How to respect a husband who doesn’t work or contribute

[Serabeth]

Hello,

I could use some advice, preferably from married Christian women, but anyone is welcome to contribute . I have struggled a lot with the command to respect my husband. A very condensed statement about my background is that I used to essentially be a liberal feminist atheist, and my husband brought me back to Christianity. But I do think some of my thought patterns regarding relations between a man and a woman have been more difficult to overcome than I originally expected. It’s one thing to agree that God’s command for how a man and woman should interact in a marriage is the best way to live, but quite another for me to force down my anger, frustration, and sometimes unfortunately nasty responses to my husband.

I feel that a large part of the reason this is so difficult for me to overcome is I feel justified in the majority of the reasons for my anger. My husband does not work. We don’t have kids. We do have pets, and he is very good with animals. Whenever I accuse him of doing nothing, he frequently points out that he trains our pets. This is true, and he does do a great job with it. Their behavior has greatly improved. However, he does very little to nothing regarding cleaning up their spaces, and expects me to clean out all of the litter boxes.

He says this is not his fault. He has chronic pain due to past injuries and a rare genetic condition that affects his connective tissue and makes his joints very unstable and prone to pain and dislocation. However, I have researched this condition and it can be greatly improved in most patients with physical therapy, exercise, and resistance/weight training. He refuses to do any of these things, even when I ask him to go to the gym or come on a walk with me. He says he’s had physical therapy in the past for his shoulder and it made it worse. I understand that, but his trainer did not know he had this condition at the time, and I suggested we might be able to find someone to modify the routine or at least help to preserve his other joints for longer. He refuses all of this.

He doesn’t have a job, which I originally was okay with since he agreed to take on the majority of the house work. He was going to cook, clean, and take care of the pets. He is an amazing cook and usually does cook enough so that about 4 of our days per week have at least one cooked meal. I do appreciate this and frequently compliment him on how tasty the meals are and thank him for cooking. However, as I mentioned, he does not do litter boxes (he says due to back pain of bending over), clean up after the pets in general, does not take out trash, vacuum, sweep, do dishes, or do laundry.

To be fair, I don’t do these things much, either. Our house is kind of a disaster. But I do each of them significantly more than he does. I don’t feel I should have to do much at all in terms of housework since I am the sole provider. I even pay for a house cleaner to come weekly in order to help him out. It hasn’t improved things very much. Our place smells and looks awful most of the time.

He says he does what he can, but his condition makes him tired and he’s in pain. So I’ve tried to have him handle things that don’t require physical effort. This includes scheduling appointments for us and for the pets, taking care of kennel or pet sitting arrangements when we travel, and other similar tasks. He does this some of the time, but he is unfortunately extremely disorganized and does not keep track of anything. If I ask him about an appointment, I’m nagging. If I don’t ask, I am informed I should have reminded him to schedule the appointment.

All of this on top of the fact that most of his day is spent sleeping and most of the rest is spent playing video games, and I’m having an extremely difficult time respecting him. One of the worst parts of this is that I frequently lose my temper and yell, and then the pets that I love very much essentially rally around him and are scared of me . I do also feel badly when I can see I’ve hurt him. He almost never raises his voice and I always look like the crazy one. Maybe I am. But I don’t know what to do. Any advice?

 

[Gregory Thompson]

maybe record yourself and then listen to what it sounds like later.

 

[PloverWing]

I think that "I can't respect you" language is going to be emotionally explosive and unhelpful. Could you instead have a conversation around fairness? It sounds like you feel that you're doing an unfairly high percentage of the chores around the house. Perhaps you could have a (calm, not angry) conversation in which you say "I feel like I do more than half of the household chores, and I would feel better if we divided up the chores more fairly."

I think your solution of him doing the less physically demanding chores is a good one, except that disorganization is evidently getting in the way. We have a big family calendar in our kitchen on which we write all the appointments that might affect other family members. Maybe something like that could be a useful organizational tool, as well as smoothing some of the conversations, a way of reminding without nagging: "When was Fluffy's vet visit scheduled for? I want to write it on the calendar."

If he has trouble with organizing tasks, perhaps a family chore chart would also be a useful tool. On Monday, he dusts and you vacuum. On Tuesday... That way, all the essential chores get done, and it's a bit of documentation about fairness for you both.

There's no need to give up liberal feminism, by the way. It's just that, as Christians, we're also called to the kind of love that works for the well-being of those around us, including family members who get on our nerves. You might find the Egalitarian Christians forum on CF to be of interest.

 

[JohnC101]

One of the best ways that I know of to keep track of chores (yes, I'm horrible at remembering them as well) is to write down a list in a place where I know I'll see them (like putting it on the fridge). You could write down a chore list and put the list in areas where he'll absolutely see them (like on the fridge). You could even get a dry erase board for this purpose.

Concerning the physical therapy, always remember that, generally speaking, going through it is incredibly painful and difficult without encouragement. Even more so when he seemed to both have a horrible time the first go around, but came out of it worse then when he started.

Wishing God's best for you!