people who had lost their jobs.

Bobbie has landed a number of jobs, although her latest is a temporary position as a paralegal. Her contract was set to end in October but has been extended to Dec. 31.

I’ve also been working with another challenger, Rick Rose, who lost his $85,000-a-year job in May 2008.

Unemployment has reached 9.7 percent, with many experts saying it will soon hit 10 percent. Delve more into the statistics and it’s already a bleak picture for men, especially black men such as Wilson. “It’s hard to stay motivated,” Wilson says.

The same has been true for Rose.

“My lowest point was at the end of 2008,” he said. “My resources were starting to run thin. I thought my unemployment was going to run out. The job market was particularly bleak at that point.”

Juan Wilson is at his lowest point now. He lost his job at a semiconductor company in 2008. He’s sent out countless resumes and went on many job interviews. He managed to get some part-time work, but that was temporary.

“Since the Great Recession began in December 2007, there has been a sharp rise in the number of married couples where a woman is left to bring home the bacon because her husband is unemployed,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, wrote in a recent report.

Boushey notes in “Women Breadwinners, Men Unemployed” that because men have lost three out of every four jobs that have been cut nationwide, more married couples must rely on the woman to be the principal wage-earner.

The unemployment rate for adult men over 20 is already at 10.1 percent. For adult black men, it’s a staggering 17 percent. That’s compared with 7.6 percent for women of all races.

As of July, 15.6 percent of working wives had a husband who was not on the job, up 3.5 percentage points from early 2007, when 12.1 percent of working wives had a husband who was not employed. Since the recession began, many families are struggling with unemployment of both the husband and wife, Boushey said.

And what kind of strain does that put on a marriage?

“There have been some days when I thought we wouldn’t make it,” Bobbie said. “It’s been extremely frustrating and crazy. We argue a lot over finances.”

It’s been difficult for Bobbie — and me — to get Juan to work on managing what little money they do have coming in.

“It’s just hard when you are the one with no income,” he said.

Juan hopes things will turn around now that he’s signed up for a series of technology courses at a local community college. The training will help prepare him to become a Cisco Certified Network Associate.

“The Cisco Networking Academy enables individuals like Juan Wilson to obtain jobs involving a broad spectrum of IT and networking equipment, not just Cisco’s,” said Carroll McGillin, a Cisco spokesperson. “Skills and knowledge from such programs are in high demand despite the distressed economy.”

McGillin said employment rates for those who graduate from the program vary, but people who achieve IT certification are often “fast-tracked” to employment and receive higher pay compared with those who do not hold certifications.

It’s that hope of getting a job fast that led the Wilsons to scrape together the $644 in cash for the tuition and fees for the first course.

The waiting and the doubting are over for Rick Rose.

After 15 months of unemployment, he’s working again. He was hired in August as marketing and communications manager for a new partnership between the Brookings Institution and the John M. Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

“It was a pretty tough process,” said Jackson Nickerson, director of the Brookings-Olin partnership. “Rick had the maturity, good communication skills and on top of that great marketing skills.”

Rose said having a job makes him feel normal again.

“Having an interesting, motivating job is a great reason to get up in the morning,” he said.