"careful" men - lighthearted I think!

[nirvanaorbust]

Men with single track minds that can only cope with one strand of thought at a time - how do you manage to live with them and retain your sanity? (D)H is currently driving me mad - he's just so deliberate about things, he's the dictionary definition of "slow and measured" and I'm mentally screaming "just fucking DO IT"! This isn't faffing - he's always ready to leave the house when agreed and he's not easily distracted. It's just that things won't happen until he's come to terms with the idea and he's accepted it needs to happen. Please tell me I'm not the only one with one like this and allow me to vent!

Current example - he and I have both booked next week off work, and agreed we'll crack on with some work we want to do around the house and garden. We both want it done, I think we could have done it last autumn, but he wasn't ready, so here we are. We need a skip - agreed he'd organise it, we've discussed it for weeks, and he has insisted, many times, that we do not need to book in advance, we can ring the day before and get one the next day.

Well you know what's coming don't you? He's just told me, with a forlorn look on his face, that the earliest we can get a skip is the middle of next month. He never thought we'd have an issue, and when I said I thought we might due to holidays and spring triggering people to do DIY, he asked me why I never said so before. Aaargh!

We also need to hire a piece of equipment for a day - again his task. He won't ring up the place to check availability, as its for the garden and he wants to wait until the weather forecast is ok to decide what day to get it. I've just pointed out we'll likely have the same issue with high demand next week, and offered to ring myself and make enquiries if he's busy this afternoon, but no, it's his job to do it. So it will wait until next week by which time I just know that it won't be available. At this rate I'll be spending my annual leave on my hobbies, which may be the silver lining to the situation but I swear if he starts grumbling about the house & garden jobs taking longer than we thought, I may

I don't know how his colleagues don't kill him if he's like this with work.

He probably isn't like this at work, he'd be fired if he was surely?

DH is a procrastinator at times. I scrapped one of his cars once while he was at work because he spent months talking about putting it up for sale without actually doing it.

My husband is the same. Many brilliant qualities. But my god, just get on with it! I'm very much a pop to the shop, buy some paint and slap it on. Kind of person. It takes him month to decide what colour to buy.

I just order stuff myself. So he's been saying for months he'll do our fence. But never makes a start. I bought the fence posts grabbed a shovel and set about it, so he set off with it. He can't start or end tasks, he's great for the middle bit though.

I'd just ring them myself if I were you.

Oh I love him to bits and he's a kind, generous and clever man but things are done to his schedule and there's no speeding him up.

I won't tell you how big the damp patch got in our bedroom before the roof got fixed after 3 long years . He did an excellent job in the end, but vetoed any attempt I made to get it done any other way. If I ring people to come in and give quotes etc he just digs in even further. Its not a control thing, it's almost like its a threat to his sanctuary or it causes him some kind of deep-seated anxiety.

Funnily some things he's totally not bothered about and I've got free rein to sort myself and I still haven't worked out what causes the difference.

He sounds like he's in an Anne Tyler novel - I always want to kill the men in them, too!

Mine does a version of this whereby whenever I suggest doing anything, he is immediately negative, has a list of reasons why it won't work and why we shouldn't do it. I counter a few of his points, but ultimately agree to keep thinking of a better solution.

Then he'll have an 'it might actually work' moment, at which point the enthusiasm builds and then, once he's on board, he's really on board and LOVES the idea and how well it's all worked out - full of praise for me and utterly bemused over his original reservations.

Sometimes the turnaround takes a while, though, which is utterly frustrating, especially when I KNOW it's something we should do. For smaller things, I can exert a bit of pressure to speed the process up. I try not to bulldozer him over bigger things, though, because I am bound to get it wrong eventually (ha!) so I want him fully on board so we go down together if I do fuck things up!