Hi All, I have a rare few hours on my own without constantly being checked up on.
I hadn't really thought of DWs behaviours as betrayals but reflecting that is exactly what they are. Over the years there’s been big ones and everyday ones. The betrayals are things we agree together or that she is going to do, commitment and compromises we agree to make but she never follows up on.
When we first got together Property Ladder was a big thing and DW saw herself as the next Sarah Beanie. We sold our three bed semi and bought a two bed bungalow to extend and refurbish. The first betrayal was at planning, she got stage fright and didn’t take the opportunity to support the application in person, I went back two weeks later – we got planning. We moved into rented but she never once set foot on site again for six months, she hadn’t booked a builder or even got quotes, her plan was to project manage but she didn’t even go there after we had moved out. She eventually managed to persuade a friend’s builder to undertake some of the work but without a contract or quote she then just paid him whatever he asked for whenever (I didn’t know this). She blew 50% of our budget on 15% of the work. I started to take on more and more of the build while working full time – she went into a full on AS shutdown and has never really come back. It nearly broke me, I was working full time in my first management role, going to the rented house to cook dinner for us, working on the build till late, back again to sleep but doing controlled crying instead, nursery run in the morning, work again, repeat for a year. 100 hrs a week. She sat reading homes magazines all day.
Unbelievably, we’ve done that three times now. This last time she even said “we’ll do it together, it’ll bring us closer together as a family”, but there is always, always, always, a reason for her to not get involved. She does just about enough to say she helped e.g. paint the outside, she did 1/3 of one coat I did the rest of three coats. The latest saga is that we got a green-homes grant of £7k, but she didn’t extend the time limit and now we’ve lost it. She works part time, we simply cannot afford to lose £7k.
She continually takes responsibility for things and screws it up or just doesn’t do it. But it’s not just the big things, it’s the micro-aggressions - I used to play a sport at international level, and kept any magazines with event reports I’d won or front covers, photo spreads etc, she tore the pictures out and threw the rest away. She’s passive aggressive – a favourite was leaving the airer up against the front door so I had to ask to be let in the house. The contra-suggestion, if it’s not her idea it’s not happening. The under-mining.
Sorry long post.