So I’ve been married for 16 years. Good stable career, pension for 30 years. DH has been self employed. He’s started around five different ventures, always promising he’d need to put work in up front for no or little financial gain. He does so much then it’s onto the new project. He’s not lazy but ineffective in what he does. The promises of his various ventures making money never materialised. He won’t take advice or direction. He’s now doing ok but only in the last five months or so.
My stable income paid the mortgage for a decade and other big costs for our entire marriage. It allowed him the freedom to try out these projects, fail, yet still live a secure comfortable life and raise DC.
Meanwhile, I have battled for the full 16 years for him to take on the domestic load in an equitable way. He’s always done childcare equally and cooking/washing up and laundry has been fairly equal. But everything else has been 90%me for the bulk of our marriage. It’s only the last couple of years it’s been equitable but I’ve had to really campaign and educate him to get there.
But generally speaking, with a bit of nuance, I have been both main breadwinner and main housekeeper with him ‘helping’ around the house rather than taking any initiative and in reality he made it harder for most of those years - creating mess and chaos, ruining things by not looking after them, avoiding planning, sand bagging my attempts to do my best to sort things out and organise them.
It’s improved - but me fighting for fairness in domestic tasks has caused arguments and he’s not happy about it. He martyrs himself a lot - ‘all this work I do…’ etc. He was only working two/three days about four years ago so I pushed him to do more domestic stuff The first couple of weeks of him doing a properly equitable split had him moaning about how exhausted he was, yet six or so years previously when I said the same he minimised it and mocked me given I was only ‘working’ part time at the time. I was actually working 24/7 just lots of it the unseen work of home making etc.
He gets disproportionately angry, verbally abusive and he’s impossible to work with. I’m divorcing him. I’ve had enough and in the last couple of years his behaviour towards the DC has worsened.
I got legal advice and he’s entitled to half my pension. Literally - it will be valued and then half will come out of my pension and a new pension created for him with that in it. ALL of it. Even the 10 years worth from before we met. So despite him not contributing equitably to home making and family raising for the bulk of our time and not being the main breadwinner, he gets half of my entire pension.
I get that this is to protect (largely female) homemakers who work hard at home to support the main breadwinner. But now it’s often women who are the main breadwinners AND the main homemaker.
It just feels so unfair. I’m gutted and feel like this is just another way women get screwed over by the patriarchy.