Anonymous
07/18/2025 14:36
Subject: I just told my husband I feel like Cinderella and he doesn't care.
Anonymous wrote:sounds like you are doing 50/50.
Agree.
Sounds like normal division of labor stuff to me.
Anonymous
07/18/2025 13:52
Subject: I just told my husband I feel like Cinderella and he doesn't care.
Anonymous wrote:Hire out what you can.
Stop doing things for him that he can do for himself, unless you choose to do it - in which case, don't hold it against him.
Depending on the age of your child, start teaching them skills. My kids have done all their own laundry since they were 10 and we're working on learning how to make meals, grocery shop, etc...
Leave for an extended period of time.
The single best thing to help rebalance our household, even just in terms of recognition of the effort involved if not redistribution of workload, was my work travel. When I was gone for 4-7 days I came home to a profoundly different level of awareness of what it takes to keep the house on track. I didn't have to whine or nag or fight to get there, which was such a relief.
Have a monthly meeting where you lay out the "to do" list. Everything and anything: cooking, shopping, cleaning, doctor's appts, playdates, b'day parties (and gifts required), planning vacations, dishwasher management, trash management, repair/handyman management, yardwork, bills, etc. Get EVERYTHING on there. Then put names next to it. You may discover that he's doing more than you realize. You might discover he's willing to volunteer for things you don't like doing. You may discover things that can be outsourced to allow other things to be redistributed. It's a tedious conversation and you both have to be willing to do it, but it can help tremendously. You agree on the distribution and then you agree not to nag each other, and to let the other person do it their way. Then you see how that works for a couple of months and go from there.
I made a list like that and it was obviously, severely imbalanced in favor of DH doing less. He looked at it in black and white after contributing to writing the list, looked at everything I was doing, and said “but I don’t want to do any of that.”
So I took him through our budget and all of our expenses to talk about what we cold cut or reallocate in favor of hiring people for the tasks he didn’t want to do. It went on and on. Didn’t want to cut dry cleaning because he didn’t want to iron his shirts or chinos at home. Didn’t want to cut takeout lunch because packed lunch was “embarrassing.” Didn’t want to take DD to activities because learning to do her hair for them was “too hard.” Didn’t want to take a different kind of vacation because “I don’t want to be with those kind of people.” (He never articulated what that meant.)
It went on and on. Big fat lazy man baby. My only sign that he had a mom who did everything for him growing up, but I didn’t know that all at once- only when I encountered various things he’d never learned or tried to do. I wish there was a better warning sign.