I’m getting tired of being the household beast of burden. Last night I decided to try and make just ONE damned chore in the house equitable. I assigned one kid to empty the dishwasher, the other to fill it, and my husband to wash whatever large items wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. We discussed it. He agreed it was fair. I HATE a dirty kitchen and can’t cook when it’s filthy and I’m tired of doing all the cleanup before slaving away at the stove and then repeating.
Spoiler: he did not wash the dishes. He played video games and then went to bed. I washed them this morning.
I was mildly annoyed (read this happens constantly so I’m used to it) and told him just now that since I washed those dishes, could he please put them away. He’s doing that now, but his response has me fucking fuming.
“Why wouldn’t you just wait until I washed them? Why did you HAVE to do the dishes just to make me feel bad about it?”
I was mildly annoyed before and now I’m just fucking furious. He has no idea why I would even consider that manipulative. I’m so mad right now I can’t even find the words to productively explain to him why that statement was so offside.
Help me, sisters. I can’t even find the words.
Do situations like that - your feelings getting invalidated and turned on yourself - happen more often or is it uncommon?
And I can see why you struggle to put this in words and explain it to him, because to me it seems like its so many layers you would need to explain to him before he would be able to see his manipulative behavior. This is something I would really struggle to do myself, so i can just send you virtual hugs.
Sorry if this unwanted advice, feel free to skip the stuff below if you just want advice regarding that specific situation.
Reading your comments, I am wondering, do you have any boundaries regarding chores and their distribution? Like if nothing changes, how long can you live with it? What is the minimum of understanding/change you want to achieve to stay in this relationship? Are there any red lines for you? How do see your own situation when you are sick for a longer time or older or have to work for more hours a week?
I feel like you already took a huge effort to communicate with your husband, to provide resources and free education, to be understanding, to deal with constant mild annoyance. It seems like that did not change anything. Right now it seems more than reasonable to check in with your own needs, expectations/hopes/wishes for the future and if you actually believe in your husbands willfulness&ability to change his ways.
It’s a mixed bag. 50% of the time he completely invalidates my feelings, but the other half is actually very understanding and progressive. He has been quick to apologize and make amends when he genuinely understands if the behaviour is off-side but that understanding seems to be at war with his deep desire to protect his ego at all costs, so he battles hard to defend himself even when he’s blatantly wrong. I am the opposite and will consider all sides and always more likely to accept culpability and apologize and make changes so it doesn’t happen again.
Things getting turned around on me ? Constantly. Like I have to actually keep a notebook all day long about everything I do and say, just so that he can’t twist it around on me later if a situation like this comes up. He’s very good at misdirection - I don’t even think he does it consciously, he just has a natural talent for twisting things and disagreeing and picking apart small minutia until I’ve totally lost track of what we are discussing. His dad is like that too - not a smart man, but don’t ever ever fucking play chess or poker with him because he’s a survivor and he will fuck your shit up.
He becomes extremely manipulative and gas-lightey without even realizing he is doing it. Or maybe he does. I’ve tried discussing that with him too, but this is one of the topics he has firmly decided he does not do (except he does) and so he has nothing to change or apologize for
Which is why I’m here for productive ways to discuss this one isolated topic with him. If I can’t stay on point and get through the discussion quickly and efficiently, it will get twisted into a horrible 5 hour nightmare of guilt and confusion.
I’m really quite upset by some posters saying that I’m practically abusing my husband and setting him up to fail. I’m just exhausted and need him to step up, I’m not abusing him.
I think you are trying to isolate a topic from all the other issues, but it seems pretty much impossible. Even if you for yourself can isolate the topic perfectly, I really doubt your husband is willing to do same and instead will view this in context of all other discussions you already had.
You know your husband best and probably know the best way to bring up this issue. If you, as someone who lived with him for years doesn’t know how to get him to understand this, we probably aren’t able to either.
I don’t have any experience with this, but in similar situations I saw two recommended strategies:
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Get someone to be on your side in this issues and get them involved, like ask a family member or a friend for help when bringing this topic up. Or get some help mediating this like with a counselor or get into couples therapy
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Confront your husband with consequences if he does not do get it. I thinks its important that those are consequences that you can actually enforce. So separation / divorce / no sex / not cooking / no cleaning / other things for him can totally be those consequences.
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My husband is super guilty of all of this. I tried all of this advice over the years to no avail. Recently I stumbled across a tiktok talking about “right now.” It’s such a simple and obvious concept but it finally put things into perspective for my husband that made a difference. It goes like this: I spend all day taking care of everyone else’s right now. The kids, work, the house, etc. When someone needs something I have to drop whatever I’m doing to help them right then. What I’m doing, my needs, are never met right then. So when I ask for help, even if it can be done later, even if it’s irrational, it will help my mental health by fulfilling the “right now” need. Doing one simple chore in that moment when I ask will mean far more to me than 10 big chores tomorrow unasked.
What I notice is that you are the one in the relationship who ultimately has responsibility for making sure the dishes get done. That means planning, delegating, following up when tasks don’t get done, and doing it yourself if it ends up not getting done.
It sounds like you’re also responsible for the cooking, which probably also includes planning, shopping, gathering ingredients, organizing the pantry, delegating, and finally the act of cooking itself.
I’m just trying to point out the high amount of mental load and management responsibilities involved in these two tasks.
On the other hand, he gets the benefit of the output of your hard work – the distilled and delegated task of just washing the pots, pans, etc. It probably only takes 10 minutes, and he already knows exactly what to do, who needs to do it, etc.
Just from what you’ve said here, it sounds like he’s getting a really good deal, only needing to do a short delegated task and then getting to go play video games. And he’s skipping even that short task.
Whether he does it in the evening or morning clearly makes a huge difference because the task is required before making breakfast, otherwise the pots and pans get in the way. He needs to understand that.
I don’t know what else is going on in your relationship and who is responsible for what other tasks. It sounds like you’re saying that other chores are just as bad. Overall it seems really unfair to me.
Agreed.
But I think the fury is coming from the accusation that she did the dishes just to make him feel bad. Like she’s looking for opportunities to bring him down. The insinuation that she’s betraying the relationship by attacking him.
That’s where the manipulation is.
It’s been 15 years of failed attempts to change her husband according to OP.
Imagine 15 years of someone setting goals for you, and you constantly failing, and them getting upset. It could be manipulation, but it could also just be panic. This situation gives me anxiety 😅
Like OP straight up tells her partner she hates being married to him…
It might be a sense of entitlement that comes from being a member of the power majority in a patriarchal society. Men are not ususally used to being ordered around (starting from childhood, when compared to women) so any request to do something might be seen as authoritarian over-reach, whereas to someone who is not a member of the power majority, the same request would be normal. It’s not personal, it’s trained behavior. Hopefully it helps you both to communicate better if you take it from that angle.
I’m not a woman either, but I’m a man struggling with ADHD, I have similar experiences with dirty dishes (and other things). It’s so difficult to remember to do things you have agreed to do and even if you do remember it can be impossible to get started, unless you have figured out a system that works for you.
If someone at work asks me to look something up or do something and they say that I can do it whenever I have time, it’s never going to get done, I need some sort of deadline to be able to start (usually as close as possible to the deadline).
I’m not saying your husband has ADHD, I’m just saying he might need more “structure” or a time when the task is supposed to be completed. Not everything is done out of malice or lack of respect.
Just my two cents since I don’t know that much about either of you.
Edit: Since ADHD is a spectrum disorder, it’s not a “one glove fits all” kind of situation, everyone have different experiences with different areas. We suffer from time blindness as well, making it hard/impossible to set goals for the future and to achieve those goals.
I’m sympathetic to adhd because I have it up the wazoo. It’s not even the forgetting. It’s the “to make me feel guilty” which puts the responsibility for his feelings of inadequacy on me. If he feels guilty it’s because he f’ed up. I’m not doing it to him and it’s a strategic ploy to make me feel ashamed for not just accepting his half assed effort.
Or he already feels guilty that you did the task instead of him, so that he feels that he let you down. As I said before, I’m just speculating from my own experiences with letting my wife down (and people at work) by not doing something that I agreed to do, that shouldn’t be hard but is hard since I was unable to get it done.
Have you talked with him about your ADHD? And that you need support from him to be able to maintain a tranquil environment at home?
His response is absolutely not an appropriate response for an equal partner to make, and he knows it and knows you didn’t do it to “make him feel guilty.” He feels bad and so he wants you to feel bad, and that’s just not how adults deal with their feelings. I feel close to this because I could see myself slipping into being like this person if I weren’t devoted to being an equal partner.
If he wants to be an equal partner, he needs to own up to his mistakes, acknowledge the emotional labor you’re doing, and come up with accommodations for his shortcomings. You have tried to accommodate for him, and that’s just taking on more emotional labor without any payoff. You’re not his mother, your his spouse, you shouldn’t have to tell him what, when, and how to take care of these things. He may need accommodations, and he can ask for help, but you can’t accommodate for him.
That said, my spouse and I both struggle with ADHD and one way we’ve accommodated our shortcomings is we have a stamp sheet which we fill out every week with cute stamps depending on who completed the task (mine is a penguin). It’s taken a lot of the emotional labor off of both of us, and shows what we need to do or if we’re done for the week and can relax. I’m not saying that solution will help in your case, but recognizing he has a problem, needs accommodations which may involve the whole household is the second step he needs to take. The first, of course, being that he needs to stop trying to make you feel bad because he feels bad. He’s gotta cut that shit out.
Another thing with ADHD (as you might know) is that the frontal lobe isn’t fully developed, which makes it harder to regulate your feelings and how to respond.
I love the idea of a stamp sheet or something like that to make it clear what needs to be done, I often don’t see things that my wife finds obvious and that can lead to irritation, but we have been able to get past that since we talked about my shortcomings and what I need support with to be able to do them.
Your preference for everything put away by the end of the night is your preference, not his. My partner doesn’t care to put things away after the kids are asleep, but they’ll be put away in the morning before everyone is up… presences are balanced that way.
Do you constantly nag him about things that you haven’t clearly communicated or is this a special case?
This isn’t a case of preference. This is really one thing in a long line of things. Unfortunately our relationship is a very uneven one where I am responsible for most of the running of the house, as well as the income, and all other tasks. What I’m asking is for some minor changes that make my workload easier to bear.
Having them put away in the morning isn’t an option either. He chooses to sleep until 10-11 daily, then games until he goes to work around 4. He gets home around 8 and then games until 2-3am.
So as you can see, that leaves very little time for him to chip in with chores.
I actually resist nagging. I hate it myself - his mother is a turbo-nag so he actually has a hard time understanding something is important unless he’s being nagged to death. It’s unhealthy and I avoid participating in that type of negative motivation.
Unfortunately it also means that since I don’t force him, he just doesn’t do it, which then falls back on me. And generally with a side of manipulation about how I’m the bad guy to encourage me to not engage next time either.
Your husband works for 20 hours a week, but you are responsible for housekeeping, cooking, childcare and transportation, and you are also the main earner?
Unfortunately yes. When we met he owned his own business and it was doing well. But he’s not a very motivated worker so over the next couple years he pulled back on his work more and more until it was costing more money to run than he was making. We had an economic downturn around the same time and I was making very good money, although working a lot of hours. When our daughter was born, we decided it was time to close up shop and he would be the stay at home parent so I could focus on earning. That was the worst 4 years of my life where I worked 80-100 hours a week and he barely did anything at all. I even had our daughter in daycare three days a week because it was too much for him and she needed socialization. He just stayed home and played games all day. No play dates, no park, nothing. Certainly very little cooking or cleaning and I was still responsible for most emotional labour tasks. I told him finally he had to go back to work or we’d be separating. He did, but since I was earning enough, that was “his” money. One of the massive points of contention was that the felt like he had to ask me for money and I agree that’s a shitty feeling. So he kept the money he made, and I still worked and paid for everything and did all the house stuff. It’s been a lot of years since then, a couple moves, I had what I’m pretty sure is a nervous breakdown after getting fired from my very well paying job (they thought they could find someone to do what I did for 1/3 the cost). Now I have ptsd from all the abuse and insane hours I experienced at that job, so I can’t really work in that field anymore and our income is significantly reduced. I picked up another full time job which earns less but that I can handle emotionally. So he contributes but it’s like 85:15 maybe ? And only because he sees me throwing up and sleeping when I’m not working. The kids are older so I have a reprieve there mostly. I’d put my actual work hours between my job and side hustle at about 55 hours a week right now. The rest is chores and mental health exercises or stress sleeping.
I’m still doing a lot of work to get back to a good place psychologically and emotionally.
As you can see- there hasn’t been a lot of time or energy to be able to set healthy boundaries and with his natural inclination to squirm like a worm on a hook, I usually just end up doing most things myself.
He’s not working on YOUR schedule. That’s quite clearly a matter of preference.
As for the nagging… well, you’ve posted this so you’ve clearly taken what you don’t like about his mother and amplified it into the stratosphere.
Meanwhile… you’re the victim of your Story.
Hopefully his next partner is actually a partner cuz that ain’t you sister.
