Together for 9 years, married for 5.
DH can often be kind, funny, thoughtful and considerate to the small number of people he is very close to but this does not extend to wider acquaintances. This presents itself in extremes of behaviour. For example if I’m ill but experience a craving for a particular type of food all I need do is mention it and he will immediately jump in the car and drive 30 minutes to get it for me even if it’s the middle of the night and bucketing with rain. I participate in regular running events and he shuttles me around to and from various starting lines across the country several times a month, often in the early hours of the morning without a single word of complaint and has generously financially supported me for two years whilst I took time off to complete a qualification (one which I wanted to do but which was not at all necessary for furthering my career.) Conversely his empathy has a short reach outside of his immediate family and he will often make extremely nasty comments about other peoples’ lives or life choices in a very flippant way and this tends to upset me, as I feel he can be mean spirited. I have tried pulling him up on this, talking to him, trying to explain why it’s important to be more open minded but he refuses to take it on board (or perhaps simply cannot change this part of his personality, it is so deeply entrenched).
The other big issue is his contribution to the housework. His mum and step-dad sent him abroad to boarding school from a young age where all cooking and cleaning was done for him and at uni his accommodation was serviced, so he never learned these life skills. Nine years later and my constant encouragement and attempts to involve him around the house have seen little improvement. I can’t remember when he last cooked dinner for me. It causes endless arguments between us and the more I read on MN about how this is apparently enough for most women to LTB or how most women “wouldn’t put up” with it the more incensed and angry I become that he is perfectly happy to reap the benefits of living in a clean and tidy house and eat the meals I cook but refuses to use his initiative to take on any of the burden. I end up having to nag and nag to get him to do anything (which I hate). All I want is for him to pick up after himself and use his initiative to put on a load of washing or run the hoover and mop round when it needs doing, hardly onerous stuff.
I find myself feeling more and more dissatisfied about our home life because of this and at the moment we aren’t getting on very well at all. I feel like I’m getting really hung up what I perceive to be his inadequacies and I’m overlooking the good qualities about him that I fell in love with.
As a fiercely independent woman and a feminist I feel like these problems should be a real sticking point for us. I feel as though I shouldn’t be willing to settle for being left to do the wife-work and that he should either shape up or ship out. However the side of me that still really, truly loves her husband recognises that these issues aside he is a wonderful partner, kind, loyal, supportive both financially and emotionally and loving (to me, even if not to strangers!) and I’m so very sick and tired of arguing. I just want to enjoy my marriage again and stop bickering over the housework. Would it be so unreasonable of me to just accept that my DH is not the domestic God I wish he was and to accept that I will need to take ownership of that? To accept that yes he can lack empathy for strangers and nothing I say is going to change how he thinks, I can’t control his personality?
Is it unrealistic of me to think that as much as we would all like a perfect DH sometimes we have to accept we don’t have “perfect” and make do with “good” and that life might actually be a little easier and more straightforward for doing so?