Totally fed up with my husband!

[Sam9769]

I am totally fed up with my husband!
We have been married for 34 years and in all that time if there is work to be done in the house, he has to be hounded to do anything.
We recently moved house but before we moved, we needed to do work on our old house to get it ready for sale. He would wait to be told what to do by me even though it was patently obvious what had to be done. If materials were required for the work, it would be left up to me to sit him down and ask him what was required and I would order them. When I would ask him why he didn't order them, the response was "I don't know!".

Fast forward, we are now in our new house which is a 1950s house and nothing has been done in it since the 1990's. Husband who is 65 and in good health is retired. I am 61 and partially retired working two days per week.
Lots of work to be done in the house and here we are again in the same situation. We hire tradespeople for the work we can't do and you've guessed it, I have to google them and find them, phone and arrange for them to come to the house. For work that we can do, he will not initiate ANYTHING!. He has to be pushed to get on with jobs in the house.
At the weekend I realised that the downstairs toilet wasn't working. It transpired that he knew about it but hadn't done anything about it.
Today, I was out of the house for 9 hours at work and doing the grocery shopping after work. Before I left I asked him to mind the two dogs and clean and tidy the kitchen.
When I got home, he was sitting on his computer with a half arsed clean of the kitchen done. He hadn't looked at the toilet and when I went out to take one of the dogs for a walk, I noticed that the outside light wasn't working. He knew about it but had done nothing. It transpires that he spent at least 7 hours today sitting on his backside on his laptop on Utube and the like.
I ended up shouting at him and he clears off upstairs, won't accept responsibility. His response today was that he was minding the dogs even though he had told me that one was outside lying in the sunshine and the other was in the hall sunning himself in a shaft of light so no real minding to do there.
I really don't want to spent whatever time I have left, pushing, cajoling and hounding a grown man to get up off his backside and do jobs in the house that need to be done.
We can't afford to have all the jobs done by the trades and even if we could it would be a free pass for him to do sweet FA.
He knows what to do and is capable of doing it but just doesn't do it!

AIBU to have had it with him?

Why are you still with him?

Sounds familiar

Have you considered paying yourself for the work? It doesn't address him, but I think that's a done deal. Paying yourself means you may feel that you are getting something. Invoice yourself with an appropriate level of pay. Preferably from his money 😃

Plus point is you are not required to collaborate and decor is all your choice.

Use the money to do things you like. Hobbies, trips, self care stuff.

And that is sad part, these men will be doing things for their own selves but never for the common life with the wife.....

Sounds like you both need a new marriage

I can’t believe most of the responses on here, as though he doesn’t want to do it so shouldn’t have to. I don’t imagine OP was in work thinking she couldn’t wait to get home to clean the kitchen, she is carrying all the planning and organising and yet several posters are telling her to learn how to do more diy as well. As for those saying they bet he didn’t want to move into a fixer upper, I’m not sure he sounds the type to have given any strong opinion on any of it, it’s likely OP had to find the new house and sort the move herself. To me it seems like he wants to be parented rather than be a partner. I don’t think that’s an ideal relationship unless it is clear from the outset and both parties are happy with the arrangement, which OP clearly isn’t. I’m amazed at how many people seem to think she should just suck it up!

Here in sympathy as DH of 30 years is exactly the same at 68.

He’s clearly undiagnosed ADHD or Autistic but that didn’t stop him running a company for 50 years or building two houses for us.

Things I have established.

He likes starting big projects but doesn’t enjoy fiddly maintenance jobs.

He either doesn’t see/forgets or lives with the niggles of broken loo’s or leaking gutters/roof.
He doesn’t have the energy he used to.

He doesn’t value things he isn’t paid to do.

He can’t structure anything, can’t start a job but then equally can’t stop when he gets engaged.

He actually had a major health issue that probably didn’t help.

I think Neurodiversity gets worse with age and without structure.

I find it absolutely exhausting.

Resolutions.

He eventually started a major natural health intervention which helped massively with energy. And to be fair this is pretty full on and he is nailing it!
Set deadlines which included hiring help if needed something he would rather avoid.

Zero tolerance.

I stay and put up with it because firstly he carried me for 20 years when I was ill.

I genuinely believe he isn’t lazy and nor does he do this deliberately.

He’s a really nice guy.

I do lose a little respect for him at times which worries me.

but she said he was able to do the jobs she’s referring to, but just WON’T do them.

I think it's getting dodgy when you start to impose your moral/ethical values on someone else's leisure time - if he wants to watch YouTube when he's free from other commitments, that's his choice. He's not obliged to find out-of-the-house hobbies (even if you agree there are times he should leave the house to let you have some alone time at home).

But when you've got a project that needs work to be done on it, he ought to be doing something towards it even if there are bits he can't do or that needs joint decision making.

The house renovating project may feel too big and scary - worth explicitly breaking into stages and finding some natural deadlines ie. work better done before it's winter, stuff that needs to be done before Christmas (say, if you're having guests or travelling elsewhere and needing things to be ok to be left).

But it should be a project that'll end at some point. Would life be less frustrating for you once the house is 'finished'?

Consider if he works better together than alone. If he were to do housework and laundry and dinner cooking on the days you're at work would that help? Can you rearrange your work / take a sabbatical to allow you be on the house renovation project full time for a bit?

Wherever you move there’s always something that needs doing, a load to be shared.

The laptop would be in the boot of my car for the day! Might even need it at work and accidentally leave it there !

Surprised it’s taken this long for you to realise!

It’s a bit late now, he’s clearly not going to change.

I absolutely agree with this and it was my first thoughts. There is a different approach for neurodiverse people and he may be demand avoidant. So the more you scold and yell the worse it will be. Just because you cannot see he is depressed doesn’t mean he isn’t.

I wonder if you spent a lifetime nagging him and complaining and now he is so disempowered and emasculated he is just switched off. I feel for you because you just want stuff done and can’t understand why he just doesn’t do it. It’s infuriating but I’m guessing all of these years you have a neurodiverse man who isn’t lazy but procrastinates.

You have spent 34 years with this man and said it’s always been like this. Yet only now you are fed up? So what’s kept you there with him for 34 years. What do you like about him and what are the positives?

im surprised too you moved to a place needed a lot of work - you haven’t made life easy. I think you also need to take some responsibility here.

You need to set and communicate your own boundaries aswell. If you have always done it then he knows you will always do it.

Instead of cost of moving I’d pay whoever just to get stuff done for an easy life. Life is too short to be unhappy.

Perhaps some relationship counselling as I imagine you have a lot of resentment .

My OH is useless at DIY. I was lulled into a false sense of security because in his previous relationship he bought and renovated houses with his wife. It has become apparent that what he actually meant was his wife arranged the workmen to do the work. My OH is very very lazy too. So what I do is do it myself or just leave it. If I was you I would give him some new build brochures and suggest you sell up and move. He isn't going to change.

And I'm glad I'm not married to you! (And I suspect lots of people would say that 😅)

It isn't just DIY though is it. He cleaned the kitchen but only because he was asked to.
He can't even scrape enough respect together to do a DIY job that by the sounds of it he's capable of doing, so that his wife can use a loo properly.
He might well have been like this for the whole marriage but that doesn't mean it's fine or that she forfeits any right to moan.

Who knows? There’s a lot of women with internalised misogyny.

I know very little about mechanical engineers.
Was he give task to do each day that had to be completed?

Could you set up[yes |I know unfortunately it would have to come from you] tasks that had to be done for each day?

Mimic his work life in some way[s]?

Has your BIL implemented strategies to make sure he gets things done or at least improves significantly ? There is so much tech out there to help forgetful people nowadays.

If there’s no change in his part , I don’t see how the diagnosis has made things better for both of them and your sister will eventually realise it.

I say that as someone who is ND and works extra hard to not let my partner do everything and I tell him to say if he needs more support etc .

It was never an option for me to say oh I’m ND so I will just leave everything all to this person who I supposedly love and care for. I try. I don’t always succeed but I make a darn good effort.

I know it sounds infantile, but nothing else appears to be working for you both

Google ADHD in men. Your husband is a classic case.

Not the point of the thread but my maths is shaky - was he was like 55 and you were 25 when you got together? That gap is huge. I’m in my 30s and I don’t even date men that old.

I’m always surprised/curious to hear these kind of are gaps because I don’t know anyone irl with massive age gaps like that but I do know it happens. Just not in my circle I guess.

I have to say I would expect a significantly older man with a younger woman is more likely to pull his weight, since due to misogyny basically older men usually feel very lucky to be with a woman young enough to be his daughter.