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Hi Smee,
the experience with my wife and some friends has shown me that most people really expect too much from a telescope, even from a moderate one (my wife found the orion nebula through a 300mm (12") F5 Newton disappointing as it still was just a grey fog with 4 stars in the middle-Otone).
What (non astro-hooked) people expect are stunning views as presented in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. And when they then look through cheap glass (no ED or FLT elements) in a 80mm (3") F5 refractor and the only thing they can make out after 10min roaming the sky is just more stars - of course they are disappointed.
My advice: if you have a tight budget-go for a Newton-style telescope with no less than 6" of aperture (diameter of mirror) on a Dobsonian-style mount. Everything else will disappoint, sooner rather than later. Or you might as well abandon the idea at all until such time a bigger budget has accumulated.
For an enjoyable telescope experience you will also need a laser collimator, eyepieces and a barlow lens to be able to change magnification. Again, cheap glass doesn´t satisfy for long as it lacks contrast and gives only very narrow fields of view (looking into a tunnel). A medium good eypiece alone costs around ($60-130), a very good eyepiece costs around $200-400 (82°FOV) an awesome one as much as $1k (110°FOV).
The other thing to consider is that Astronomy is highly adictive and like most adictions VERY expensive over time. Look at the signatures of the people here in this forum, most of them own more than one telescope and a large number went into Astrophotography, a level at which you stop talking in hundreds of $. A question you have to ask yourself is: do you really want to get your husband hooked?
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