OK here goes (have name-changed for this). Apologies in advance for the very long essay but I really need some honest advice on how to stop my marriage disintegrating further.
DH and I have been married for almost 10 years, and have DS1 (4) and DS2 (3 months). We are both busy professionals in the same field. DH's job is busier and more senior than mine and involves 2 roles. Until I went on maternity leave with DS2, I had a job that was similar to one of those roles. I also have some experience of DH's other role, and know a number of people doing similar jobs, so I know what his work entails (although he claims I don't). I am responsible for most domestic matters (children, cooking, household organisation, bills etc.)
Basically, DH is a workaholic. He goes to work between 7 and 8am and tries to come home for DCs' bath and bedtime at 7-7.30pm, but frequently doesn't get home until after 8pm. After dinner, he sits down to work again at his laptop at around 10pm, and for the last few months has been working until 3-4am almost every night. He has always had a similar pattern of work, but the time he stops work and comes to bed in the wee small hours has gradually got later and later over the years.
The "big issue" in our marriage is the conflict between DH's work practices (and the resultant chronic sleep deprivation), and the demands of married/family life.
From my point of view, DH's work practices have a big impact on me and on family life. He works the same evening/night hours 7 days a week, so considers that he "needs" to lie in every Saturday and Sunday (often until 11am or so). (I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of lie-ins I have had since DS1 was born.) He insists that we go out as a family on the weekend, and gets offended if I suggest taking the children out myself and leaving him to sleep. But in practice that means we either wait until he is up before going out, which restricts the sort of activities we can do, or he gets up early to come with us and is then irritable and frequently falls asleep when we are out (e.g. during meals - not great for conversation).
When he is up at weekends, I am still responsible for the majority of family organisation - breakfast, washing and dressing DS2, packing change bags, spare clothes, snacks etc. He will occasionally get DS1 dressed (even though DS1 is perfectly capable of doing this himself when in the right mood!), but then seems to consider that he has made his contribution and displays an air of puzzled innocence if I get annoyed that he hasn't done more. He often sits down to work at his computer whenever he perceives there to be a "spare" moment at weekends, and seems oblivious to the fact that I am running around doing all that needs to be done to get us out of the house.
He isn't like this all the time. He will often devote large amounts of time to DS1 on the weekends and sometimes takes him out on his own. They have a lovely relationship and he is a good father.
From his point of view, he is very ambitious and his identity is very much bound up in his work. He considers that he has already "sacrificed" productivity at work for the demands of married life and parenthood (erm, he proposed to me and the DCs were a mutual decision). In his worst moments, he is not prepared to compromise further on his working hours and doesn?t think he should be asked to ("You knew what I was like when you married me, you knew what you were getting yourself into"). He accuses me of having altered my priorities. This is true, I have become quite child-focussed, but one of us had to - and anyway, isn't that what adults do, adapt to changing demands in life? He says that he feels constantly pulled between the demands of work and of home, and feels guilty that he is not performing adequately on either front.
All of this has led to massive resentment on both sides. I resent him because it seems like the DCs and I are consistently last in DH's priority list, and he is far more worried about disappointing/inconveniencing/alienating work colleagues than letting me down. He frequently seems like a passenger in family life rather than (as I had fondly anticipated) a co-pilot. He resents me because I nag him about work. I feel like a single parent with a lodger some of the time, he feels surplus to requirements when I focus on the DCs. We both feel that the other doesn?t listen to our point of view.
I have tried and tried over the years to find a way past this by talking to him. The same issues were there pre-DCs, but were more manageable, I think because I made fewer demands on him - I was more work-focussed then myself, and I would do my own thing at weekends (e.g. go to the gym) while he slept off a long night's work. Not surprisingly, since the birth of DS2 I have needed him to be more family-focussed, and this has caused more friction.
None of this is helped by the interaction between our personalities. I am a "glass-half-full" person, he is very much a "glass-half-empty" person. He sees things in black and white, I see shades of grey. This means that when I ask him to reduce his working hours temporarily while DS2 is so small, he hears that I am asking him to never work at home again and to throw away his career.
I know a number of people who do his sort of job. No-one else works these hours. His only strategy when things get busy is to work longer hours. He has low self-esteem (thank you very much, MIL) and genuinely feels that he needs to work harder than everyone else to maintain his professional position. I have talked endlessly with him over the years about "working smarter" rather than "working longer" (he finds it difficult to say "no" to colleagues or to delegate) but the improvement in his working practices has been very gradual.
He makes intermittent efforts to improve, most recently by saying he will stop work at 2am and come to bed. This lasted a couple of days and then it was back to 3-3.30-4am.
Things came to a head last weekend when we had a blazing row, witnessed (to my deep shame regret) by DS1. We seemed to patch things over until early this morning when I lost it with him when he was still working at 3.30am and told him to sleep on the couch. He said "OK" but then just got into bed at around 6am when he'd finished working! He clearly feels (and says) that I'm being hysterical but I just don't think he understands how unhappy this situation makes me. I do not want to live like this for the rest of my life. At my lowest, I feel straight-jacketed by the demands of a self-centred man who doesn't really care enough about the impact of his actions on his wife or family to change his behaviour. Yet I recognise that this isn't entirely fair and he does have his own side to the story.
Please don't tell me to leave him. For various reasons connected to our circumstances, I can't end my marriage. More to the point, I don't want to end it. DH is my best friend. He is a wonderful father (although he doesn't believe this himself - more self-esteem issues). I think that, somewhere under all the built-up resentment, I still love him. I want to find a way around this so we can all be happier. I think I am going to have to try going to Relate by myself. I doubt that he would come as he is very sceptical about counselling.
Neither of us is perfect. I can be bossy and like things done my way. Sometimes I wonder whether part of the reason his refusal to work less infuriates me so much is because he just won't follow my advice. But ultimately, I just want a better family life, I want to feel like my needs matter to DH, I don't want my sons to grow up thinking that this is a normal working or family life, and I don't want DH to work himself, quite literally, to death. Is any of that so bad?