to wish DH would just bloody leave for work on time

[PeoniesforMissAnnersley]

DH is always late. When we have to go somewhere I'm standing in the hall at the time I've said we need to leave, which is when he'll start trying to find his sunglasses/keys/wallet. The only way we can leave on time is if I follow him around asking where his stuff is and hurrying him up.

At the moment he works in another city which is an hour's drive away - every single night he says "I'll need to leave at X time tomorrow because I need to be in at Y time to do Z". And every single morning he leaves late, comes back for things he's forgotten, arrives in his workplace way later than he planned and then ends up coming home late as he has to stay and make up the hours.
This morning he was supposed to get the train (he usually drives), knew what time the train was at, arsed around until he's not left enough time to get to the station and is now leaving on a much later train meaning he will be back really late tonight.

I know this is a small, petty thing (and he is an awesome man and lovely DH) but it is driving me crackers that he can't just get his ass up out of bed, get dressed and go to bloody work on time! I can't believe that his employer doesn't notice that he's always late.

This drives me loopy. He can be running late in the morning - at this point a normal person i.e. me would have a quick wee, shower, get dressed and run out the door eating a cereal bar or some such.

He will eat his breakfast first, because he has to then leave half an hour before brushing his teeth, otherwise they will fall out and the world will end. He will have a leisurely poo, then his shower. He somehow thinks it important to still carry out all the little bits of his routine e.g. cleans out his ears, flosses slowly, brushes his teeth, applies his spot cream... Irons his shirt, makes his sandwiches. Oh it makes me cross. Then will stay late at work, meaning I'm stuck at home with a fractious witching-hour toddler when I need his support the most!

Oh god, my DH is the same and it drives me crackers! I see the "last minute pee" and I raise you a "last minute dump". And sorry to lower the tone but how the devil does a dump take so long?

But yes, showers upstairs, comes down to get something, goes back upstairs to get dressed, comes down for breakfast, goes back up for socks, comes down to put stuff in bag, goes back up to fanny about with hair.

In fairness to me, I do tend to leave him to it but the endless time wasting and inefficiency of a morning is infuriating to watch! It's annoying more when we're going somewhere together and I'm waiting 20 minutes for him to stop fancying about and double checking he's turned taps off, then driving down the road and him not being sure if he's got his wallet.

YANBU, my DH is the same. The kids are almost always late for breakfast club as he leaves too late. In theory the drive should take 10 minutes but you can't predict the traffic in the mornings and it only takes one idiot going at 40 when the speed limit is 60 and you're late.

Even when there were roadworks along the way he didn't seem to be able to leave earlier. It's like he's got a mental block about leaving time for contingency.

Oh and CurlyBlueberry my DH will always have breakfast and a full cup of tea before leaving. These are non-negotiable and he will die otherwise.

My 14yo ds is like this.

I have made a conscious decision to stop chocking him and my mental health has improved greatly.

So, he is late for stuff. Stuff he likes he misses out on. He gets detentions from school. He gets disapproval from classmates for getting them a class demerit. He simply gets left behind if he delays the rest of the family.

Not my problem.

Detachment is a wonderful thing.

The husband needs exactly 2 hours prep before going to work.. it's always 2 hours which is bemusing because I get up about 45 minutes before I start work. It's literally up, shower, dressed, quick drink and slice of toast and out the door.

So even if he starts work at 4am he'll get up at 2 or 3 if he's at work for 5 and so on. If he's on a later shift he'll still do those 2 hours beforehand.

But the beauty is he does it all himself without any input from me.. it's just not my job to sort him out.

It would be a zero-tolerance approach from me.

• Stop getting him up. Use earplugs so his alarms don't disturb you.
• Leave on time for things you're going to together, regardless of whether or not he's ready.
• Watch a film of your choice/cook when you want in the evening. Leave his dinner in the dog.

She seems to be unable to understand that if she is always 10 minutes late then she needs to get up 10 minutes earlier!

I actually disagree with this to an extend. People who are late/faffers will make all tasks expand to fill the time available. I have known faffers be later the earlier they get up. This is usually because they think they have more time so either try to do something extra (exMIL used to do this - oh i'll just give the bathroom a quick clean/drive to a detour to pick something up because i've got an extra 10 mins. She never worked out that 10 min jobs never actually took 10 mins by the time all the added bits get put on - Like Jamies meals, it's only 15 mins from the actual start time not the decision, getting things out of the cupboards, boiling the kettle, puttin ghte pans on etc - sorry bit of a digression there ) OR they just dither around taking longer to do the things they already do.

HappyAgainOneDay yes, unfortunately he needs them for tv and we have a family car and he has a work car so he'd need at least 3 pairs. I take a deep breath and pretend not to notice and get annoyed.

I have also started to stop trying to think of everything for everybody. He knows what time he has to get up for work but will leave it till the last second, I now let him get on with it rather than nag him to get up.

We recently went on a camping trip and I decided this year that if he couldn't plug in to what was going on then the item/s that he'd not worried about and forgotten would have to be left behind. When it got to the 3rd thing on holiday that he said "did you bring..." and I looked at him blankly, he started to get the message that he had to take responsibility for remembering items as well. I suggested he start a list on his phone of everything he wanted that he hadn't brought. We're getting there, as someone above said, I'm not his mother and I don't want to act like one.

and then don't get annoyed

My DP is like this. When we've discussed it (calmly, after the event!) he says he likes the brinkmanship of it. Like it's him against time, or something.

My dad is the same - can't go anywhere without drinking a cup of tea, which takes 20 minutes because it's hot.

I tend to just ignore my DP now. He was faffing around before we had a table booked for lunch at the weekend and I pissed myself laughing at him running to the restaurant 15 mins late. All his own fault & I told him so.

My dh is constantly late. He over showers and get up later than he should IMO. But that's his problem I leave him to it. The only times I've had to talk to him about it is when it affects family outings or dinner times. I've explained how it makes me feel what example it sets for the dc and that it's disrespectful to hold everyone else up. He sorted it. Not always and it's always just by the skin of his teeth when he isn't late but if I didn't detach I would go mad. If I could change anything about him it would be this

Op- the lie in thing sounds awful. Just selfish selfish selfish. I can't believe an adult would so completely disregard another's feelings and comfort. If he can't see how horrible that must be for you he must be so self absorbed it's shocking. Fucking disgusting behaviour.

CurlyBlueberry yes! My dh is exactly the same. His routine has to happen no matter what. Arrrrrrgh!

I see this from two sides:

The man-keeping-everyone-waiting-with-last-minute-wee thing - that is pure power play. My dad does this. He needs to show he is more important than everyone else by having everyone lined up waiting for him to swan into position, to reinforce that the world revolves around him. He is retired now but his job was predicated on that - the protocol of his job draws a strict distinction between Masters and Little People, and Little People had to flow around the Masters, dropping everything, and waiting as long as it took.

The not-being-ready thing. That is slightly different. I have been that person and basically it was about not wanting to go there. Either I didn't want to go to work because I hated it and was exhausted, and I stupidly imagined that I could somehow limit the time I was spending in the place by getting there as late as possible, and then it went wrong and turned into being actually late; or I didn't want to go to the party because it would be stressful, and I was tired; or I didn't want to go to the party yet because if we get there now it will just be painful standing about, the party isn't going to get going for another 2 hours.

If it's work, there is no solution, you have to go there. BUT actually in this case, he has found a way of being late resulting in having to do less work in absolute terms. In this case he is swapping work time for leisure time - because staying in bed and getting to work later means that you are doing work at the other end of the day that he would otherwise have to get involved in. He just doesn't want to do the work.

I have no idea how to address this because although I have a very clear Marxist-derived sense of the material nature of units of time / work / money, and how certain people seem to be able to manipulate domestic arrangements so that they can secure more of these units for their personal use, I have absolutely no idea how to lay this out to someone who is probably doing it it subconsciously and the suggestion that it is happening will make him very angry; he will accuse you of pettiness; say "this is a partnership! We are supposed to support each other! how can you be like that!" etc - it's effectively unchallengeable

I'm not sure you can change people like this.

I went it an off-site meeting, five miles away. I travelled by public transport and was on time. Guess who was late? The social worker, whose office was on the floor above the meeting room.

DH also does a thing where he chooses the most innapropriate time to do something totally non urgent. But because he can't prioritise at all, he can't determine what is essential at that point in time, he just see everything as comparable in importance. So just about to leave and go on holiday, taxi outside, oh i forgot to call Tom about that thing we are doing in 6 months time. Or dinner booked at a restaurant, i think i'll call my mum or reprogramme something on the computer. If i protest i get a bewildered wounded face and 'you just don't want me to have friends/talk to my mum/have a hobby'. i don't give a shit what you do when there is time to do it, i only care when you are making everyone wait! That's not true tho apparently. There is no feasible reason, other than me being controlling, to protest

I adjust my activities accordingly

There's your problem OP. Why should he bother to change when you can - and do?

If he doesn't get out of bed, let him deal with it. If you tell him what time dinner will be on the table and he's not there, let it go cold. Or throw it out. If you have to leave to watch a film at 7pm, leave at 7pm with or without him. If he tells you it'll take ten minutes to get somewhere, check Google Maps and tell him it says twenty minutes so that's what time you'll be leaving.

He won't get sacked for being late, he'll get a warning first. When he does talk about how he's going to deal with it. Not how are "we" going to deal with it, but how are "YOU" going to deal with it?

I have the opposite issue.
DH is very anxious about time.
So he leaves for work at 7 am, is in work for 7.45 am. Is paid from 9 am.
I wouldn't mind if his work were flexible enough for him to then leave early, but it isn't - he has to stay in the building until 6.
Now, admittedly on work days it's not too much of an issue given that he would otherwise just have to bring more work home (teaching role so lots of lesson prep/ marking/ moderation etc) but in the holidays (of which he has far fewer than school teachers) it does my head in.

For example, he will be sitting in the car twenty minutes before agreed leaving time, tapping the steering wheel. Meanwhile I am running round after the DC. Now they're older they just get themselves sorted but when they were small, I was changing nappies, doing feeds, finding spare clothes etc by myself while he fretted about being late (to something with no clear start time in any event). And then he makes us telephone when we leave, when we leave the motorway, and when we're leaving the town nearest the village where his family live to give them updates on our ETA even though we're not late. I find it very wearing and anxious - he's 46 FFS and still it's all about pleasing the parents. Don't get it at all.

I manage to arrive on time for everything, often quite early, but without assuming everyone else will do all the preparation.

Anyone else have to deal with Schrodingers car keys in the morning? Every day he swears the keys were left in the key bowl, which is designated for keys and meant to be where keys reside when not in the lock the keys are for ( )... And yet, and fecking yet, the keys are mysteriously elsewhere.

Every. Single. Day.

"Where are my car keys?" Because obviously it was me who left the bloody things at my arse despite there BEING A BOWL FOR THEM TO LIVE IN.

...and breathe. And go to lie down in the dark for a while.

Personally I blame the person who used to fold his neatly pressed clothes in the order they were to be put on, assemble the things he needed for the day by the door and wake him gently with orange juice (when he was more than old enough to know better).

Someone enables his behaviour OP, so he has no impetus to change. He expects you to wipe his arse for him so simply stop and leave him to sort his own shit out like the adult he is supposed to be.

We had quite a lot of 'where are my...?' questions with me looking blankly and then 'WHY aren't you helping me?' when i didn't leaps up everyday to start rummaging. Then things like i would go to my bag and realise my keys were gone and call DH and he'd say 'oh yeah, i couldn't find mine so i took yours' meaning i couldn't leave the house till I found his .

The key nadir was when we had a professional photo thing booked which i'd paid a fortune for (we had recently got married with no pics and had a baby - so wanted some nice snaps), and DH couldn't find the hire car keys, so we spent the hour which was allocated to me getting ready searching the house for them. We couldn't find them and had to get a taxi and i had to do my make up in the back. We never got time to change DS and we all looked red, and angry, and sweaty.

We thought we were going to have to pay £100 for new keys and then 4 days later i found them in his sock, stuffed into his stinky trainer, in his gym bag, in the bottom of his wardrobe, under a pile of shite

After that i allocated a drawer just for him and i will not engage with him about it, if his things re not in there, then tough shit.

Yes vezzel the only way to approach this is to appropriate the leisure time at the other end of the day. I think a fine way to do this is to have already eaten and be having your lesiure time when they get in. I had this out with dh when ds was about 4 weeks old. He came in about 7:30 pm looking for dinner and I was in the bath having I had already eaten- not pleased but as I said to him why should I do another 2 hours work when you have finished for the day.

'he will be sitting in the car twenty minutes before agreed leaving time, tapping the steering wheel. Meanwhile I am running round after the DC'

Make him get back out of the car and run round after the sodding DC!

It's a real conundrum whether just to leave them to it, in which case they might learn eventually but there is an awful lot of heartache and potentially expense to get to that point. Or bend over backwards to try and get them organised and still be disappointed.

How have you not murdered these fuckwits?

Op, you need to get your DH something like this key finder for his keys, etc.

It's a shame you can't get miniature ones for glasses though, although you could attach them to the glasses case.

I suggest you tell him that from now on, you will not be altering your timetable to accommodate his lateness.

Perhaps give him a week where you will help him organise himself - get all the ironing done in advance, set everything out near the door the night before, get up with him and help him up, etc. Make him realise that actually, it's not impossible to be on time.

Then tell him it's up to him from now on and you refuse to mother him - and then BACK AWAY. DON'T get his things ready, don't get him up out of bed, don't get out of the shower at your time just because he's faffed around, etc.

Sort out dinner time and movie time for the evening (or whatever else it is you want to do) and then do them, at the time agreed. If he is late, then he misses dinner (get some REALLY boring frozen meals which he can pull out for himself). He misses the beginning of the movie, don't catch him up or restart it, and make sure the best movie snacks are eaten .

By leaving late he must MISS out on things at home, because it is unfairly impacting on you otherwise.