Husband doesn't help with hardly anything

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:He has ADHD. Seriously, he's able to do well at work because he's able to focus on that one thing. Once work is over, he wants to "zone" into games, sleep, etc. and will use all kinds of techniques to avoid tasks that seem tedious or boring.
I have a teen son with ADHD and without meds, he acts exactly like this.

I'm the PP that said the DH sounds selfish and entitled, but actually this makes more sense. Significant ADHD and defensiveness about doing anything to fix it.

Is ADHD making him complain about the cleaners, lol?

The fact is, you can both be ADHD and a jerk. I have a brother w ADHD and he is a fantastic husband. ADHD does not excuse or explain this total abdication.

Also ADHD does require symptoms in multiple areas. Someone who can manage work can also manage home duties. Someone motivated to run every day has the capacity to do the freakin’ dishes.

THIS. I wish there was a PSA about this. OP's DH may indeed have ADHD. He could also be depressed. None of this is an excuse for being an absent father and a jerk to your spouse.

Also, one of the problems about any diagnosis for the DH here is that he's not going to do anything about it. If he has ADHD, he's not going to get tested, take meds, or try to use adaptive skills to counteract its impact on his family. Same with depression. He's not going to go find a therapist and talk to a doctor about meds and figure out what works and try to get better. At best, he will go to an appointment that OP researches and makes for him, and if the suggested solutions are really easy, he might do some of them. At best. But OP will have to hold his hand and do most of the legwork and also never be frustrated by the fact that he will never, ever take personal responsibility over any of it. It might get moderately better.

People like this can sometimes find a diagnosis to blame their behavior on, but that in itself is just another way for them to shift responsibility off themselves. They are just selfish. They want to do the stuff they enjoy and they want other people to handle everything else and they have learned from a young age a variety of tactics for making this happen. I know men and women like this. It's entitlement, often facilitated by families who trained them into it. An ADHD diagnosis will not undo 40 years of thinking nothing is your fault and you don't have to do anything that is even mildly unpleasant to you.

Exactly. At their heart, people like this are users. As long as they know they can passively-aggressively get their way, they will never step up. If/when OP divorces him he’ll no doubt figure out how to run a household on his own - but only because he has to. My worthless DH has actually *said* this to me: “I lived alone and managed before we got married - I can take care of this stuff. I just don’t now.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wasn’t yesterday a holiday? Was there some reason he couldn’t spend some time on the couch? The OP’s whole post has the feel of just shitting on the spouse as a form of stress release.

OP, what if you just told your spouse that next Saturday you’ll be gone all day because you’re going with a friend to a show. What would happen?

What if you just didn’t cook? What if you ordered out? What if you just announced that you would no longer be cooking on weeknights? What would happen?

I just feel like you’re wanting to *talk* to your husband about this problem that you perceive but you’re not taking any *action* to change the dynamic. You and your spouse are in a dynamic. It takes two to tango. You could change your behavior dramatically. Your complaint is that your spouse does whatever he wants when he wants it. Well, maybe you could stand to do a little bit more of that yourself.

“But the house would fall down!!!!” you cry. Really? So everything has to be done just the way it is now, and what you need is for your husband to basically do some of the stuff you want done? Maybe he does not want to spend his Saturdays at the playground. Maybe he thinks it’s OK to play video games and to let his kid play her own games in her room. Maybe that’s actually OK. Maybe what’s making you unhappy is not his failure to act for others but your failure to act a little more selfishly.

As long as the only story you’ll tell yourself is that your husband —the man you married!— is just inexplicably selfish and bad, you are not going to get anywhere. I would stop trying to talk to him and just start changing the way you act. Book a weekend away by yourself, stat!

Op here. Sure, relax some, but not from 10am to 8pm without budging. Particularly when he took off Friday and did pretty much the same thing that day too.

I’ve tried various versions of things you mentioned - no cooking, no cleaning, etc. and he just does not care. But I don’t want to live in a pigsty, nor do I think we should eat out for every meal ($$ wise and from a health standpoint). The house doesn’t have to be perfect, and we certainly don’t eat every meal at home, so I’d say I’m already pretty lax.

OP, ignore these people trying to blame you. There is no excuse for a grown adult with a kid to act as your DH does. I struggle with this with my DH as well. He doesn't sit around watching TV/playing video games like yours does, but he does not help around the house at all and he totally ignores many basic parenting duties. On the holiday on Monday, he felt he'd had a busy day because he practiced his Spanish, tried to go for a bike ride and then discovered his bike needed a new tire, went to REI to buy new tires and then deemed them too expensive, came home and ordered tires on Amazon, and then, at my prompting, took DD to the playground for 45 minutes and stopped at the grocery store on the way home for 5 items.

What he doesn't realize is that MY day was taking care of DD all day while he did all these things for himself, planning dinner, and then having to coax him into taking DD to the park for a little while and grabbing a few items we still needed for dinner while I prepared it. I did nothing for myself on Monday -- the entire day was childcare, food prep, and then listening to DH complain about how annoyed he was about the bike issue. Oh, and when he got back from the park and grocery store, he complained about that, too.

It is very hard to be married to someone like this. And if you point out the inequities, they immediately get super defensive and attack you, so nothing ever changes because there is no openness to the idea that the way things currently work might not work for you or DD. If it works for him, and it does, that's how it has to be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s only victim blaming if we accept on face value that OP is a victim. It’s also possible that her spouse is a victim of her behavior. And that both of them are acting in extremely maladaptive ways to reenact familiar scenarios from their youth that are deeply ingrained in them. We are only hearing her side. We are not hearing all the stuff that he does for the household that she has conveniently forgotten. We are not hearing the times that he tried to express to her that he likes to do other things with his time or that he disagrees with her choices in how the house is run or how their child is raised or what the priorities are. She portrays that as “complaining about how I do things while he does nothing.”

There’s no excuse for one partner abdicating all household/childcare responsibilities. You’re just fabricating the scenario where OP is at fault.

It's just the classic argument that a wife is always to blame for her lazy husband because she didn't ask him to help the right way.

There is a hilarious episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill on the book Men Are from Mars... about this exact dynamic. Like if a husband is a huge a$$hole, the actual problem is that his wife did not phrase her request for him to stop being a huge a$$hole in the right way. It's amazing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, this is the PP who says you should talk less, act more. You dismiss what I say, saying you won’t live in a sty. You also say you don’t want a divorce. Is this how you are with your spouse, you just dismiss everything he says and just stick to your complaints? If so, then I understand why he says you are making things miserable and why he avoids you. Why are you stuck in this role and unwilling to change? How does it benefit you—It *must* benefit you because you are choosing it.
I seriously think you need therapy and possibly medication for depression. If nothing else therapy would help you find new strategies and ways of talking to your husband.
If your response to that is that therapy won’t work and that you are too busy for therapy because your spouse is so lazy and awful, then I suggest you look up the term “help rejecting complainer” and consider the possibility that The situation you were in with your husband is actually extremely comfortable for you despite the fact that you say you hate it.

Op here. I am in therapy. I've asked him to do the same (individually) because I think it would be beneficial and he won't. I wouldn't say I'm depressed (thanks for the armchair diagnosis) but I am extremely burned out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, this is the PP who says you should talk less, act more. You dismiss what I say, saying you won’t live in a sty. You also say you don’t want a divorce. Is this how you are with your spouse, you just dismiss everything he says and just stick to your complaints? If so, then I understand why he says you are making things miserable and why he avoids you. Why are you stuck in this role and unwilling to change? How does it benefit you—It *must* benefit you because you are choosing it.
I seriously think you need therapy and possibly medication for depression. If nothing else therapy would help you find new strategies and ways of talking to your husband.
If your response to that is that therapy won’t work and that you are too busy for therapy because your spouse is so lazy and awful, then I suggest you look up the term “help rejecting complainer” and consider the possibility that The situation you were in with your husband is actually extremely comfortable for you despite the fact that you say you hate it.

there’s some kernel of truth here but it’s also tremendously victim-blaming. on a daily basis OP didn’t have a choice when her DH started pulling stunts like making their small child wake him up to take her to school. she’s only “comfortable” with it inadmuch as she has to supress active anger and rage to get through the unfairness of it all. because with men like this, it’s NOT the case that OP could have just “made a choice” for him to do more. No, she likely went through all sorts of phases where she tried to get him to, from discussing to anger to pleading. What happened is NOT that she made some kind of choice because it benefited her, but that he taught her by his actions that there is nothing she can do about it. She got conditioned to it. It’s low-key abusive TBH.

yes now she does have a choice whether to divorce or not. this is a huge change with serious costs & benefits to weigh, like finances and time with her child. she’s not being a “help-rejecting complainer” to have difficulty making this decision.

Op here. Thanks for saying this better than I can. I feel like I've tried so many different tactics - not caring, calling him out on it, passive aggressiveness, just doing it all quietly, being the "cool" wife... I could go on. They all yield the same results.

And I've never said he does nothing. But he does the things he's interested in only - yard and money management. The couple other things I force him to do only out of sheer necessity because I work FT, are the things he resists or uses as an example of how he's really pulling his weight.

AND at least one of those things (dropping DD off at the bus stop) is just common sense because he WFH most of the time and I do not. Though I'm sure in his mind, there's a situation where he should sleep til 8:29am and roll out of bed into his first call, while I handle the entire morning and take her in and then commute 30 minutes to my office while somehow still leaving in time to pick her up in the afternoon (aka working PT which he doesn't want me to do because he likes FT money). The only way I've been able to convince him he should be the one to drop her off, is because it's actually impossible for me to drop off and pick up most days and work full time. I still do the vast majority of the morning routine, but DD has to wake up earlier than she needs to if she wants assistance with anything (or hell, just spend time with a parent in the morning) because I have to leave so early and he won't get up until like 5 minutes before they need to leave.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s only victim blaming if we accept on face value that OP is a victim. It’s also possible that her spouse is a victim of her behavior. And that both of them are acting in extremely maladaptive ways to reenact familiar scenarios from their youth that are deeply ingrained in them. We are only hearing her side. We are not hearing all the stuff that he does for the household that she has conveniently forgotten. We are not hearing the times that he tried to express to her that he likes to do other things with his time or that he disagrees with her choices in how the house is run or how their child is raised or what the priorities are. She portrays that as “complaining about how I do things while he does nothing.”

There’s no excuse for one partner abdicating all household/childcare responsibilities. You’re just fabricating the scenario where OP is at fault.

It's just the classic argument that a wife is always to blame for her lazy husband because she didn't ask him to help the right way.

There is a hilarious episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill on the book Men Are from Mars... about this exact dynamic. Like if a husband is a huge a$$hole, the actual problem is that his wife did not phrase her request for him to stop being a huge a$$hole in the right way. It's amazing.

Yes, it's a sad life philosophy that people get to be jerks, cheaters, robbers, abusers, or killers based on the tone other people use. Tell that to the judge, lol.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, this is the PP who says you should talk less, act more. You dismiss what I say, saying you won’t live in a sty. You also say you don’t want a divorce. Is this how you are with your spouse, you just dismiss everything he says and just stick to your complaints? If so, then I understand why he says you are making things miserable and why he avoids you. Why are you stuck in this role and unwilling to change? How does it benefit you—It *must* benefit you because you are choosing it.
I seriously think you need therapy and possibly medication for depression. If nothing else therapy would help you find new strategies and ways of talking to your husband.
If your response to that is that therapy won’t work and that you are too busy for therapy because your spouse is so lazy and awful, then I suggest you look up the term “help rejecting complainer” and consider the possibility that The situation you were in with your husband is actually extremely comfortable for you despite the fact that you say you hate it.

there’s some kernel of truth here but it’s also tremendously victim-blaming. on a daily basis OP didn’t have a choice when her DH started pulling stunts like making their small child wake him up to take her to school. she’s only “comfortable” with it inadmuch as she has to supress active anger and rage to get through the unfairness of it all. because with men like this, it’s NOT the case that OP could have just “made a choice” for him to do more. No, she likely went through all sorts of phases where she tried to get him to, from discussing to anger to pleading. What happened is NOT that she made some kind of choice because it benefited her, but that he taught her by his actions that there is nothing she can do about it. She got conditioned to it. It’s low-key abusive TBH.

yes now she does have a choice whether to divorce or not. this is a huge change with serious costs & benefits to weigh, like finances and time with her child. she’s not being a “help-rejecting complainer” to have difficulty making this decision.

Op here. Thanks for saying this better than I can. I feel like I've tried so many different tactics - not caring, calling him out on it, passive aggressiveness, just doing it all quietly, being the "cool" wife... I could go on. They all yield the same results.

And I've never said he does nothing. But he does the things he's interested in only - yard and money management. The couple other things I force him to do only out of sheer necessity because I work FT, are the things he resists or uses as an example of how he's really pulling his weight.

AND at least one of those things (dropping DD off at the bus stop) is just common sense because he WFH most of the time and I do not. Though I'm sure in his mind, there's a situation where he should sleep til 8:29am and roll out of bed into his first call, while I handle the entire morning and take her in and then commute 30 minutes to my office while somehow still leaving in time to pick her up in the afternoon (aka working PT which he doesn't want me to do because he likes FT money). The only way I've been able to convince him he should be the one to drop her off, is because it's actually impossible for me to drop off and pick up most days and work full time. I still do the vast majority of the morning routine, but DD has to wake up earlier than she needs to if she wants assistance with anything (or hell, just spend time with a parent in the morning) because I have to leave so early and he won't get up until like 5 minutes before they need to leave.

He just sounds entitled, honestly.

[Anonymous]

Again, women make all kinds of different choices in this scenario. You just have to decide what is most palatable to you.

I hope your therapist is helping you through all your options while really realizing you cannot change this person.

And I’m sorry your husband turned out to be a dud. And really, it sucks for your kid even more than you. He sounds very disengaged.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is pretty much a lot of husbands, they don’t do shit. They just sit there or do their own thing. Women put up with it.

I saw one dad at the aquarium taking everyone to the bathroom and getting them snacks and water bottles. He was so different so yeah there are a few good dads out there, but not many.

So a Disney Dad?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s only victim blaming if we accept on face value that OP is a victim. It’s also possible that her spouse is a victim of her behavior. And that both of them are acting in extremely maladaptive ways to reenact familiar scenarios from their youth that are deeply ingrained in them. We are only hearing her side. We are not hearing all the stuff that he does for the household that she has conveniently forgotten. We are not hearing the times that he tried to express to her that he likes to do other things with his time or that he disagrees with her choices in how the house is run or how their child is raised or what the priorities are. She portrays that as “complaining about how I do things while he does nothing.”

Wrong.

Take your BS and gaslighting is elsewhere.

The fact that Op knows his behavior is very wrong, and she’s been empathetic and given him the benefit of the doubt for a year or two now, means she’s not “used to it” from growing up. If she was “used to it” she wouldn’t be alarmed at the bad situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:He has ADHD. Seriously, he's able to do well at work because he's able to focus on that one thing. Once work is over, he wants to "zone" into games, sleep, etc. and will use all kinds of techniques to avoid tasks that seem tedious or boring.
I have a teen son with ADHD and without meds, he acts exactly like this.

I'm the PP that said the DH sounds selfish and entitled, but actually this makes more sense. Significant ADHD and defensiveness about doing anything to fix it.

Is ADHD making him complain about the cleaners, lol?

The fact is, you can both be ADHD and a jerk. I have a brother w ADHD and he is a fantastic husband. ADHD does not excuse or explain this total abdication.

Also ADHD does require symptoms in multiple areas. Someone who can manage work can also manage home duties. Someone motivated to run every day has the capacity to do the freakin’ dishes.

THIS. I wish there was a PSA about this. OP's DH may indeed have ADHD. He could also be depressed. None of this is an excuse for being an absent father and a jerk to your spouse.

Also, one of the problems about any diagnosis for the DH here is that he's not going to do anything about it. If he has ADHD, he's not going to get tested, take meds, or try to use adaptive skills to counteract its impact on his family. Same with depression. He's not going to go find a therapist and talk to a doctor about meds and figure out what works and try to get better. At best, he will go to an appointment that OP researches and makes for him, and if the suggested solutions are really easy, he might do some of them. At best. But OP will have to hold his hand and do most of the legwork and also never be frustrated by the fact that he will never, ever take personal responsibility over any of it. It might get moderately better.

People like this can sometimes find a diagnosis to blame their behavior on, but that in itself is just another way for them to shift responsibility off themselves. They are just selfish. They want to do the stuff they enjoy and they want other people to handle everything else and they have learned from a young age a variety of tactics for making this happen. I know men and women like this. It's entitlement, often facilitated by families who trained them into it. An ADHD diagnosis will not undo 40 years of thinking nothing is your fault and you don't have to do anything that is even mildly unpleasant to you.

Touche

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP—your way isn’t the only way. If you want something done, do it yourself.

so... OP wants her DC to be at the bus stop on time, so she should take her DC herself to the bus stop rather than the dad who wfh and is sleeping in?

Do you hear yourself? No.. you just probably talk out of your a$$. Hard to hear when your mouth is that far from your ears.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP—your way isn’t the only way. If you want something done, do it yourself.

so... OP wants her DC to be at the bus stop on time, so she should take her DC herself to the bus stop rather than the dad who wfh and is sleeping in?

Do you hear yourself? No.. you just probably talk out of your a$$. Hard to hear when your mouth is that far from your ears.

Op here. Haha, thank you for this. This is what by DH tells me "it doesn't has to be done your way" but I'm literally just asking for it to be done without some sort of issue or complaint. And there ARE so many things I just do that he can/should do just because it's more of a hassle to rely on him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is pretty much a lot of husbands, they don’t do shit. They just sit there or do their own thing. Women put up with it.

I saw one dad at the aquarium taking everyone to the bathroom and getting them snacks and water bottles. He was so different so yeah there are a few good dads out there, but not many.

So a Disney Dad?

That's so rude based on the tiny bit of knowledge you have about a complete stranger.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I think this is crazy awesome. Like totally fine.

He doesn't want to participate in your lives. He's made it incredibly clear.

My wife did the same thing. She even complained about the cleaners. First off -- it's ADHD and depression, OP. In men, it manifests in anger, but looking at everything, it's like there is a real reason for all of this. Yes, my wife worked and even was a great employee (despite hating her work and complaining constantly). But it doesn't matter.

My view was to just do what all of these posters said. I focused on me. I worked on my own anxiety and depression, which helped me get a sense that yes, I had a role in this dynamic but I had a great opportunity.

I manage everything in my home. I mean, everything. I do all of the cooking, I make all of the major decisions (my wife gets told what's going on and can weigh in, but her untreated ADHD makes this an exercise of slowly feeding her information in bits that don't overwhelm her). If she hates something, obviously, I'll make a change, but if it doesn't impact her, she doesn't get a say. Activities? I do 100 percent of the driving (I work from home and manage this). Cooking? She's welcome to cook and add to the weekly calendar, but if she doesn't, I just make the meals I want for us, decide when we are eating out and do the grocery shopping. Major kid decisions like tutoring? I found them, including that 3k in money from the state of Virginia to pay for math tutoring. Money stuff? I handle all of the budgeting and saving and retirement planning.

In the short-term, my kids got a mom who could intensely focus on them the way she could. She did things with them like play Animal crossing or read. And I think I have learned to value her own expertise and talent that is driven by her ADHD -- she can research incredibly well and focuses on tasks sometimes to an incredible extent. Yes, it's a halloween costume or cleaning the laundry room, but I appreciate it whenever it comes up and keep things moving.

We both focus really hard on having a respectful discourse. We don't yell and I detest complaining (I sort of shut down with all of the complaining and disengage after years of hearing complaints with no action on her part). It's a peaceful and happy home.

I always will run things by my wife basically saying this is what I think the plan should be, do you have a plan/want to get involved?

Months went by but slowly she started getting more involved. She's still not terrible involved in the weeds, but she doesn't want to be.

And yes, I could be divorced. But it's just a headache, I would much, much prefer managing this all alone with my wife not causing harm than having my kids grow up in two homes, one with a person with an untreated mental illness/cognitive issue and one with structure.

The future? Who knows. If we didn't have kids of course I'd cut and run but I won't thrust the complications of divorce on my kids. I might when they are adults, but they can decide what if, any, relationship they want with either of us.