Lockdown seems to have highlighted this more but lots of the behaviour so many of my friends husbands / partners are exhibiting is exactly new - lots of general complaining in the past about “wife work”, husbands not contributing to running of the house and being a bit lazy - but now that people are stuck in the house pretty much 24/7 with them so it seems more obvious and also seems to have been elevated to higher levels of twattery and in some cases just outright cruel behaviour.
Apart from myself and one other friend literally every other friend I have just seems to have been treated in one way or another like shit by their other halves.
There are just so many examples and it all feels super depressing. My friends are smart, talented women who seem to be wasting away with partners who won’t do even their fair share, never mind go above and beyond for them.
A friend who is still working full time from home but whose furloughed husband refuses to take on looking after their 3 year old son during working hours because he wants to “relax” if he’s not at work and is constantly playing on an Xbox.
The friend who is working from home, as is her partner, but all home schooling and general life admin, house cleaning etc is falling to her and if she asks her husband to keep the kids entertained for half an hour whilst she has an important work call he sulks and whines at her.
My friend whose dad died during lockdown (not from coronavirus, he’d been ill for the last year) - she’s obviously devastated, particularly as she didn’t get to see him the last couple of weeks of his life. She asked her husband if he could take a day or two off work just after her father had passed away to help look after their children and support her. He told her that as she is a SAHM it was her job and she needed to just get on with it. When she pointed out that you would get compassionate leave from a job if your father he died, he stormed out of the house and was sending her messages saying she was ridiculous and needed to grow up and stop being so weak.
And possibly the worst example, a work colleague who has had cancer surgery during lockdown. She had run out of painkillers and asked her husband if he could go get some more for her. He refused to go because he was in the middle of watching a film. I can’t fathom how anyone could know their partner was in pain and refuse to go get the medication that would relieve that. He eventually did go but this was after she was apparently sobbing in pain and begging him to help her and only after a bunch of shouting and slamming doors from him.
I could post loads more examples of perhaps less obviously horrible things but just so many instances of husbands / partners refusing to help, not taking any responsibility for their own children and just generally seeming to go out of their way to make the life of person they are supposed to love harder.
I just feel utterly deflated that so many of my friends seem to be treated this way. I guess I’d like to hear that this is unusual because the prospect that the majority of women are treated like this is so depressing.
Is this generally how it seems across the board? Or have I got some unusual friendship circle where so many of my friends seem to be in relationships with completely inconsiderate arseholes?