Here's the thing I don't understand about husbands who don't help out

[Anonymous]

It starts with parenting your sons. When my sister got married, her MIL said to her "I want you to know that he knows how to do laundry, clean a bathroom and do dishes. Don't think he doesn't and don't do it all". When my sons were born, I vowed to be able to say the same. We have a cleaning service but every Saturday, my kids have to clean, dust and vacuum their rooms and each have to clean a bathroom and then they clean the basement. They are not going to assume a wife or mother does all of this. Everyone in the family lives in the house, so everyone helps clean. My husband included.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because my husband wouldn’t go back to the store, clean the bathroom again, or watch the kids. He’d do what he wanted and get pissed at me.

This. Not only that, but the next time one of those things needed to be done, he'd say "Well I can never do it to your demanding specifications, so why bother?" It would give him an easy out, which is what he's already looking for.

Any halfway decent parent knows that positive reinforcement is a much more effective way of getting your children to behave a certain way, and that criticism tends to make them more recalcitrant and combative.

Yep, I'm comparing my husband to a child. That's because when he was an actual child, his own parents failed to do any of this. They bought into toxic ideas about masculinity that "boys are just messy" or "girls are just naturally more helpful than boys." So my grown ass husband has had to relearn how the world works as an adult because his parents bought into dumb ideas about traditional gender roles. That sucks for both of us, frankly. I don't love having to praise my husband every time he does something normal and expected, like cleaning the shower. And he doesn't like that he is instinctively selfish and childish at times because his parents taught him the wrong stuff.

And before you say "Well, why didn't you marry a better man?" a few things. First, the vast majority of men are like this to some degree or another. My husband had actually figured some of this out on his own before I even met him, putting him light years ahead of other men I know. But two, toxic masculinity sneaks into all the crevices of a person's personality. You think you've sorted it out and then, boom, you have kids and discover a whole new batch of idiotic assumptions about gender. Sorry, but we all have to keep working on misogyny forever in the hopes that our kids will have a slightly easier time. At let we are working on it instead of eating it up and teaching it to our kids on purpose.

I know that you need to tell yourself that, to make yourself feel better. It puts the responsibility on society as a whole, rather than you. It's not your fault you married an incompetent ass that you had to treat like a child.

But you should recognize that it's just a deflection - a polite lie you can tell yourself so you don't have to face the truth.

Just by the prevalence of these types of threads, it should be evident that husbands who contribute less than their fair share to the household work aren't rare. Even studies show that full time working women spend more time on childcare and chores that working men do. If you truly feel that household duties are shared equally in your family - great! But you must realize that that situation is less common.

Please google selection bias.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because my husband wouldn’t go back to the store, clean the bathroom again, or watch the kids. He’d do what he wanted and get pissed at me.

This. Not only that, but the next time one of those things needed to be done, he'd say "Well I can never do it to your demanding specifications, so why bother?" It would give him an easy out, which is what he's already looking for.

Any halfway decent parent knows that positive reinforcement is a much more effective way of getting your children to behave a certain way, and that criticism tends to make them more recalcitrant and combative.

Yep, I'm comparing my husband to a child. That's because when he was an actual child, his own parents failed to do any of this. They bought into toxic ideas about masculinity that "boys are just messy" or "girls are just naturally more helpful than boys." So my grown ass husband has had to relearn how the world works as an adult because his parents bought into dumb ideas about traditional gender roles. That sucks for both of us, frankly. I don't love having to praise my husband every time he does something normal and expected, like cleaning the shower. And he doesn't like that he is instinctively selfish and childish at times because his parents taught him the wrong stuff.

And before you say "Well, why didn't you marry a better man?" a few things. First, the vast majority of men are like this to some degree or another. My husband had actually figured some of this out on his own before I even met him, putting him light years ahead of other men I know. But two, toxic masculinity sneaks into all the crevices of a person's personality. You think you've sorted it out and then, boom, you have kids and discover a whole new batch of idiotic assumptions about gender. Sorry, but we all have to keep working on misogyny forever in the hopes that our kids will have a slightly easier time. At let we are working on it instead of eating it up and teaching it to our kids on purpose.

I know that you need to tell yourself that, to make yourself feel better. It puts the responsibility on society as a whole, rather than you. It's not your fault you married an incompetent ass that you had to treat like a child.

But you should recognize that it's just a deflection - a polite lie you can tell yourself so you don't have to face the truth.

Just by the prevalence of these types of threads, it should be evident that husbands who contribute less than their fair share to the household work aren't rare. Even studies show that full time working women spend more time on childcare and chores that working men do. If you truly feel that household duties are shared equally in your family - great! But you must realize that that situation is less common.

Please google selection bias.

DP but every study ever conducted backs up PP's point. Even in households that both the husband and wife feel like the work is equal, the wife is doing several more hours of work than the husband. Just because she referenced this board instead of the many, many studies that prove her right doesn't mean she's wrong.

[Anonymous]

**** I'd (politely)* point this out to him and ask him to go back and get the right things.****

I pointed these out to my DH a few times, and he blew up at me..."I never do anything right".. I had to bite my tongue because what I really wanted to say was, "No, you f*n don't and that's why I have to keep micromanaging you".

But I'm sure someone will say that I'm the problem because it has to be *my* way. No, getting the right medication for our infant is not "my way".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

I don't get mad at my DH when he forgets stuff from the grocery store because he can't find the stuff he wanted just as often as what I wanted. I don't have to teach him how to clean (he's better at most cleaning than I am), but when we were dating and I told him he was loading the dishwasher wrong it led to something like a 4 week standoff because he can't handle criticism at all. He had to break the dishwasher and have a technician come out and tell him exactly what I said he was doing wrong before he changed his ways. I don't think you can teach or train a grown man to be better at basic tasks, you have to choose to marry one that's not a screw-up to begin with (which, dishwasher incident notwithstanding, is what I did). This is why I have more sympathy for women who realize their DH's suck at childcare than cleaning - that one is at least partially unknowable before the fact.

Okay I'm intrigued. I gotta know what he was doing so wrong that it broke the dishwasher - just so I can be sure that I don't do it. I mean really, can you put dishes in the dishwasher in such a way that it could break it? Please, tell us, pp!

Honestly, he just refused to scrape his plates. And then, because I told him you have to scrape your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher, he turned it into a stupid standoff and put even more food into it. It was his condo so I just watched him be a jackass and bided my time. $250 later a technician is cleaning out his trap and explaining that you have to . . . wait for it . . . scrape food off dishes before putting them into the dishwasher.

And honestly my DH is not like the nightmares that get threads on this forum - this was a one-off. But the crazy overreaction to any perceived criticism makes me understand why other wives aren't standing near the bathroom saying 'SCRUB HARDER, DUMMY' like OP apparently wants them to. I wouldn't react well to that either.

+1 yep. I find men don't like to be criticized and told that they are doing something wrong by women, including in the bedroom.

[Anonymous]

If my husband did stuff differently from the way I would have preferred, including child care, I accepted it as his way of doing things. Sometimes it was very difficult to do that, such as when he took the kids camping and they all set off fireworks purchased at a roadside stand, something he knew I would not approve of. I expressed my opinion on that but ultimately I did not tell him he couldn't do it, he's a grown man.

I also accepted the results of his cleaning and cooking efforts. In addition to that, I learned a lot from him about stuff I didn't know like working with tools, maintaining a car, basic home maintenance, and more stuff that would traditionally be considered man's work.

I did not know what kind of guy I was getting for the long haul because we only knew each other three months before we got married. The marriage lasted 25 years though so I guess our approach to marriage and chores etc. worked pretty well.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

You are the one being trained here, and you don't even see it.

This is so true of my situation. My DH acts like a complete asshole anytime he’s asked to do something. So guess wha? I don’t ask him anymore because it’s not even worth the fuss. Looks like I got trained.

+1. Initially I was leaning toward the "OP's a crazy b!tch" camp, but after reading all the posts from women clucking that they could never ask their husband to clean the bathroom properly, I think she's onto something! And I would much rather be in her marriage. There's a difference between micromanaging and calling out an obviously half-assed job. (<--I.e. in the latter, you don't care how it's done, so long as it's done.)

(Immediate PP, don't mean you! I'm sympathetic to your situation!)

[Anonymous]

I think if you're going to be a mom with a stay-at-home spouse, you really have to adopt the same mentality as men in that situation. I stay at home. My husband DOES NOT CARE what we get from the grocery store. It's not that I do it right and therefore he doesn't have to worry. I could do it totally "wrong" and he really wouldn't notice. He does not notice if things are clean or dirty. I don't have to clean the bathroom to his "standards" because he doesn't have any.

So, if you're the wife and you're going to go to work and have your spouse stay at home, I think you have to do the same thing the men do - not care!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Guess what, other peoples relationships have different dynamics than yours

Duh

I think the OP’s point is that you have 2 choices if you find yourself married to one of these useless types. 1. Get him to change or 2. Accept that he won’t. But then don’t complain about having to do everything yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

I disagree. I think the OP treats him like the adult he is, who is capable of cleaning a bathroom to high standards.

Accepting his lazy half assed cleaning would be to treat him as a child.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

Except this is the way lazy DH's "train" their wives to do everything. They do an intolerably bad job. When it comes to kids, sometimes they threaten their safety or wellbeing. So mom does it all.

X100

Then complain endless on DCUM!

[Anonymous]

It's hard to take these posts seriously though. Women always "think" they do ALL the work. Realities vary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because my husband wouldn’t go back to the store, clean the bathroom again, or watch the kids. He’d do what he wanted and get pissed at me.

This. Not only that, but the next time one of those things needed to be done, he'd say "Well I can never do it to your demanding specifications, so why bother?" It would give him an easy out, which is what he's already looking for.

Any halfway decent parent knows that positive reinforcement is a much more effective way of getting your children to behave a certain way, and that criticism tends to make them more recalcitrant and combative.

Yep, I'm comparing my husband to a child. That's because when he was an actual child, his own parents failed to do any of this. They bought into toxic ideas about masculinity that "boys are just messy" or "girls are just naturally more helpful than boys." So my grown ass husband has had to relearn how the world works as an adult because his parents bought into dumb ideas about traditional gender roles. That sucks for both of us, frankly. I don't love having to praise my husband every time he does something normal and expected, like cleaning the shower. And he doesn't like that he is instinctively selfish and childish at times because his parents taught him the wrong stuff.

And before you say "Well, why didn't you marry a better man?" a few things. First, the vast majority of men are like this to some degree or another. My husband had actually figured some of this out on his own before I even met him, putting him light years ahead of other men I know. But two, toxic masculinity sneaks into all the crevices of a person's personality. You think you've sorted it out and then, boom, you have kids and discover a whole new batch of idiotic assumptions about gender. Sorry, but we all have to keep working on misogyny forever in the hopes that our kids will have a slightly easier time. At let we are working on it instead of eating it up and teaching it to our kids on purpose.

That's it 100%. There are deeply entrenched cultural ideas that men don't need to do certain things if women are present. There are studies that have even found this is true in the workplace - men will volunteer for certain duties if no women are around, but once women are there, it's expected they will handle those things.

I don't blame men and I don't think they consciously realize what they're doing. Hell, most of the women I know (including myself) have internalized misogyny....and that's often why we marry men who don't pull their weight. We're too young and naive at that age to recognize it.

But it's a HUGE disservice to again put the onus on women to explain these things to them and "train" them to behave like a functional spouse. I'm happy to explain my point of view to my H, but I'm not going to praise him every time he completes a basic task. At some point, it's on him to examine his own beliefs about gender roles and make changes.

Unfortunately I don't think most men will change. The idea of losing their power - and being equal to everyone else - feels like oppression. My own H dismisses it with "well all the women at my work get paid the same as us!" Like dude, it goes SO far beyond that.

I feel like the best I can do at this point is raise my daughters to not tolerate that behavior from males, and raise my sons to view women as equals.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

OP here. The difference is, I was rightfully calling him out on his lazy cleaning (or grocery shopping). Every adult with half a brain is capable of doing these chores. IMO the laziness of not doing a good job with them = disrespect for the people he lives with. It’s rude.

I only had to do it a few times. Yes he heard it as nagging. But I’d rather have a couple little squabbles early on in our marriage like that than make a martyr of myself these past twenty years of cleaning up after him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, OP, you sound like his Mother. Your way of teaching your DH to clean the bathroom is how I teach my sons. My DH knows how to clean a bathroom better than I do by learning from his Mother. If your DH is not cleaning the bathroom to your standards, then you should be the one with that chore, or you should learn to accept the way he does it. I mean, you can tell him you don't think it's clean enough, and if he wants you to teach him, then go for it, but don't think it helps any relationship to treat your partner like a child.

I don't get mad at my DH when he forgets stuff from the grocery store because he can't find the stuff he wanted just as often as what I wanted. I don't have to teach him how to clean (he's better at most cleaning than I am), but when we were dating and I told him he was loading the dishwasher wrong it led to something like a 4 week standoff because he can't handle criticism at all. He had to break the dishwasher and have a technician come out and tell him exactly what I said he was doing wrong before he changed his ways. I don't think you can teach or train a grown man to be better at basic tasks, you have to choose to marry one that's not a screw-up to begin with (which, dishwasher incident notwithstanding, is what I did). This is why I have more sympathy for women who realize their DH's suck at childcare than cleaning - that one is at least partially unknowable before the fact.

Man, I feel bad for you. He can’t find the things he wanted. You know what I’d say to a teenager? Well, did you ASK someone for help?? Plus now they have apps for that.