Reply to DH wants to be in charge of home repairs but doesn’t understand them

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "DH wants to be in charge of home repairs but doesn’t understand them"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Being in relationship with other humans does require some tact and grace. What would happen if you did the whole thermostat correction call but your attitude was non-judgmental? Like instead of communicating, "See, you did it wrong again," you communicated, "OMG, I know right, how awesome that we don't have to wait another week, I'm so glad my googling paid off." If the answer is that he would still pout and act like a victim, then I don't think there's much you can do but accept that you chose to marry someone with these deficits. But if you always jump in and take over, as though he can't communicate effectively with professional adults to such a degree that he somehow overrides their professional advice, then I can see why he would feel like you are patronizing him. And that's not sexy or gracious. But neither is being completely incompetent, so you're at a bit of a stalemate.

To be totally honest, I'm giving you this advice as I'm divorcing someone who always screwed everything up around our house (in our case, because he thought he was handier than he was). He installed the shower handles incorrectly so they fell off every time you tried to take a shower. He installed a screw backwards in the back door knob and it fell off. He replaced our deck posts with indoor trim wood and they've practically disintegrated in the rain. Everything he did was, in retrospect, really dumb. So now he's gone and I just call a guy and have it done the right way. But when we were married I couldn't do that, because he got really mad and weirdly personally offended by the idea that I would pay someone to do what he imagined he could do himself, when he finally got around to it ten months later. Our youngest commandeered a hammer and started fixing up her room herself at like age 7, because "if you ask Daddy it will take him ten months." So that was fun.

It was, stupidly and pointlessly, a constant source of stress. And that's because my stbx is not self-aware or emotionally mature. (He left me, and while it's not fun to be rejected and have no choice in the matter, I do realize how much better off I am.) Now I'm not there to be a buffer and he seems to be bringing that energy to his relationship with our teenagers, which is heartbreaking and frustrating and, also, not something I can fix. It is what it is. This is the person I had children with, and I have to make peace with that. I learned a long time ago to choose my battles. We're going through some growing pains now because I've recalibrated what I will swallow/accept to be ex-wife appropriate, not wife appropriate, and he's finding it a bit disorienting. Poor lamb.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics