Coming to this thread late: I married one of those. I can't say total mistake because we had four lovely children, but really, if you want any kind of lifestyle, don't go there. Lack of ambition is one thing, total disinterest in paying his share is another. He was sort of a SAHD, with a repair business on the side, in theory, so that I would commute five days a week and he'd potter off to the garage at evenings and weekends. In a good year he made as much as £1500 and was very proud of himself. In a bad year my salary subsidised the business. Probably made about 500 quid per annum on average. He didn't get a real job until he realised I was serious about divorcing him, and even now he's made a half-assed excuse to work part-time while Muggins commutes full time to London as always (except for the 3 months I've just had off with depression).
I'm not greedy (except for chocolate!), I don't demand a holiday every year or a new (or even 10 year old) car, I can do without evenings out or alcohol for months at a time, as long as the children are fed and clothed that's my duty done, I don't expect the house tidy as long as nothing's actually rotting in the corners, etc. With my not-very-brilliant salary and the money my parents left me we managed to have our own house and only ran into serious debt every few years, fortunately usually bailed out by some other relative falling off the perch and leaving us a bit of money. I spent 23 years like that, until some issues that had been building up finally boiled over (mainly over his extreme jealousy concerning all the men I MIGHT have been sleeping with, but wasn't) - and then I admitted to myself how totally frustrating the last few years had been, how unnecessary the squalour was that we lived in, how he'd use any excuse not to get a paid job ("you never make money working for other people" was a favourite saying), and most awfully, how I had just closed my eyes to it all. It was only when our eldest two went off to university that they started to realise this was NOT NORMAL. They came back and tried to tidy the place up, but he wouldn't let them throw anything away because it might be useful.
I'm divorcing him at last. He will have to have half my pension as he never did that for himself, he will have half the value of the house, which should be enough to set him up with a little place of his own, but he absolutely has to have a three bedroom house with a garage (!). He's having a good whine about the amount I'm making him pay a solicitor because of this "stupid divorce business", and basically it's become evident that he isn't all that nice at all when things aren't going his way. That ring a bell, BB?
I asked him the other week what he thought his life would have been like if we hadn't married. He described various scenarios and options he had had at the time, but I realised: they all involved some woman providing him with somewhere to live. Not one of the options included him doing some kind of job that would make enough money to even feed himself, let alone buy his own place. Good thing he doesn't have any expensive habits. And yet he's a talented person, he more or less built the house we're currently living in, he could make money doing so many things. He'd just rather potter while someone else pays the bills.
No, you don't want this for yourself and your children, you really don't. Good thing he's behaving like an ass now so you know giving him the elbow was justified.