I know this forum is mostly for mums, but as a dad of a 1 year old (with another on the way) I wanted to get your opinion on something that is frequently raised between me and my wife.
Thankfully my wife and I very rarely argue, and we generally get on very well. However, whenever we do argue the “issue” of my social life always gets brought up and held against me.
I think this is unfair, because I don’t think I really have much of a social life (which is fine with me) and I make every effort to ensure that all housework and care for our son etc is split equally.
I’ll paint a picture of our home-life, and I’d be interested in your opinions of whether It’s fair or not.
I work full time (5 days a week) and my wife works part time (3 days a week). She has our son for 2 days a week (tougher than working, I know) and he is in nursery for the other 3 days. We spend both days of the weekend together as a family.
One of us will get up at 6am everyday and start work early, which means that our son can spend as little time as possible at nursery and 4 days out of 5 we can eat as a family at home at around 5pm. The other day I have to work late to ensure that I work my full hours at work.
We try to split the housework as much as possible. She cooks most of the tea’s (because she finishes work earlier), she does most of the clothes washing, we split the washing up and the cleaning up of the pets, I do the hoovering and the ironing (mostly my shirts anyway).
We both basically work hard until 7pm when our son goes to bed and then spend some time together, watching TV or Netflix until its bedtime.
I play 5-aside football once a week with work colleagues, which means I get home at 19:45 instead of 18:45. This means that I miss putting my son to bed one night, but it would be my “late” working day anyway and it’s pretty much the only exercise I get all week.
I also run a scout group one night a week (my wife helps at the same group but on a separate night). This is the scout group that my wife and I both joined as kids, so we have some attachment and feel like we should support the group as adults. However, the running of the group does eat into our weekends. My sons Saturday nap (2 hours) is normally taken up with scout admin work.
My social life consists of the following:
• One weekend away each year to a European city. I look forward to this each year as a chance to catch up with my old friends.
• 1 day of cricket and 1 evening of cricket each year.
• 1 concert/gig each year.
• 3 or 4 evenings out each year for peoples Bdays, or general catching up with old friends.
• 2 work events (xmas party etc) per year
That’s pretty much it.
I used to have hobbies before getting married, things like martial arts, playing the guitar, playing the odd game of Fifa etc. I don’t do any of that anymore since we had kids, as doing any of that would take away time from us as a couple.
I quite often turn down tickets to the football or evenings out with work, to spend time at home. I would say on a normal week we have 4/5 evenings in with each other sat on the sofa.
The question is; do I go out too much?
To be honest, I fail to see what I could cut back on. Out of everyone I know, I’m pretty certain that I go out the least. Most of my work colleagues (even the ones with kids) go to the gym frequently and/or don’t leave work till half 5 or 6pm.
I know a lot of people don’t get home to eat tea with their families and I’m very thankful that I do. I like my work/life/family balance and I wouldn’t change it for the world. However, as I mentioned above, my wife is always pushing for more “us” time and every time we disagree on anything, this “issue” of me going out too much is always raised.
Personally, I think one of the big issues here is that my wife does not go out at all with any of her friends. We both have small circles of friends, so she could easily organise some meetups or even spa days if she wants to, however these are very rare indeed, despite me saying she should do more of them and that’s its healthy to have some contact with friends.
She also does not do any exercise. She used to do swimming before we had our son, and despite talking about getting back into it, she very rarely makes the effort to go.
I’m amazed at times that she can have a go at me for taking an hour out of the week to try and stay healthy, or for meeting up with some friends I haven’t seen for 6 months. Is 4 or 5 nights a week at home together not quite reasonable?
To be honest I worry about the future as its only going to get worse when our son and their brother/sister start doing their own activities in the evenings. Its all fine with me as I expected this when we had kids, I knew we would have to make sacrifices and time as a couple would be one of them.
Am I being unreasonable?
Dad102