Good luck. I expect she’ll find that hard. If she does it, praise her, and tell her that it makes you feel loved.
I’m not a counselor, but I’m afraid i identify with your wife. There have been times in our marriage when he was really frustrated with how little housework i did. I’ve always worked, and until this year, when i dropped to part time, I’ve earned more than he did, so I’ve contributed financially. But, like your wife, i need structure in my life or i don’t get jack shit done. That was a major consideration in my not actually retiring. I was afraid i wouldn’t do anything else.
The best money we ever spent was hiring a cleaning lady. Now, i never clean the toilet and he doesn’t mind.
So… If your can help her find a job that imposes structure on her, heck, event a volunteer thing, that might help, too.
Can I make a gentle suggestion? From nothing to an hour is a lot. Overwhelming. 15 minutes twice a day is 1) enough to make a big difference and 2) not overwhelming.
In fact, I’d recommend defining the task more specifically as well. When Iook at a room that’s a mess, I fall apart. If I say “I’m going to spend 15 minutes organizing this bookcase” or “I am going to just pick up trash, and not put things away”, it really helps. Help her set a task and a time limit. Both need to be much more narrow than an hour/a room. But it can also be more often than once a day.
Agreed. Success is likely if tasks are achievable. Break things down a bit at first and allow her to work her way up.
Also, temper expectations. There will be setbacks and disappointments. Figure out what the way forward is, and at the same time, where your boundaries are.
My wife has severe OCD and is hoarder. She won’t throw anything away. As a result our living room is full of junk and I’m not allowed to throw any of it away. A few years ago I said to her, “This room needs cleaned. Since I am not allowed to do it, you will have to do it. Start at that corner, work your way over to the other corner, and start pitching things.” I said I’d like to see the living room cleaned within the next six months. She stressed about it. Lost sleep over it. Had extreme anxiety over it. And never did it. It’s still a mess.
The note i think about it, the more i think that giving her a more narrowly defined task is more important than the time. Ask her to do the dishes. Or to tidy the kitchen table. Or to look for things that can be thrown away in the living room.
Forget about housecleaning. Her #1 priority should be getting a job. She should be focusing on getting back into the workforce for many reasons. A big one is financial security of the marriage. If she is in her 40’s and there are no kids, staying at home is a huge luxury. She needs to be working so that you are not bearing the full financial burden of supporting the household and saving for retirement. There is so much uncertainty in the employment landscape that it’s very risky for you to be the only one working. Any job she gets means added income and security. And I’m sure a big part of your anger is that you feel it’s unfair that you are working full time with all that associated stress and she’s just coasting along. Even if she keeps a clean house, that resentment won’t go away. She needs to get a job so that she is also contributing to the house in a way that’s more equal.
Getting a job is not necessarily to head off the alimony issue. However, if her attitude is that by not working she holds you hostage because of the threat of alimony, that’s a huge red flag about how she feels about you and the marriage.
My husband has hoarder tendencies. Sometimes, we sit down and go through things one-by-one. I pick it up, and together we either throw it away or find it a home. I usually put a limit (we are just going through this box). In the long run, we are both better off.
I cannot understand why it’s so hard for him to throw things away, but it just seems to be an area where he needs support.
I like the idea of specific tasks instead of time, but couldn’t she choose the task? I don’t like the idea of one spouse assigning chores to another. If she’s too overwhelmed to select a task, I guess he could suggest some and let her choose, but I think autonomy is important here.
It’s all a piece. Whatever is going on with her, she’s having real trouble with focus, organization, and follow-through. Getting a job entails all those things and more. As she regains her confidence and sense of competence through smaller tasks and therapy, she’ll be better able to get back to the workplace.
It’s important that the end goal is to get a job rather that be a homemaker. If doing stuff around the house helps achieve that, great. But if this is all done with her thinking she can stay at home as long as the house is clean, then it’s unlikely she’ll get a job. It sounds like she doesn’t like working anyway.
I don’t think anyone was suggesting the end goal should be that she’d become a homemaker. According to the OP, she’d always worked before, and there’s no reason to think she wouldn’t find a job when she’s doing better.
It sounds like she was holding her own for a while, even making more than the OP at one point, before reaching a breaking point. Sometimes people can be really good at concealing pain. Probably as children, they found ways to deal with unpleasant thoughts or feelings so that they could appear to be functioning. They eat their pain and don’t learn how to communicate openly and effectively. To people around them, it seems like all is well, until it’s not.
None of that lets the OP’s wife off the hook, but I sense that there was a slow-build for a while. She didn’t just one day become depress and say “fuck it”; she’s probably been awfully depressed for an awfully long time and felt like she couldn’t talk about it. She got overwhelmed and she probably has a combination of feelings. Maybe being a slob is her way of saying screw people for not figuring her out and reading her mind and feelings sooner. I want to be clear: in no way am I saying that anyone should have just read her mind - it’s a ridiculous expectation. Nevertheless, she might feel that way.
He says she hasn’t kept a job for more than 2 years and she quits because “her supervisors hate her”. That seems more of a fundamental problem with her attitude about work than something that just happened in this last go-round. I’m skeptical that making progress on housework is going to turn this around in any sort of meaningful way. I would drop housework totally as a therapeutic strategy because no one likes doing housework, and it sounds like she really doesn’t like it. If you want to have her do small tasks to help her feel more confident, have her do tasks that she actually likes doing. I would say to only focus on housework if having her do housework is your end goal.
My wife also has hoarder tendancies. We currently have a collection of 4 -5 year old community newspapers “in case there is something important in there”. We also have a collection of plastic tubs, containers etc that is large and growing. “somebody might find these useful someday”. Recently, the soft plastic bags and wrap collection is growing. “I need to sort these by type and will find the time soon”
Note we have curbside recycling of all paper and hard plastic, and I can take plastic bags and wrap to a depot, where it all goes into a single bin with no sorting. But no.
However, she has committed to getting rid of some of the stuff we don’t actually need. So far, I have sold my vinyl albums, hundreds of science fiction books, and other things that I valued. So we can have more room for newspapers, plastic tubs and plastic bags.
If she doesn’t like work, why is it important that the end goal be her getting a job? DCnDC says he’d be okay with her not working if she helped out around the house. If he’d be okay with that, and if she’d be okay with that, and if she doesn’t like working, why wouldn’t the universe be okay with that? There ain’t nothing wrong with full-time homemaking if that’s cool with every other household member.
I read that more as his exasperation at the situation rather than being okay with having a SAHW. It sounds like she just put herself in that position without any kind of discussion. That’s typically a significant change in the relationship that should have been discussed. DCnDC, think about if you’re really okay with that and what it means for now and for the future. Whatever you want for the future should be what you focus on for improvement. If her being a happy homemaker is the right thing, then focus on that. If her working is the right thing, work on that.
I think the conventional wisdom is just that step one of pulling yourself out of this sort of hole is to take control of your environment. You don’t have to scrub the baseboards, but the process of cleaning out your depression nest is widely understood as significantly therapeutic. It’s fairly easy, very modular, and the results are immediate and dramatic.
I agree that “put off everything else to find a job” is counter productive. Doing stuff and feeling good about it makes a healthier happier person who is better able to find and keep a job.
