I’m 37F, work full-time from home and my husband is 44M. We don't have kids. He does a couple of late shifts a week alongside consultancy work.
Financially, he pays the rent, council tax, water and around 70% of our basic groceries. I pay rent for my office room, the remaining groceries, for any premium groceries for my personal use/health products/supplements, luxury toiletries, household purchases including appliances and furniture, and I usually cover most of our holidays apart from his fuel/driving costs. We keep our finances separate.
Household-wise, I do pretty much everything. I clean the house, including deep cleans and cleaning on the go, cook his dinners every day, do all the laundry and bedding and generally keep everything running. His regular household job is taking the bins out and that's about it. If he ever uses the kitchen, I have to clean up after him. Water splashes in the sink, table wipes, dusting etc - basically all cleaning on the go is my task.
The issue is that he thinks I should be doing more. He expects
- breakfast made and served to him every day, including days while I’m working and on shift, wouldn't even make a cup of tea for himself without resenting me if I didn't do it for him
- his clean clothes folded and put away
- ideally his meals brought to wherever he is in the house
- hosting his friends and family a couple of times a month which I can't, as it eats into my time to recharge for work
He also wants more say over what I cook, would like me to host his friends and family more often and is unhappy that I don’t spend much time with some of his family because of a difficult history between us. He wants me to be the bigger person and forgive - I can not after repeated and ongoing attempts by his mother to break my home. He wants me to increase my capacity to face toxic behaviour even though he knows my mental health is messed up because of this.
He gets annoyed when I ask him to do basic things for himself. His response when I say I don’t have the bandwidth is that I should increase my capacity to do more around the house. At the same time, he feels I should contribute towards rent and household bills. My position is that if I’m expected to contribute significantly more financially, then the domestic workload also needs to become much more equal. He doesn’t agree and has actually said that
"Doing household chores makes me feel more like a housemate than a husband" - which I think was quite telling.
The immediate argument is that I’ve told him I’m not going to interrupt my workday to make and serve him breakfast when he is capable of making it himself.
Am I being unreasonable? And from the outside, does our current split of finances + household labour seem fair?