Me micromanaging or DH being f-ing useless?

[UncleBunclesHouse]

I am prepared for some flaming here but I’d like to hear honest views. We have always had very different standards of tidiness - I am more on the extreme tidy side and he is very messy. I knew this when we got together, his other wonderful qualities make up for it. However the constantly trapped at home situation of the past year, plus me having a rough pregnancy has really brought the issues around this to the fore.

It is a tidiness thing, not cleanliness and I never have to worry about that side. He does all the cooking, this past year has done all the shopping (not very well...but has taken responsibility for it), there are also a number of ‘his’ jobs which I have nothing to do with and he just cracks on. He is self employed and works long hours with often unexpected issues which he has to drop everything to attend to.

However - he leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, never puts anything away and if I ask him to do something ‘for me’ (it’s not for me, but not one of ‘his’ jobs). He is very forgetful- in all areas of life but worse with anything domestic. We have talked about ways to work together on this, he asks me to make a list, which he 99% of the time ignores. He says he will do X,Y,Z then just doesn’t. I can ask a dozen times and nothing happens. I feel like nagging and list making is just enabling him, micromanaging like a child and making him tune out, but I’m at a loss at to what else to do tbh. It’s like he has a mental filing system and if it isn’t deemed important to him it goes in the trash folder. I know this as when it is something really important, for example anything that would affect the health, safety or security of me or DC, he deals with it very quickly. But the general mess, that I can’t really tidy up at the moment due to said pregnancy issues, makes me unhappy and stressed in my own home. So he might not think it matters if his clothes are all over the floor, but when I have to look at it all day it does matter to me.

Do I just need to let this go?? I’m debating stopping asking anything at all, problem is I see it will be me who will suffer from it ultimately as I’ll be fuming inside at the mess! But I’d feel less stressed also I think, if I wasn’t feeling let down. No point in saying stop doing his washing, leave the mess or whatever, he wouldn’t care so that wouldn’t work.

@CraftyYankee

From WebMD:

ADHD isn't a character flaw. It's a developmental disorder of the brain. Some of the symptoms of adults with ADHD are:

Trouble completing and organizing tasks
Frequently losing important belongings
Forgetfulness and distraction
Restlessness
Difficulty following details
Impatience

I recently read an article about adult diagnosis of ADHD and it rung a LOT of bells for me.

That was a couple of months ago and it's precisely because of all the above traits that I haven't got around to doing anything about it

@MiddleParking

Why would he have to pay the bill for a luxury service you’ve unilaterally chosen to use?

Because they are his clothes..? Which he isn’t dealing with. I wouldn’t expect him to pay for my washing and ironing to be done, or do it. Joint stuff like bedding, towels, kids stuff etc I think is different.

"His need to be messy is greater that his feelings for you and him caring for your happiness."

We can't marry messy men and then expect them to change just because it becomes more unbearable for us. You said it, you knew it when you married him. You can rant about it, get annoyed about it and take to him about it. You can't expect him to become something he never was and that you accepted as part of him before. You have to loosen to meet it go if you love him not expect him to change because he loves you.

For disclosure we have it the other way round. He is exceptionally tidy and I am not. At times that really annoyed me, I want to live in a home not a show home. We have come to an agreement that he can tidy as much as he wants but he shouldn't expect me to change. PS, I do TRY, it's just not in my nature, sometimes I just don't see it.

PpS, we have a cleaner, agree with others it can be a life saver, could you afford for them to come more?

We can't so the other thing we have put in place is the midweek tidy. On a Sunday, after kids are in bed we spend and hour both cleaning at the same time. He knows it's timetables so it soothes him, I know I've signed up to it cause I love him and I do it.

We have an adult relationship though and have talked it out. I know he loves me, accepts me and thinks my pluses outweighs my cons. He's not perfect either (who is?) But I think the same.

If he is right for you in any other way you need to decide if this is a deal breaker but noone is perfect!

Hope you sort it, everyone deserves happiness 🙂

Ask him to read this for a man's point of view

She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes By The Sink

www.huffpost.com/entry/she-divorced-me-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink_b_9055288

@NeverDropYourMoonCup

Bin and book a cleaner?

Far less stressful in the long run than never being able to rely on somebody who pretends to need something more like a fucking star chart written by his Mum to be able to do anything.

Or do him lists printed in Comic Sans and with a space for a star when they're completed? Literally doing it might make him realise just how ridiculous he's being - or he'll like the idea, albeit possibly less Infant School in design, which would suggest that he might have some form of learning or processing disability.

Cleaners are there to clean, not put away

Yes, I'm aware of that - the idea was to reduce the workload of the OP in addition to losing the major issues of the person who is being so useless, so she only has to deal with her own tidying up and shopping/cooking for her LO and doing a far better job of those to boot.

I don’t have ADHD (my sister does, as does my niece so I’d know!). I can always find my car keys and my wallet which is a real teller fir ADHD 😂

I am untidy. Tidiness is not a driving need for me and, in general, looking at the mess doesn’t phase me at all. I would struggle to meet someone else’s tidiness standard. I think you need a frank discussion about his standards and yours and find a middle ground (unless he can never find his keys in which case you may have a bigger issue!)

Was about to post a link to that porridge - I showed it to my DP to try and get him to understand that these things come across as hugely disrespectful to the one doing the majority of cleaning and tidying and that he needed to realise it could well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. He’s definitely been better since having it explained to him that’s it’s not just about the clothes on the floor or the cup left on the side. Someone on here once suggested that each time they leave something for you to do, they’re essentially saying “fuck you UncleBuncle” so make him say it out loud and see how often he’s actually disrespecting you.

The fundamental issue is that he doesn’t care if his jeans are on the bedroom floor. Those of you saying he’s expecting mummied or leaving them “for op” are wrong. He’s happy for them to stay in the floor for now.

There's also something in ADHD where piles just become part of the background. Your eyes kind of skim over things that you're not focused on in the moment. So not only does it not impact me, I don't even really register that it's there most of the time.

As an untidy person who is constantly striving to not be so I can empathise with your DH here.

I’ve always been untidy; in fact some of the descriptions of adult signs of ADHD are rather hitting home. I’m not lazy, I do endless household jobs and admin, have a very stressful and responsible job (in which I have to try doubly hard not to be disorganised), yet I lose and forget things all the time, can spend all day constantly doing jobs in the home but it will be untidy in 24 hrs. My DH grew up in an extremely tidy environment and we struggle to find a happy medium. I think he is obsessed about tidying and nit pics all the time about completely irrelevant gripes, he thinks I am untidy and scatty. Ironically I don’t like the house being untidy so I always make sure it is clean and tidy at least by the end of the day, and will also try and keep on top of it generally, but equally I don’t feel the need or incentive to tidy up every hour, esp when it will all be a mess again by tea time ( 3 kids).

No solutions really- I guess we can’t help how we are, though both sides can and do need to compromise.

Don’t send his stuff to be cleaned and ironed, it’s really petty and will be more work for you. My OH is tidier than me and if he did this I’d be livid, put it in a separate wash basket and leave it somewhere you don’t have to look at it but most clothes don’t need to be ironed anyway (unless it’s his work shirts),

I’m thinking one option could be any laundry on the floor or lying around will be put in a separate basket (by me!) and when it’s full I’ll send it away to be collected, washed and ironed and returned - and he will pay the bill.

Put it in a basket - yes, good solution. Then it’s not lying around annoying you.

Send it away to be washed/ironed etc and he pays - if I was your partner I’d feel very insulted by this pass agg approach.

If the laundry basket is full, he can choose to deal with it. Or have no clean clothes. Stick it under his side of the bed or in his wardrobe and you’ll not need to see it.

Does he ever seemed to be distressed, frustrated, ashamed by his forgetfulness, outside of your relationship? Has mentioned that things which seem easy to others are are a bigger deal for him? That it's something he's just had to cope with living with? ADHD is more than just forgetfulness and messyness, but if he feels like he's like to change or understand himself a bit better, maybe some ADHD books might help give him coping strategies.

I was coming on to say do you think he has adhd - because sounds like he might. Do some reading around organisation for people with ADHd, and if it all sounds familiar - arrange things for an adhd Brain - a kitchen chart could be good.

Other than I’d outsource more, try and deto your standard a bit - but yes, make sure he does half -

Just coming on here to thank you for bringing this thread into our lives

Ughhhh yep. Same thing happening here. Cupboards left open after cooking is always a weird one!

DP works very hard, does most of the cooking and cares for our animals regularly as well as dealing with the heavier work but yep somehow she still can't tidy up after herself. It's not sexism or whatever (although I appreciate it usually is), because we are both women.

She does however have ADHD... I know it's a taboo to say things like this on Mumsnet and armchair diagnose but it might be worth exploring. Once DP got her diagnosis, it made our lives a lot easier.

So another messy person’s viewpoint here. Like your DH, I don’t let things get dirty and I make sure things are safe. I just am not good at keeping all the objects in their pre defined homes. I would find it very stressful to be told to put things away all the time in my own house. While I like having a tidy house, the stress of having to tidy things away all the time is greater than the stress of seeing my kid’s toys on the floor or dirty clothes in a heap by the washing machine instead of in some kind of laundry hamper. But I do understand that other people find mess stressful. As a compromise for your household, could you allocate a place (spare room, cupboard, large plastic or cardboard box) that is allowed to be a total mess. This is the space your DH is allowed to dump the objects he can’t think about putting away till later. So when something’s a mess and it’s bothering you, you just ask him to move it to the mess room/box right now, with the understanding he’ll sort it out properly in his own time. The box/cupboard/room will be a total pigsty, but it would be contained in one place and you avoid physically over exerting yourself and getting resentful.

Even if your standards for tidiness differ, he has no excuse for acting like a messy, game-addicted teenager, who won't do their homework.

He has made you a mommy-surogate and household-manager of everything and is living off your efforts to keep the house livable.

Like I have said to another poster today: This won't change. Are you sure you want to keep living like this, with a man who is acting like deadweight.

Sis, if he wanted to do better, he would.

Also, a little bit of hope for the next couple of years. If your husband is messy but keeps things clean and safe, you may find he improves (possibly temporarily) when your baby starts crawling - suddenly all things left on the floor or random surfaces are hazardous. I have never swept the floor so often as when DS was at the eating all the random things he could get his hands on stage. I now pick up clothes off the floor as soon as I see them because my toddler might slip on them. I also never leave empty coffee cups by the sofa anymore because they will be tipped upside down on probably dropped on the floor... Sometimes I might move them to the table rather than the dishwasher though...

In fairness my DH does 90% of the cooking and hoovering/mopping so I can't complain too much.
But he does have a habit of taking out tools to do a job and then walking off leaving them when it's finished etc so I got him a box and if I'm tidying I put his left out stuff in it.
He can no longer complain about not being able to find things because I hid them and I no longer have to use headspace working out where his belongings are supposed to go.
Everything is in the box.
Clothes I got a blanket box and use as a laundry basket so they are out of sight and smells are contained.
I also prioritise my own laundry as he clearly doesn't care about his clothes! This isn't in bitterness just reality.

This was me when I moved in with my boyfriend. He could tidy, he'd kept his own room in his flat tidy, but seemed less able once we moved in together. Dealt with it by hiring a cleaner, which I also had to manage. Drove me crazy but I rationalised it all because I was unable or unwilling to see what was underneath.

Three children later his only jobs were the bins and cutting the grass. And even that was too much for him - there was the day that i ended up putting a baby in the backpack so that I could cut the grass.. This is someone who wouldn't dream of treating a work colleague like this.

We're divorced now and what I've learnt, painfully, is that they do know they're choosing not to, it does matter and it is big enough to be a deal breaker. It did enormous harm to my sense of self over a prolonged period of time and our children also learnt to treat me as a doormat. Basically he thought it was beneath him to clean. But not me, obviously. Not sure if that's misogyny or entitlement but pretty unpleasant either way. As another MN said, why would you treat the person to claim to love this way?

@97876757user

Let it go. If he's doing his best and it's not good enough then do it yourself or get someone else to do it. Life is too short for this.

Completely agree. I loathe, absolutely loathe and detest with the passion of a hundred suns 'neat freaks'. I don't mean not mopping floors or things that are necessary for hygiene, but all this unnecessary fussing over things left on the coach or on the workbench and not put away. I feel for the men with this, I feel like they should yell GET A LIFE! Life is to be lived, not some obsessive compulsive neat freak going on about a jumper on the couch or something. Too many people spend far, far too much time making things neat and tidy, and not enough time relaxing and just.....living. I'm very casual, leave things where ever you leave them, etc. A neat freak would have me feeling very stabby. They say opposites attract, but if my other half was so uptight like that I don't think I'd last a week with them.

*couch

@CaptSkippy

Even if your standards for tidiness differ, he has no excuse for acting like a messy, game-addicted teenager, who won't do their homework.

He has made you a mommy-surogate and household-manager of everything and is living off your efforts to keep the house livable.

Like I have said to another poster today: This won't change. Are you sure you want to keep living like this, with a man who is acting like deadweight.

Sis, if he wanted to do better, he would.

Have you actually read what the OP's husband does, or are you just going off on one based on projections in your own mind?