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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.

Not OP, but to the PP -- how old are your kids? The "let them be bored, they don't need extra activities even if they like them" talk on DCUM tends to come from parents of younger kids. Whatever your kids' ages, you do not comprehend that OP is talking about one, twice-a-week activity. That leaves plenty of time for the DD to get all that valuable boredom you prescribe, ride her bike, play outside, whatever. And Daddy should show he gives a s**t about his own child's interests and personality by supporting her with an occasional ride at least; he might learn his DD is an actual, interesting person, not an inconvenience.

And as DD gets older, is she also supposed to stay home and not have any activities until, I guess, she's 16 and able to drive herself to them? That's limiting. It's actually punitive, saying the kid can't engage in something she finds interesting, even enriching, because daddy plays on his phone rather than making one run a week so mom doesn't have to do both runs.

You truly do not know the difference between overscheduled and healthily engaged in something that isn't schoolwork or just being at home. Yes, kids need to be able to entertain themselves. What OP describes is not at all a kid who is being hauled to endless activities. DD shouldn't give up her ONE outside interest just because dad makes it stressful due to his laziness. Dad should step up, instead.

My three kids are in middle school and elementary school.

The problem is that OP married a lazy slob and had kids with him, so maybe they should try living within their means (timewise and moneywise) as a family before getting a divorce.

And the daughter is not going to suffer from missing a twice a week activity that "she finds interesting." That's just silly. This obsession with activities for little kids is nonsense. Yes, I'm sure that they do find all this interesting. But OP's family obviously doesn't have the wherewithal to do it, so why not just cut it? Is her daughter suffering?

And the slippery slope nonsense about what if she is 16? Just take it slowly. Maybe the situation will be different by then.

But what is clear is that OP's family cannot handle everything. And it is crazy to divorce rather than give up some team -- still curious what that is -- for a 6 yo. And dog daycare. Just get rid of the dog. It would be happier with a family who could walk it then being carted off to dog daycare. Ridiculous.

So the DD is supposed to stay home because daddy's an immature a-hole and can't even muster the energy to drive her somewhere once a week while mom does it the second time each week. Got it.

"Just take it slowly. Maybe the situation will be different by" the time DD is a teen--? Are you for real? OP is supposed to stay with this DH and the kid is supposed to hang around and draw and ride bikes at home until "the situation" with lazy and entitled bachelor-dad improves?

You're advocating --though you won't see it -- for the world to revolve around the DH here. If you think twice a week for one activity is overscheduled, you truly do not know what overscheduled is. It's fine and any kid should be able to have one activity he or she enjoys. As for affording it, if you've kept up with this thread, it looks now as if the DH might have been hiding money and lying about his income, so...maybe the family will find money for this one activity, after OP finds out what's really going on financially with her DH who has insisted they always keep finances separate.

You seem to want to put the OP and the kids second to the DH's self-centered bachelor ways. It's not about the child's activiy or team or whatever. The issue really is the DH's living as if he's a roommate who's vaguely inconvenienced by this woman and these kids who are in his space.

Anonymous wrote:OP. So I left the house for a couple days.

H has told me before that life would be so much better without me. We’ll see if he’s right.

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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.

That's pathetic. Why would you even want to be married to a man if you think the majority of men treat their wives poorly?

OP has since clarified that her situation is substantially different from mine. I had garden-variety housekeeping issues that are normal. Why would I want to be married when being married sometimes produces conflict, unequal balances etc? Because I consider these things to be part of the human condition.

Well, that's convenient for these useless spouses, because they do not. Men don't stay in relationships that make their lives more difficult.

Over the course of a marriage (say, 50 years?) it is extraordinarily common to have some out years, some conflict, some unmet needs. You are either naive or in for a shock if you think it is always smooth sailing and that men will pull 50% in all childcare, housework, etc all of the time, from wedding til death. And lots of men take their vows seriously and work through conflict.