Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A grown man "chilling", any way he wants ... while he financially supports his family ...

yes, he gets to "play on his phone". How much money do you make Op? How much money does he make Op? People need down time.

I make more than he does, and there have been several times where he could not cover his portion due to his mishandling his money.

I support the family far more than he does and I do not get downtime because he gets several hours of downtime a day.

This right here shows that you two are not partners. That attitude -- his portion? Crazy. Just get a divorce. You are not equipped to be married, nor does it sound like he is. Too bad you didn't realize this before you had kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A grown man "chilling", any way he wants ... while he financially supports his family ...

yes, he gets to "play on his phone". How much money do you make Op? How much money does he make Op? People need down time.

I make more than he does, and there have been several times where he could not cover his portion due to his mishandling his money.

I support the family far more than he does and I do not get downtime because he gets several hours of downtime a day.

You make more money and he can't cover his bills and he dumps all the housework on you.

Yeah, call a lawyer on Monday. The only question you maybe can work out with a therapist at a later date (hopefully you can afford better once you have his half firmly tied down in child support) is why you let him treat you this badly for this long.

Lose the angry entitled deadweight.

You will have more down time during his custody time after you separate. It will feel strange at first, but you adjust

Anonymous wrote:A grown man "chilling", any way he wants ... while he financially supports his family ...

yes, he gets to "play on his phone". How much money do you make Op? How much money does he make Op? People need down time.

So he gets to sleep in until 8am while OP gets the kids ready. And he gets to chill in the late afternoon after work while OP is picking up the dog and kids. So when does OP get “chill” and just play on her phone?

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Anonymous wrote:Wait it out my fanny. Are you some doormat SAHM who's congratulating herself on how much crap she put up with for decades? Sorry but allowing yourself to be mistreated ks not a solution, it's a failure.

Um, no, and I'm not sure what your vaginas has to do with this.

So your advice is for OP to do all the work herself, allow herself to be treated disrespectfully by a lazy and irresponsible man, let him waste their money, this goes on for decades, and at the end what's the prize? Still being married to a jerk who's slightly better? No thanks.

He sounds immature. That tends to improve over time.

Where I'm coming from with this is, I did have a husband that didn't do as much housework as I felt he should and also was irresponsible with money. At some point I decided to stop nagging and just accept the situation. It was not easy and it was not fair. Fast forward about 10 years- he is now a much greater contributor to the household-- does all cooking, shopping, schlepping the kids around, and a non-terrible amount of cleaning. (I still do more cleaning.) And, his income is now extremely high, high enough that he is still able to make silly purchases or lose money in predictable ways and it doesn't impact us at all. I dislike clutter, so I don't love this trait, but it isn't a crisis like it was before. So yes-- people can and often do have a difficult time in the first part of marriage and then go on to have a great marriage.

It sounds like she's done and is leaving him, and that's also a path forward. But this is something that is a fairly common problem in relationships, and if you read the research on it, it does tend to improve with time, and in later life actually flips, with men doing more housework than women in retirement age.

But what if he didn't improve? What if he never made money? Would it be worth it then? Seems like a big gamble, especially if retirement security is on the line.

Yeah, that was a gamble. My retirement wasn't on the line though, we were financially okay in that department, along with paying for college, etc. After devoting a lot of time reading studies on the division of housework in modern American families, I decided that it was likely to improve and focused on that. It's hard to visualize the counterfactual, how I would have felt if we were still dealing with this. But I tend to be data driven and the numbers for married people are generally better than unmarried.

If my husband never made money at all, I wouldn't have married him. Financial security is a huge factor to me. He was always a good earner, just an even better spender until he made so much it'd be difficult to spend it.

So you married an immature man who treated you badly, but that's ok because money?

He treated me poorly in a way that the majority of men treat their wives poorly. In most American households, women do the majority of housework. So, uh, yeah, like most women in hetero couplings, who stay married, I tolerated this suboptimal yet common condition until it subsided. My decision to do so was less about money and more about wanting to be married to a man.

Okay no. It may be true that in most couples women do the majority of housework, but for a lot of them it's *on purpose*, agreed to, and peaceful.. It's a smaller proportion of couples who have that dynamic because the man is immature, lazy, disorganized, disrespectful, uncaring, etc. Stop acting like those marriages are the same, they aren't.

It's sad that you felt you needed a man that badly. I'm sad for the younger version of yourself.

You think that women just *want* to do more work? Like they walk in and say "no, Chad, don't do the dishes! I want to!" It is peaceful because women know the deal- that men are not likely to pull their weight in that regard, and they are tired of beating a dead horse. It's always disrespectful, uncaring, etc.

Thank you for your sympathy.

If they are SAHM or work part time, yes I would think that is definitely and explicitly the deal. The question is not "In how many households does the woman do more". It's "In how many households does the woman do much more despite working full time and going to therapy and constantly exhorting her DH to do the things he explicitly agree to do?". And that's a far smaller proportion.

On the contrary, when women outearn their husband, they do even more housework than in couples where the woman earns less. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/02/housework-divide-working-parents/

Are these women just like, obsessed with working? Is that it? Has nothing to do with the fact that men are cultured to regard it as women's responsibility?

I don't know, probably some of them are unahppy and others of them have their reasons, but I do know it's abnormal for a.man to behave like OP's husband, being lazy and yelling and doing hardly anything in the face of therapy and repeated requests.

I suspect that OP is more persistent about this issue than most women, as I also was before I made peace with it. Can we at least agree that it is not normal to write love letters thanking your spouse for cooking dinner? That's an unusual level of engagement on this topic. And, like most men are cultured not to do housework, women are cultured to do it. So this is probably not an issue that is brought to the surface in the way it is in OP's (and was in mine at first). So he sounds like a prick but maybe a lot of marriages would look like this if women weren't all out there cheerfully and consensually doing more than they should have to.

The "love letter" sounds like a desperate move from someone who's trying really hard to save her marriage to a man-baby who needs a cookie every time he wipes his own bum.

OP. So please tell me if this is abnormal...

On Wednesday, I was supposed to pick up DD1 from daycare, pick up DD6 from after school care, take DD6 to practice, pick up the dog from dog daycare, handle dinner, while H had....nothing, because he told me he wants to come home from work and have some time alone to unwind. I realized this was ridiculous and told him to pick up the dog and do dinner since he would just be sitting around while I drove kids around. And that's why I wrote the note, because he did it, and I wanted to show that I'm grateful.

But I'm also like...wtf. The reason the dog goes to daycare is H refuses to wake up half an hour early to walk her, he needs to sleep in until 8am instead while I wake up at 6am to get the kids ready. The reason we didn't have groceries for dinner is he said he would handle groceries that weekend but didn't. So why the hell should I be thankful for him doing basic household things when I'm on my feet from 6am-9pm?

No, this is not normal, at all.

I do though think that people get so overscheduled that it just destroys families and individual happiness. Life would be so much better if you could drop the daycare, drop the dog daycare, drop the practice for a 6yo. If only one of you worked and you dropped the extra stuff, you would not feel so stretched. Of course, you'd probably have to live somewhere cheaper. People get on this crazy treadmill, and the truth is, very few people have the executive functioning skills and energy to keep it up AND BE HAPPY. Of course, you are in the situation you are in, and assuming you don't want to make a radical change of lifestyle, it is probably better to get divorced than to continue on with this resentful relationship.

OP. Practice is twice a week, and DD loves it, so I don’t think it’s fair to make her stop because H wants to watch football.

DD1 needs daycare. I work. What else am I supposed to do? The dog needs to be exercised, and H won’t do it. I can’t keep a dog cooped up all day, and H refuses to walk her.

I get that she likes it. My kids like lots of things that I don't let them do because it is expensive or intrudes on family time or is just a hassle. It is really a perspective thing. I firmly believe that kids SHOULD be bored sometimes. It's healthy. And yes, I think that your husband wanting to watch football instead of her going to practice (for what even?) twice a week is totally reasonable. She is a kid. Let her play in the yard, draw, ride her bike, whatever. And more importantly, if it is creating all this tension and stress, drop it. She will be happier overall if her parents are happy and together rather than going to whatever practice this is.

The dog? Do you have a yard? Do you work from home? Dogs don't need daycare. So, yes, your husband should walk the dog. Honestly, it is a mistake to get a dog with young kids. I don't know why people do it.

The daycare for your youngest is unavoidable unless one of you quits working. I get you don't want to quit, nor would I in the precarious situation you have with your loser DH. I was more talking about how we have these overscheduled two working parent families without the ability to manage that amount of hectic scheduling.

Here is the deal: you married and had kids with a guy who is lazy and a slob, maybe has ADD, and maybe has a phone addiction. You, as a family, cannot afford to have all this scheduled activity. It is no different than if you wanted a mansion but didn't make that much money. You need to cut back on all this extra stuff and spend your leftover time and money on making your lives more manageable. Seems worth it to try that before getting a divorce. Or just divorce the loser. But it sucks for your kids.

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Anonymous wrote:He won't change. Decide how to proceed going forward. You might be better off as a single mom.

However, I will say I remember that stage of life (two working parents, no outsourcing). I let a lot of things go. I didn't care about tidying or dusting.

I wouldn't bother with systems/cards/love letters. We stockpiled necessary things like TP, food when we had time. Otherwise, we picked a Saturday morning and the whole family helped clean the house. Good enough and no nagging.

Sounds like you had a partner. OP clearly does not. If any of these things get done, it's because she did it, not they.

It sounds like that, but I usually did the shopping. I rounded everyone up on Saturday and gave orders lol. I think my kids think I run the entire show. I'm OK with that.

Anonymous wrote:A grown man "chilling", any way he wants ... while he financially supports his family ...

yes, he gets to "play on his phone". How much money do you make Op? How much money does he make Op? People need down time.

I make more than he does, and there have been several times where he could not cover his portion due to his mishandling his money.

I support the family far more than he does and I do not get downtime because he gets several hours of downtime a day.

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Anonymous wrote:Wait it out my fanny. Are you some doormat SAHM who's congratulating herself on how much crap she put up with for decades? Sorry but allowing yourself to be mistreated ks not a solution, it's a failure.

Um, no, and I'm not sure what your vaginas has to do with this.

So your advice is for OP to do all the work herself, allow herself to be treated disrespectfully by a lazy and irresponsible man, let him waste their money, this goes on for decades, and at the end what's the prize? Still being married to a jerk who's slightly better? No thanks.

He sounds immature. That tends to improve over time.

Where I'm coming from with this is, I did have a husband that didn't do as much housework as I felt he should and also was irresponsible with money. At some point I decided to stop nagging and just accept the situation. It was not easy and it was not fair. Fast forward about 10 years- he is now a much greater contributor to the household-- does all cooking, shopping, schlepping the kids around, and a non-terrible amount of cleaning. (I still do more cleaning.) And, his income is now extremely high, high enough that he is still able to make silly purchases or lose money in predictable ways and it doesn't impact us at all. I dislike clutter, so I don't love this trait, but it isn't a crisis like it was before. So yes-- people can and often do have a difficult time in the first part of marriage and then go on to have a great marriage.

It sounds like she's done and is leaving him, and that's also a path forward. But this is something that is a fairly common problem in relationships, and if you read the research on it, it does tend to improve with time, and in later life actually flips, with men doing more housework than women in retirement age.

But what if he didn't improve? What if he never made money? Would it be worth it then? Seems like a big gamble, especially if retirement security is on the line.

Yeah, that was a gamble. My retirement wasn't on the line though, we were financially okay in that department, along with paying for college, etc. After devoting a lot of time reading studies on the division of housework in modern American families, I decided that it was likely to improve and focused on that. It's hard to visualize the counterfactual, how I would have felt if we were still dealing with this. But I tend to be data driven and the numbers for married people are generally better than unmarried.

If my husband never made money at all, I wouldn't have married him. Financial security is a huge factor to me. He was always a good earner, just an even better spender until he made so much it'd be difficult to spend it.

So you married an immature man who treated you badly, but that's ok because money?

He treated me poorly in a way that the majority of men treat their wives poorly. In most American households, women do the majority of housework. So, uh, yeah, like most women in hetero couplings, who stay married, I tolerated this suboptimal yet common condition until it subsided. My decision to do so was less about money and more about wanting to be married to a man.

Okay no. It may be true that in most couples women do the majority of housework, but for a lot of them it's *on purpose*, agreed to, and peaceful.. It's a smaller proportion of couples who have that dynamic because the man is immature, lazy, disorganized, disrespectful, uncaring, etc. Stop acting like those marriages are the same, they aren't.

It's sad that you felt you needed a man that badly. I'm sad for the younger version of yourself.

You think that women just *want* to do more work? Like they walk in and say "no, Chad, don't do the dishes! I want to!" It is peaceful because women know the deal- that men are not likely to pull their weight in that regard, and they are tired of beating a dead horse. It's always disrespectful, uncaring, etc.

Thank you for your sympathy.

If they are SAHM or work part time, yes I would think that is definitely and explicitly the deal. The question is not "In how many households does the woman do more". It's "In how many households does the woman do much more despite working full time and going to therapy and constantly exhorting her DH to do the things he explicitly agree to do?". And that's a far smaller proportion.

On the contrary, when women outearn their husband, they do even more housework than in couples where the woman earns less. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/02/housework-divide-working-parents/

Are these women just like, obsessed with working? Is that it? Has nothing to do with the fact that men are cultured to regard it as women's responsibility?

I don't know, probably some of them are unahppy and others of them have their reasons, but I do know it's abnormal for a.man to behave like OP's husband, being lazy and yelling and doing hardly anything in the face of therapy and repeated requests.

I suspect that OP is more persistent about this issue than most women, as I also was before I made peace with it. Can we at least agree that it is not normal to write love letters thanking your spouse for cooking dinner? That's an unusual level of engagement on this topic. And, like most men are cultured not to do housework, women are cultured to do it. So this is probably not an issue that is brought to the surface in the way it is in OP's (and was in mine at first). So he sounds like a prick but maybe a lot of marriages would look like this if women weren't all out there cheerfully and consensually doing more than they should have to.

The "love letter" sounds like a desperate move from someone who's trying really hard to save her marriage to a man-baby who needs a cookie every time he wipes his own bum.

Or someone extremely focused on this issue. In my case, I didn't grow up with men in the house and didn't have a strong basis for understanding that men generally don't do things like wash dishes. So I was totally incensed. For all we know, he's a normal man and us confused why she isn't just consensually doing the dishes like all the other ladies I was told about upthread.

This is bs. I love how you say you don't really have broad experience living with men but then here is a big generalization. Maybe you married a loser slob, which I guess makes sense based on your background.

Yeah "Men don't wash dishes"? Uh. My Dad was a doctor and he and I would wash dishes together every single night. My Dad's the person who taught me how to wash dishes. Dad's first summer job at 15 was washing dishes for a summer camp.

A grown man "chilling", any way he wants ... while he financially supports his family ...

yes, he gets to "play on his phone". How much money do you make Op? How much money does he make Op? People need down time.

OP, you mentioned that you were looking for a place to live. You dont want to do anything that could be used against you in a divorce, so maybe call an attorney before you move out. Your husband seems very off normal. Be careful.

Did he ever show up for family life, OP? If so, when did he start checking out - after the first kid, or later?

And agree, you probably shouldn't have a dog if it's such a hassle.

Anonymous wrote:DD6 does not need to be driven to practice. DD6 doesn't need an EC. Certainly eliminate that. You shouldn't be driving these kids anywhere that's not absolutely necessary. They walk to school or they take the bus. Maybe you shouldn't have a dog. Drive thru McD's and pick up dinner once in awhile if you have to ~ All of this is better than divorce.

I'm usually on the side of sticking it out, but I dont think OP should have to sacrifice her values about parenting to try to ride this out. Divorce is bad but not worse than what you're describing.

Anonymous wrote:DD6 does not need to be driven to practice. DD6 doesn't need an EC. Certainly eliminate that. You shouldn't be driving these kids anywhere that's not absolutely necessary. They walk to school or they take the bus. Maybe you shouldn't have a dog. Drive thru McD's and pick up dinner once in awhile if you have to ~ All of this is better than divorce.

That is absolutely ridiculous. A grown man playing on a phone does not take priority over children’s well-being and health. If something is going to be cut, it should be getting rid of dad’s phone.

DD6 does not need to be driven to practice. DD6 doesn't need an EC. Certainly eliminate that. You shouldn't be driving these kids anywhere that's not absolutely necessary. They walk to school or they take the bus. Maybe you shouldn't have a dog. Drive thru McD's and pick up dinner once in awhile if you have to ~ All of this is better than divorce.

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Anonymous wrote:Wait it out my fanny. Are you some doormat SAHM who's congratulating herself on how much crap she put up with for decades? Sorry but allowing yourself to be mistreated ks not a solution, it's a failure.

Um, no, and I'm not sure what your vaginas has to do with this.

So your advice is for OP to do all the work herself, allow herself to be treated disrespectfully by a lazy and irresponsible man, let him waste their money, this goes on for decades, and at the end what's the prize? Still being married to a jerk who's slightly better? No thanks.

He sounds immature. That tends to improve over time.

Where I'm coming from with this is, I did have a husband that didn't do as much housework as I felt he should and also was irresponsible with money. At some point I decided to stop nagging and just accept the situation. It was not easy and it was not fair. Fast forward about 10 years- he is now a much greater contributor to the household-- does all cooking, shopping, schlepping the kids around, and a non-terrible amount of cleaning. (I still do more cleaning.) And, his income is now extremely high, high enough that he is still able to make silly purchases or lose money in predictable ways and it doesn't impact us at all. I dislike clutter, so I don't love this trait, but it isn't a crisis like it was before. So yes-- people can and often do have a difficult time in the first part of marriage and then go on to have a great marriage.

It sounds like she's done and is leaving him, and that's also a path forward. But this is something that is a fairly common problem in relationships, and if you read the research on it, it does tend to improve with time, and in later life actually flips, with men doing more housework than women in retirement age.

But what if he didn't improve? What if he never made money? Would it be worth it then? Seems like a big gamble, especially if retirement security is on the line.

Yeah, that was a gamble. My retirement wasn't on the line though, we were financially okay in that department, along with paying for college, etc. After devoting a lot of time reading studies on the division of housework in modern American families, I decided that it was likely to improve and focused on that. It's hard to visualize the counterfactual, how I would have felt if we were still dealing with this. But I tend to be data driven and the numbers for married people are generally better than unmarried.

If my husband never made money at all, I wouldn't have married him. Financial security is a huge factor to me. He was always a good earner, just an even better spender until he made so much it'd be difficult to spend it.

So you married an immature man who treated you badly, but that's ok because money?

He treated me poorly in a way that the majority of men treat their wives poorly. In most American households, women do the majority of housework. So, uh, yeah, like most women in hetero couplings, who stay married, I tolerated this suboptimal yet common condition until it subsided. My decision to do so was less about money and more about wanting to be married to a man.

Okay no. It may be true that in most couples women do the majority of housework, but for a lot of them it's *on purpose*, agreed to, and peaceful.. It's a smaller proportion of couples who have that dynamic because the man is immature, lazy, disorganized, disrespectful, uncaring, etc. Stop acting like those marriages are the same, they aren't.

It's sad that you felt you needed a man that badly. I'm sad for the younger version of yourself.

You think that women just *want* to do more work? Like they walk in and say "no, Chad, don't do the dishes! I want to!" It is peaceful because women know the deal- that men are not likely to pull their weight in that regard, and they are tired of beating a dead horse. It's always disrespectful, uncaring, etc.

Thank you for your sympathy.

If they are SAHM or work part time, yes I would think that is definitely and explicitly the deal. The question is not "In how many households does the woman do more". It's "In how many households does the woman do much more despite working full time and going to therapy and constantly exhorting her DH to do the things he explicitly agree to do?". And that's a far smaller proportion.

On the contrary, when women outearn their husband, they do even more housework than in couples where the woman earns less. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/02/housework-divide-working-parents/

Are these women just like, obsessed with working? Is that it? Has nothing to do with the fact that men are cultured to regard it as women's responsibility?

I don't know, probably some of them are unahppy and others of them have their reasons, but I do know it's abnormal for a.man to behave like OP's husband, being lazy and yelling and doing hardly anything in the face of therapy and repeated requests.

I suspect that OP is more persistent about this issue than most women, as I also was before I made peace with it. Can we at least agree that it is not normal to write love letters thanking your spouse for cooking dinner? That's an unusual level of engagement on this topic. And, like most men are cultured not to do housework, women are cultured to do it. So this is probably not an issue that is brought to the surface in the way it is in OP's (and was in mine at first). So he sounds like a prick but maybe a lot of marriages would look like this if women weren't all out there cheerfully and consensually doing more than they should have to.

The "love letter" sounds like a desperate move from someone who's trying really hard to save her marriage to a man-baby who needs a cookie every time he wipes his own bum.

OP. So please tell me if this is abnormal...

On Wednesday, I was supposed to pick up DD1 from daycare, pick up DD6 from after school care, take DD6 to practice, pick up the dog from dog daycare, handle dinner, while H had....nothing, because he told me he wants to come home from work and have some time alone to unwind. I realized this was ridiculous and told him to pick up the dog and do dinner since he would just be sitting around while I drove kids around. And that's why I wrote the note, because he did it, and I wanted to show that I'm grateful.

But I'm also like...wtf. The reason the dog goes to daycare is H refuses to wake up half an hour early to walk her, he needs to sleep in until 8am instead while I wake up at 6am to get the kids ready. The reason we didn't have groceries for dinner is he said he would handle groceries that weekend but didn't. So why the hell should I be thankful for him doing basic household things when I'm on my feet from 6am-9pm?

No, this is not normal, at all.

I do though think that people get so overscheduled that it just destroys families and individual happiness. Life would be so much better if you could drop the daycare, drop the dog daycare, drop the practice for a 6yo. If only one of you worked and you dropped the extra stuff, you would not feel so stretched. Of course, you'd probably have to live somewhere cheaper. People get on this crazy treadmill, and the truth is, very few people have the executive functioning skills and energy to keep it up AND BE HAPPY. Of course, you are in the situation you are in, and assuming you don't want to make a radical change of lifestyle, it is probably better to get divorced than to continue on with this resentful relationship.

OP. Practice is twice a week, and DD loves it, so I don’t think it’s fair to make her stop because H wants to watch football.

DD1 needs daycare. I work. What else am I supposed to do? The dog needs to be exercised, and H won’t do it. I can’t keep a dog cooped up all day, and H refuses to walk her.