All women I know are in my situation

[growli]

Pretty useless DH. They're left to look after the kids. Called nags if they complain.

It mostly falls on them. The marriages are pretty rubbish.

I've posted here so many times about my issues with my H and my lifestyle with small kids.

I always get told I need to divorce. I get told that there are other men out there who aren't as useless with their children.

In real life, every woman I know, faces something similar. Mainly responsible for everything to do with kids and house, works full time most of the time too.

Husband works hard, but doesn't contribute to looking after the kids or household. Complains of not enough sex.

The women I know are highly educated and in successful careers. We all feel stitched up. We were told if we study hard and are in successful careers, we wouldn't end up being slaves to our husbands and children.

What happened to the men our parents raised ? For them to expect women to still be like their mothers ? Doing everything for kids and family.

Mothers and mothers in law in general ( even though they raised us to be successful career women with choices ) don't have a whole lot of sympathy as it seems a raise to the bottom and ' how much harder ' it was for them.

I realise I'm generalising

I hope that younger men may be more evolved, as (I’m 67) my husband leaves absolutely everything to me and there’s no point even trying to discuss it. One of my daughters has a “lovely husband” who’s great with the kids, does housework when asked, really nice man but doesn’t notice what needs doing. My other daughter has been married twice and neither of the men made any attempt to share anything. Friends my age have a mixed bag of husbands/partners but generally, however deliightful the partner, the woman does the main share of everything, especially those “jobs” that can’t really be assigned as jobs because they are …. cleaning up as you go …. noticing little things that need tidying/wiping/moving. I too find it tiring and depressing.

In my circle it’s mixed, but the ones with husbands as you’ve described have mostly separated. One thing that is true though, is that even with the ones where the husband does equal amounts around the house and equal hands on parenting, I still see the women organising presents for parties, Christmas, birthdays, holidays, childcare, attending more school functions and being the first port of call when kids are sick. If people say that this kind of stuff doesn’t on the whole still fall to women, they are living in a bubble.

@greenbeansnspinach Ive experienced the opposite Ive found older men (over 60) to be a lot less sexist than the younger ones (under 50)

God. What a depressing thread. Plus those that don't live like this are disbelieved.
It's like the regular threads on here where the man won't propose and the woman waits for years.

So a lot of women will say ‘he wasn’t like this till we had a child.’ But actually if you listened and watched carefully he WAS. Just in other ways. The women were still buying all the birthday presents, remembering to get fresh loo roll and tooth paste, organising days out. Many women carry the mental load long long before they become mothers.

Then the long maternity leave in the UK (not a lot of people take fully shared parental leave like Scandinavia) reinforces the ‘woman does all the shit related to kids- mental and physical). And by then it’s too late to change.

And I agree with OP it’s depressingly common. DH is very much an equal parent and in fact does a lot of mental load as well (he’s on the school parent board for instance). But a lot of people think that makes me ‘lucky.’ I also knew DH wasn’t making shit up about wanting to be an equal partner because he actually made career decisions to help me and has continued to do so. That’s very very rare in our friend circle even when dads do housework/childcare. There is an assumption that the woman’s career is secondary. As a physician/scientist DH earns a lot more than I do as an academic and yet he’s never seen my career as a nice ‘extra.’

Yes my life easier as a single parent

It is awful to hear about so many younger woman putting up with this. I am in my 50s and DH is in his 60s and we have never been anything but equal partners. When dd was born 26 years ago we were in the fortunate position of running our own business so we were able to choose our hours and decided to jobshare with one another once she was 3 months old and I came off of maternity leave. We both spent 2 days a week on our own at home with her and both took an equal share in housework etc. I remember an acquaintance saying that she bet DH didn't remember to buy the loo rolls/do the cleaning etc which was rubbish. He is a competent adult. I couldn't be attracted to an incompetent man-child.

As to the question of how we bring up our sons - it is by modelling. DS has only ever grown up in a house where both adults cooked, cleaned and took care of him so as an adult now living with his partner, he does not think he shouldn't be doing these things. DH and I were no longer jobsharing by the time DS was born as our business had closed and I spent some years as a SAHM whilst DH worked full time but when he was at home it was all hands on deck as he knew what it was like to be at home with small children.

I don't know how things have changed in maternity services since I had my two (26 & 23 so a while ago) but I remember back then thinking that if you weren't careful things would start off badly as women were taught how to do everything with the baby and dads were only allowed on the wards at specific times, meaning the mother then goes home telling the dad how to do everything with the baby and could just be left to get on with it as she is the one in the know. We had to consciously work against this. Hopefully it is better now as that was decades ago and I guess mums are not all in hospital for as long now.

Sorry to hear this OP but certainly not every relationship I know is like this. In fact my DH and alot of other parents I know split effort and responsibility fairly equally.
With my DH we split jobs, granted into perhaps slightly gendered roles, but know my DH would rather be a dad taxi than organise the school uniforms for the week. He's brilliant with house admin, I'm better at weekly shop. He takes to skating, I take swimming.
He'd be equally capable at 'my' jobs, it's just in splitting things we've gone with individual strengths. We're both useless at DIY so thats when we call for help!!
Also when splitting it"s useful to know you have absolute responsibility for it, or can get muddied and end up more work/complicated.

He is also just such a lovely person, very caring, and will do anything for family and friends.
I had a shocker for a 1st marriage so my DH is someone I believe I now deserve!!

@growli

I can identify with this on a personal level and also others I know with kids. Maybe it depends on the type of people you know. On here a lot of ppl seem to say get a cleaner but that's not an option for me.

I blame the mothers for pandering to their “little Princes”.
I haven’t done too badly with my OH. He does the shopping as he takes his mum, so gets ours while he’s there, he does the cooking, bins and the gardening. I do the cleaning, washing up, occasional cooking and all of the organising and general life admin. I would love it if he would just think to himself “I know, I’ll wash the pots that I’ve just used” or at the very least, he’d give the toilet a quick clean after he’s ‘decorated it’. We don’t have kids at the moment, but when we do, he’ll be doing most of the childcare. He works 5-12:30, whereas I usually leave the house at 7 and get home between 5:30-6. I’m the higher earner, so unfortunately part time is off the cards for me, but as a teacher I’ll have the school holidays.

Let’s be honest…. We now have the worst of both worlds…. we have to work and do household stuff.

Asian culture is much better.

@potniatheron *Beginning in the 80s, a few things happened in the West. Debt became cheaper, inflation accelerated, blue collar jobs became devalued as manufacturing and skilled labour went to Asia. At the same time the mass media began pumping this idea of the shoulder padded career woman who could have it all and still be beautiful and desirable. We see examples in the films, books and advertisements of the time (plenty of examples but cba to go thru them - you're clearly highly intelligent so you'll know what I mean, or, since you are impervious to mass media, you can perhaps read about them in books). At the same time, childbirth and mothering AS CRUCIAL FULL TIME JOBS IN THEMSELVES began to be subtly devalued. The housewife, the housefrau, the plump little woman indoors. Who wants that?

So this meant that women were forced to enter the workforce because the menfolk's jobs no longer paid enough to support the family. At the same time, mass media made working desirable - as long as women looked sexy and thin whilst doing it, and also flawlessly managed the household (domestic service having disappeared as a skilled trade some 30 years earlier).*

Women did not start working in the 80s what planet are you on??! 😂

@Sissynova I know! Utterly ridiculous.
Let me tell you something else about the 80s. Not only were we working demanding jobs and not looking sexy, we weren't hanging around for men to propose! In my circle that was considered very old fashioned!

Good grief. No. Men are different from each other as are women. Kindness is kindness and my husband has always been a kind dad and we share everything. Not being smug, just honest.

@Maireas good advice for couples but how do single mums do it I was wondering!

It’s also interesting and depressing in equal measure how quick many posters are to blame their MIL. It’s all MIL’s fault for how their DH behaves as an adult, and her fault that they chose to raise children in that environment and model a toxic relationship to them.

Lucky you, never having a bloke who says ‘ I will do it in a minute/later/tomorrow/next week/in my own time/ while all the while meaning NEVER!

You're a great role model because you're doing it all yourself! Never accept limitations for them because of sex.

But as a single mother said earlier in the thread...her sons are lazy and entitled despite her best efforts and their father having had no involvement, but if they don't shape up, she'll still get the blame.

Women need to stop criticising other women.
When I was married to my ex h I became brainwashed into caring what his bastard parents thought.
One example, his mother gave birth and then a few hours later cooked dinner for her lazy twat of a husband and her other dcs.
Ex fil never, ever cooked a meal. He never ironed or did ‘woman’s work.’
Ex mil never learnt to drive. She was reliant on her dh.
I don’t have anything at all to do with them now and my life is much better.
By contrast my lovely dh was taught to cook by his grandma. She owned her own catering business. Dh does all our cooking. He is a diamond.
After divorcing ex h I felt that he had morphed into his father. I didn’t see it before. Maybe he was like that all along who knows.

I wonder if there is a generation thing because my DP is a lot older than me (early 40s & mid 50s) and he does at least half the childcare and mental load. Maybe more. He had wanted a child for a lot longer than me and I think he was very ready and willing to step up when it happened.

I think it might be, @Zhougzhoug - me and my husband are much older and have always shared responsibilities. Is it mostly younger women?

and I really hate it when women aren't believed when they say their husband isn't like that.

Someone attempted to 'probe' me on this thread. The gotcha attempt didn't work because when I say my husband isn't useless (or lazy), I mean it.

Attempting to silence women who don't have useless/lazy husbands isn't the answer, especially somewhere like AIBU.

I know, @SouthLondonMum22 . We're not being smug, just saying that some of us have equal marriages. How ridiculous to try a gotcha!

Was not my experience with my husband and thankfully is not the way things are in my daughter’s household. I often read the feeds about shit husbands and think there can’t really be that many useless, selfish men out there can there ?