I am not proud of this. I have recently got into a pattern of being irritated with DH, and picking on him in a patronizing way for quite silly things, or complaining about things that probably don't really matter.
It's stuff like "have you changed your shirt, please do it, it smells" and "why can't you share my interests, I don't want to be married to someone who does nothing but work" and "can't you take the initiative on cooking occasionally, why do I have to do it all the time" and "can't you just notice the draughts of air and put the thought aside rather than worrying obsessively about wall insulation that you can't afford to fix?" and when he comes home talking about a new project at work I ask how much more time it's going to require for him working in the evenings, rather than being pleased about it.
He is quiet and withdrawing into work. It's not really surprising. i'm being a cow. Where the stuff matters I could say it more nicely and effectively. Mostly it doesn't matter.
But it's an overall pattern that is really beginning to drive me mad.
I am irritated because he makes statements like "I'd like to spend more time on X" in front of other people, where X is something he thinks is deeply inferior to work - and then does absolutely nothing about ever learning any more about X (things like reading anything at all, ever, not related to work; cooking; doing anything at all round the house or garden that isn't just something he can pay a tradesman to do). He clearly has little respect for people who have had opportunities but haven't turned them into good careers, but doesn't think about the fact that people like him are usually propped up by people like me, who become trivial-minded and boring because we're constantly dealing with day to day trivia simply because he absolutely never does any of it.
He used to say he liked me because I was multi-dimensional, and did things like reading, cooking and gardening. I guess I should have looked harder at his parents and realised that he was trying to convince himself that reading, cooking and gardening weren't a waste of time.
In his parents' old house they paid people to do the garden for them - they now have a house that covers the entire block and has no garden. His mother has always been censorious and rude about people who do anything other than work and buying pre-made food or eating out; she is frequently rude about my parents' habit of giving her potted plants, making sure she keeps them all, dead, until I visit so she can ostentatiously throw them all in the bin and say her life is too busy for trivia like tending to plants, or cooking. She is always very rude and patronizing to caterers when they have visitors (she would never cook for visitors herself), and tends to ask them what their career plans are. His father does nothing other than work, and generally eats out. He's one step beyond in that it would never even occur to him to talk to a gardener or caterer in his own home.
Dh seems to want to turn into his parents. I get angry. I pick on him. He retreats into work and gets more and more like his parents. 