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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wait! What's a secret chicken stock maker space heater user!? I ask because DH almost lit up the laundry room last week after leaving a space heater on in there to...wait for it...keep his latest vat of (in progress) home-brewed beer warm. It's also wrapped in his winter coat right now, dead serious. [/quote]

Can't find the thread right now, but a poster was complaining about how her DH deboned some chicken and started making some stock but then went off to do something else leaving the stock pot going and a space heater on.

DH is like the OP's and others' and for a long time it drove me nuts. I reached the point where there was just this simmering kettle of rage that was eating away at my enjoyment of life and marriage. After spending some time venting to a friend, I realized that I could keep getting annoyed about it or I could do something.

DH had offered to get a housekeeper, but I just couldn't see spending the money on that and the prospect of someone else cleaning my house just bothers me. So that wasn't the answer.

So, first I watched and tried to figure out ways to get him to do the things I wanted. The dry cleaning tags are a good example. They are pernicious, but I realized that DH didn't have a trash can where he gets dressed. So he ripped them off when he got dressed, put them down and forgot about them (until they reached critical mass and they got his attention). So, I put a trashcan next to his closet. Problem mostly solved.

But I still felt like I was constantly picking up after him.

I stopped picking up a lot of the stuff, and I realized that some of it was going away, just not on my timescale. DH left something and moved on, but frequently noticed it the next time he came through. Part of the problem was that I was constantly on the lookout for the things DH would leave behind, and as soon as it was clear that he had left something, I would pounce on it. When I relaxed a little, I found that some (but still definitely not all) of the things he left behind got cleaned up, just on a different schedule than I would have.

When I was watching him, though, I also realized that he was cleaning up after me. Things that I nagged him about, I realized that I did, too - although not nearly as often. But he was cleaning up and putting those things away in the same way he did the things that he left behind. I also realized that when he was taking the initiative to clean something up I told him that I was planning to get to it later and that he didn't need to do it. So, I was sending very conflicting messages to him - I was nagging him for things I did, too, and I was stopping him when he was trying to help.

So I took several steps - I tried to be more consistent about not doing the things I was nagging him about, I tried to relax and recognize that some things were going to happen on a different schedule, I worked noticing when he did things on the time frame I wanted them done and on complimenting him for them, and I stopped stopping him when he was trying to help - except, of course, when his "help" was going to actually make more work for me, which still happens on occasion. I also worked on reminding myself about the things he did for me/us, because DH does do a lot of the things around the house that I do like to, and sometimes I have to remind myself about that. A lot of my anger/annoyance went away after that.

Phase 3 involved positive reinforcement - for both of us. Our sex life wasn't what I wanted it to be and was nowhere close to what DH wanted it to be. So, when DH did things to keep the house cleaner on a schedule that kept me from feeling like all of the burden was on me, I used those happy feelings to get a little frisky with DH. This wasn't just me giving him sex to reward him, it was me rewarding him but also changing my own behavior in ways that I wanted to change it - so win-win.

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