Husband doesn't do squat around the house. How should I deal with it?

In My Humble Opinion
121

Mine does as well - works 50+ hours a week - although indoors. He often comes home from work at 7pm and faces hours more of email, showing up in bed past midnight. And I work, in a job where I often have evening meetings with the Far East.

We do have some help - my mother is retired and likes to come over and clean. (yeah, I know) But she isn’t always in town.

My husband does about 80% of the cooking. He does laundry - I do more and my mother (when around) does most of it. He does dishes. Mows the lawn (last year my son started to take this on). Picks up and organizes. Takes care of the small odd jobs. He doesn’t clean bathrooms and seldom dusts or vacuums, but the rest of it he’ll do. And I think the sheets could go about six months before it would occur to him to wash them…

I know busy. A few years ago my mother was out of town a lot because my sister (with two little kids) had breast cancer. I was going to school half time and working full time in a new job that involved a bit of travel and a lot of late night meetings. My husband was doing two and a half people’s worth of jobs at work and pulling regular 18 hour workdays. And we had kids in 1st and 2nd grade. And yet we found time to wash the underwear, get the dishes done, get food into our children, and mow the lawn.

122

And remember, the odds are very high that you will find someone (a friend/roommate, or a new husband) to share household expenses with. Your financial situation is actually quite likely to improve over what it is now, if you start living with someone with an income, even if you do have to pay spouse support.

123

Freckafree, if you want to read how some Dopers experienced living in a home with an hoarder or near-hoarder, read this thread.

I second everyone else: you are deluding yourself if you think you are doing your son a favour by staying with your husband.

124

This. Besides, if you stay four more years, that’s four more years of equity in the house that you’ll have to split with him. Most importantly, divorcing him will FORCE him to get a job, which is undoubtedly the best thing for everyone, including your son who has witnessed his father sponge off of you for a decade.

125

Nope- the OP already stated that the husband receives Social Security, I believe… most likely she will be ordered to support him for a certain time period. Worth it, though.

126

Good post, elbows. It’s easy for us to toss out advice about just dump the guy, but it’s obviously not that easy or she would have done it already. It’s sort of like when someone leaves an abusive spouse, people always ask, “Why did you stay so long? Why didn’t you just leave?” It’s never that simple.

That said, starting to make an exit plan is a very good idea if you truly think this marriage is over. Talk to lawyers; get your finances figured out; talk to your son and feel him out on this. Things are not hopeless, even if they probably feel that way right now.

127

You have to recognize that she’s as invested in the dance as he is, and just as engaged. They neither need ever be alone with whatever demons are driving their behaviour, as long as they are in this antagonist thing.

One a slob/control freak/emotionally needy, the other a mooch. Can’t you almost hear them sniping? Both righteously rationalizing where they are at, and why they can’t change it. And, as long as they have each other to demean, one up, piss off, well, they got something, and they’re not all alone.

It is never simple or easy to disengage from a codependent relationship. As hard as divorce is, couples in this circumstance have a mountain to climb before they even near divorce. Again, just my opinion.

128

elbows, there is a great deal of truth in what you have said here. That’s one of the issues I want to work on with a counselor. If I no longer have him to blame for my horrible life, where does that leave me? I recognize the codependent aspect of what’s going on. I want to find a counselor who can help me work my way out of this – help me figure out why I’ve put up with this for so long, what I am getting out of it. I think a lot of it has to do with getting married at 19 to a 32-year-old (who already had those patterns ingrained by then), but I need to figure out why I got into that relationship to begin with.

And, FWIW, we don’t snipe at each other. We communicate when the topic is our son. Otherwise, our interaction is at the most superficial or practical level. We sleep in separate rooms and have for some time. I’m deeply angry and resentful, but I have very rarely expressed that. That pattern is something else I need to work on with a counselor.

129

Wow, you are already way more evolved than my friend was, I’m impressed.

Though, I have to say persons who are deeply angry and resentful and firmly believe they aren’t expressing it to the world are in their very own kind of hell, indeed.

I wish you luck in finding a counselor, I hope you know we’re all pulling for you, you sound like you’ve found a path to what you want for yourself and your family. I acknowledge it is a difficult and challenging path but we all know you’re worth it. If it helps, you’ll never meet a woman, who fought her way out from such a place, to ever say the cost was too dear. What ever the cost turned out to be.

130

Seriously.

My parents haven’t divorced (strict Catholics), but you can tell they don’t like each other at all. During one of the times my mom was super pissed (with reason) at my dad, she said to me, “I should have divorced him years ago!” and looked like she was hit by a truck when I said, “That’s what I’ve thought for god knows how long.”

She believes it’s more important to stay together no matter what for the children. I would have much rather they divorced instead.

131

Agreed. He’s growing up with a really unhealthy view of married life.

132

Maybe not. If he’s just retired (not disabled), SSA allows him to work and keep all or most of his earnings, depending on his age and when he was born. Just because he’s chosen not to work for the last ten years, doesn’t mean he can’t.

133

I laughed with joy when my parents told me they were divorcing. I had known for years that they needed to. I was only 9. I’m quite sure your son would like a different life.

Congrats on your decision to get a counselor - I believe it will save all of you.

134

This is so, so true. I believed I would not live without my husband. He was my second, and for one thing, I didn’t want to be the girl that got divorced twice. I didn’t want to put my kids through another divorce. Putting them through the divorce was so much better and healthier for them than living in that hell would have ever been for them.

Of course, the husband threatened to take my kids from me (long story, one was not biologically his so I understand now it would have been impossible but when you’ve lived with someone like that you tend to start believing him if he says the sky is red). Then he threatened to shoot me. He threatened to do things to my car to make me wreck and kill me. As you may guess, none of that happened.

The cost was not too dear. I would gladly go through it all again to be out; looking back I can see that I am not even the same person I was, and I am so much MUCH happier.

The only thing worse than the time I invested in that relationship would be if it were the time + 1 day.

See a lawyer about whether you would owe spousal payments, getting custody of your son and walk away. In my case, I waited and he left me anyway and I only regret I didn’t walk out on him. (The threats were not to make me stay, but to make sure I still did what he said even though we weren’t married anymore.)

135

God, I resent every day that my parents never showed each other any affection, never showed each other any love. I wish they had. Divorce is a valid option! It’s OK! I hate this religion and this culture that says we forever have to suffer for a mistake we made when we were nineteen. Hell, we don’t always even expect that for murder!

Your son is learning an incredibly warped view of marriage, as others have said. It will take him years to break out of this mold.

I wish you so much luck. This is not like the situation with the poor woman and her drug-abusing daughter, where she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. You have options. You don’t have to put up with this.

136

WOMAN: I want you to want to do the dishes.

MAN: Why would I want to do the dishes?

137

My wife is like the posters hubby. She is a bit of a hoarder and does almost no work around the house. But they can justify it. When i was working and she was home, the dishes sat in the sink. They would stink and get moldy, but she was not bothered by it. I made remarks about "science projects "in the sink.
Eventually I just started washing the dishes. She decided it was fair since she cooks. If putting burgers or steaks on a Foreman Grill is cooking, she does. When i cook, I do the dishes. Somehow fairplay is different for her and I. But it is easier to wash the dishes, because I hate the mess and the smell.
I have been constantly removing accumulated trash from the house. I have slowly made progress. If I did it all at once, she would panic. But getting a couple boxes a week out to the garbage, has actually helped quite a bit.
The last battle was when i threw out her favorite chair. It was broken and was a mess. But she got it from her dads house. It was his chair. But she used green duct tape to fix the holes in the leather and a box under it to support a hole in the seat. It was a battle ,but I grabbed it and threw it out.
Sometimes it is easier just to do more work than to fight over it and not have it done at all.

138

It always surprises me when people express surprise at how divisive something like this can be. If you look at the top five things couples tend to argue about (I read years ago that they’re sex, money, kids, in-laws, and housework, btw), it’s the one that has the most direct and incessant impact on the quality of your time at home. I mean, yes, it doesn’t typically stir the sort of strong emotions that sex and money and conflict with/about other family members do…but none of those things colors every single hour you spend at home and awake. Housework does. And it’s relentless, even more so than having kids because you can send them to Grandma’s for a weekend every now and again. So yeah, it makes total sense to me that it can be such an issue.

As for the OP, I just don’t know what to say. If you’re truly committed to staying for the next four years, I’m not really seeing where your husband has any incentive whatsoever to change. You’re not going to leave, you’re not going to take his son out of the house, and you’re sure as shit not going to stop cleaning the things he won’t because you can’t stand to live like that. So what does he have to lose by maintaining his current habits? Bupkis, that’s what he has to lose. Not a single damn thing. Your choices, as I see them, are to continue as you’ve been doing, or to quit cleaning and let the place descend into utter squalor.

I have to admit, though I’m ashamed of the feeling, that I find threads like this something of a relief. I feel bad for the people who start them and am appalled by the behavior described in them…but they make me feel sooooo much better about my own inadequacies as a homemaker. I freely admit I’m not a particularly good housewife–the house is typically sanitary and reasonably straight, but it’s never spotless, I mow the yard and maintain the garden, but not to neighbors’ standards (to be fair, our neighbors mostly subscribe to the putting green school of lawn care), and it’s not uncommon for me to have to respond to his ritual “What ya been up to today, sweetheart?” with “Well, I mostly watched old movies, knitted, and argued with stupid people on the intarwebs. Oh, and I’ve not even begun to think about dinner.” When I get down on myself because I don’t contribute enough, it’s perversely comforting to know that there are people who are much, much less useful than me.

(In my own defense, I would like to add that I do have a part-time job to mitigate my financial drain, I make quilts and purses as a sideline, I make a lot of our Christmas presents, and the “old movies and knitting” days are mostly limited to the winter as I have the garden and preserving stuff from the farmer’s market to keep me busy in the warmer months.)

139
140

For what it’s worth, I can kind of understand your wife’s upset over the chair, especially if her dad has passed away. But I do agree with you that if you’re not going to fix it and it’s broken, it needs to go.

Something that happened this week actually made me think about this thread. My husband has been almost exactly like the OP’s since well before we were married, only he’s always worked. It was never a dealbreaker for me since we always lived in a reasonably-sized condo and didn’t have kids, so keeping up with the housecleaning was no big deal. It ticked me off kind of, but not enough that it was a dealbreakder. It was just easier to do it and not nag because nagging never had any effect anyway.

Then we had children. Our house descended into utter chaos - it looked like a laundry- and paper-bomb had gone off in it. Finally, last week my husband was home between contracts (he’s a consultant in IT) and I asked him to go through his papers. He abruptly realized exactly how messy our house was. I practically heard the click when the lightbulb in his brain went off.

He’s cleaned out the entire storage area, given away all the electronics he insisted we keep but never used (two old televisions, four monitors, five computer boxes), most of his old papers and has even started pushing me. I had given up pushing him a couple of years ago because I was tired of wasting my breath.

Then he got even more motivation. He decided we were ready to start talking cleaning service because, with two children and both of us working full time and a larger home, we really can’t keep up with the housework on our own. So he did some homework, found a housekeeper and called her and… She refused the work because we still had so much clutter on the surfaces she was concerned that we would be paying her for the wrong thing (de-cluttering, not deep cleaning). My husband was absolutely horrified. He’d gotten a lot done, but didn’t realize that there was still more to do.

So he’s asked me to help him and we’ve put our heads down and gotten to work. We still have a long, long way to go and we’re both exhausted (having a baby with a cold doesn’t help), but I feel so relieved that he finally gets it. And no amount of nagging I did would’ve made him realize how buried we were. Him going through his papers really brought home our situation. And having the cleaning lady refuse to clean for us was like a bucket of cold water for him.