# Did I marry a deadbeat? [VERY long]



## Mule (Jul 12, 2012)

First of all, I excuse for this being so long, but I feel like in order to evaluate everything, I'd have to describe the entire situation, given the fact that we've had some bumps in our past too.
I have been with my husband for 6 years, married for 5, we have a son of 10 months. In short, given the same choice today, I would not have married him, and if I had known/realized what I know now, I would not have had a child with him. I have been on the verge of divorce for different reasons several years ago, now the thought is rearing its ugly head again except the reasons have multiplied.
I really, really need some help here to figure out if I am being overly dramatic or if I have been taking too much **** all these years.


Anyway, here it goes:

We met not even a week after my previous relationship had ended, during some sort of festival if you will. Just having gotten out of a relationship that had bored me to death, I was obviously "on the hunt" and picked my prey among the group of people we were with, but that one didn't bite. My husband however seemed very interested though and I wasn't going to be picky. Things happened and I guess I just went along with it because it somehow felt natural.

We lived almost a thousand miles apart at the time, he didn't have a car, so I would drive to him for around a week out of every month for the next half year. Then he graduated and was no longer bound to his location, so we talked about moving together, as long distance had annoyed us for a while. My job prospects where he lived where terrible and him moving to me wasn't an option either since he didn't speak the language, so we opted to move to a "neutral" country and both took up the same entry level position over there. 

Barely three months later, somewhat too lax birth control led to a surprise pregnancy and after debating for quite a while, we decided not to abort, since our situation was less than optimal, but not terrible. I however ended up terribly conflicted over whether or not I really wanted to have a child at this point in my life and, I am not sure in retrospec, but I believe "and with this man" was also a factor, so I more or less panicked and did go for an abortion in the end. I have never told a soul about this abortion, officially it was a miscarriage, which comes close enough as it is, as the entire situation did leave me pretty messed up and internally mourning for a long time. 
If I had to analyze myself, I would say that a part of me was trying to make up for the abortion and/or made me realize I wanted to have a baby. He wanted to get married before having a kid, so I took him up on the offer and we got married after 1.5 years of relationship.

Over the next two years, I made some huge steps up the career ladder, while he continued to be stuck in the same type of entry level position despite having a masters degree in a sought after field. 
I would casually look at job listings every now and them and suggest matching offers to him, but he would rarely if ever actually send applications in and as a result nothing ever came out of it.
At one point, he was laid off from his job and took up an even worse job, which made him visibly miserable. It was fairly obvious that he disliked himself in that position, and his self-hatred pushed me away, which in turn made him even more irritable, etc...
A little while after this started, I realized that a co-worker had been crushing on me for a while, and with not really getting much attention at home, being swooned over felt damn good. I developed a crush of my own, and after a few months of mutual crushing, we had an affair. Three months into this affair, my husband started suspecting things and when asked, I admitted the affair. He said he was willing to forgive me if it would never happen again.

The following two or three weeks, I was incredibly close to separating from him. The guy I was having an affair with was very, very dear to me, and we clicked in ways that my husband and I never did. "Affair guy" later said that in another life, we would have ended up happily married for the rest of our lives, and I sincerely believe this to be a plausible scenario.
I still think about him rather frequently today, over 4 years later, and think about what if's.

If I hadn't been married, I would not have stayed with my husband. Even with being newly married, the scales only tipped in his favor ever so slightly, and only because divorcing after being married for 6 months would have been incredibly... embarassing, for the lack of a better word.

After the decission, I immediately took up another job (another step up), cut all contact with the affair guy and dove as deep into work as possible to try and forget about him.

Later that year, I received a very good job offer for a job back in my country, and the company agreed to also hire my husband - in an entry level position still, but at least this time it sort of matched his qualification, so we decided to move. That company turned out to be horrible, so I got a new job (again a step up) soon after, and I also got the husband a job at my new company, this time it was finally a small step up for him and he enjoyed it quite a bit. Unfortunately, that company went bankrupt around a year later, and yet again, I got him a job at my new employer, which is where we still are right now. He is in a job that matches his studies, but, until very recently, was horribly underpaid. I was and am still showing him job offers every now and then, and he still always has excuses why they don't fit - and when he doesn't have an excuse, he will say "Okay, I guess I'll send them my CV later" and will never do it.

Basically, the entire time since the affair ended, I have completely burried myself in work and our relationship just "worked", as in it remained a low-maintenance, comfortable environment, with, thanks to shared hobbies, relatively little contact with the outside world, to the point where we don't really have any friends here yet but never really seemed to mind. So in a nutshell, everything seemed ok, and I never really thought about "us". I was crushing on people periodically, but I was and am guessing that that's perfectly normal.

Since things seemed to be going well enough, we finally tackled the baby project one and a half years ago, and the result is now 10 months old and is honestly the best thing that's ever happened to me.
I absolutely positively love him to bits.
On the flipside, I have come to realize a few things during my maternity leave that are making me seriously doubt if I should just keep sticking around. 
My husband has always been lazy, phlegmatic and the king of procrastinators and the phlegmatic bit has always annoyed me (good example: jobs), but I guess I just kept on hoping he would eventually snap out of it or that I was just overreacting and his constant excuses were actually sound. The lazy part I think just wasn't as obvious at the time - everybody is lazy, and sure, when I can, I like to be lazy too. 
The difference I have been seeing since my son was born however is that I am lazy when I can afford to be lazy. When things need to be done, I do them, usually ASAP, no matter how many things that may be.
My husband? No. He will go the way of the least resistance no matter what the circumstances.

Since I am still on maternity leave at the moment, I do the entirety of the household (Before, he used to do the vacuuming and cat litter, we would go grocery shopping together, he would help me hang up the laundry and would do the odd thing here and there if I kicked his ass), which is fair enough in my opinion. I am home, he works, so the place is tidy and clean when he comes home, his closet magically refills with clean clothes and the kind elves make sure there's a nice dinner.
I also used to be the one getting up during the night when the kid didn't sleep through the night yet, and I am now the one that gets up when the kid wakes up in the early morning, while the husband sleeps until 8, because...well, he has to be fit and rested at work. 
I do and have done all of this as my understanding of my "part of the deal", and I have been doing so without any sort of resentment whatsoever. 
Now with this sort of arrangement, one would think that he would be grateful and would concentrate on the kid for the hour that the little one still is awake when he gets home and that he would try to take care of the kid a little bit here and there during the weekends to give me a hand every now and then, especially considering that we used to do the household, laundry and shopping together during evenings and weekends before we had a child, meaning that he actually has MORE free time now than he did before.

Not the case, and that's is what's seriously bumming me out and is making me doubt the entire marriage. When he gets home in the evening, I don't immediately "attack" him with the kid, as I do realize he just came home from work and may be exhausted (I am too, but hey..). I give him a few minutes to arrive, he then messes around with the kid for maybe 10 minutes, then he usually visibly starts looking forward to starting the (very brief) bedtime routine. Until we recently had a massive fall-out over this entire topic, he would also immediately go sit down at his PC as soon as the kid was in bed, while I would be tidying up toys and the aftermath of dinner alone for another half hour. He also has a habit of fixing himself snacks late in the evening and leaving everything whereever he last used it, including full open milk cartons on the counter.

During weekends, I sometimes try to do (non-fun!) shopping that would be very hard with the kid in tow, he then sees me off rolling his eyes and saying things like "Okay, but hurry up" or "Don't be two hours again".
Needless to say, when I get home, the place invariably looks as if a bomb had just hit and the first thing he does is hand me the kid and dash off to "relax". Other than that, weekends are mostly the same as weekdays for me, except for the fact that I can't really do anything outside, because his response is always something along
the lines of "Well if you waaaant to..." and usually also "But let's not make it too long". And well, if that's the response you get if you ask your husband to go for a walk together with your son, you stop asking eventually.


All these are things that we have discussed several times since the birth of our son, and very little has changed, and the changes usually last for a short while only. I have also mentioned that if this would continue when I go back to work in two months, I would not be having any of it, and I am pretty sure I mean this.
I also know from experience that when he promises to change something, he means it. He just never actually DOES change it. Tomorrow...
Since I have come to the (wrong?) realization that he is essentially useless, I have basically lost all respect for him. How can I respect somebody who refuses to do their best while others have to work extra hard to make up for that fact?

The sad part is that we get along well in general, we can have fun together and I think he does a fairly decent job 
as a dad, and I think I could deal with sex being an "Well, ooookay then..."-deal and loving him more like a friend than
anything else if I felt like he was bringing anything into the relationship besides that.

But I really, really don't see him doing that. 
I have always earned significantly more money than him despite him having much better and much more valuable qualifications simply because I worked hard and he...was being himself, and it annoyed me a little, but it was okay, I had hope that he would move his ass eventually. 
I have always done all of our finances, taxes and paperwork, booked all of our holidays, done all necessary research, booked his doctors appointments (!) and it annoyed me a little, but I was ok with it. 
He has never really cooked unless I specifically asked him to or just didn't make any food myself, and it annoyed me a little, 
but I was okay with it. 
I even did all the driving to our respective families, both 7 hour drives away, this entire time because he didn't do his driving license until last winter (because I told him I was sick of it and wasn't going to drive myself to hospital in labor...I still ended up doing exactly that because he kept postponing the driving lessons I booked for him) even though he is a terrible co-pilot who always sleeps in the car. 
And now that he has his driving license, I'm not even saying anything about his always finding excuses why he can't drive, even though I know that if he as a new driver doesn't practise soon, he will never lose his fear and become comfortable...
I am not even bugging him about the fact that despite being with me for 6 years and working in my country for 4 years, he still 
hasn't even TRIED to learn the language.
I am not on his back about his weight, even though he is now officially obese because he feels the need to fix himself additional meals in the middle of the night.
I try to not always tell him when he smells because he hasn't had a shower in the morning and is still wearing yesterday's shirt, 
even though I find it pretty disgusting.

But when I put all of these things together and see how he is literally infinitely more work than he is of help at the moment, 
I can't help but wonder if I am willing to continue doing this for somebody who, when I am being completely honest, was never 
and will never really be what I had been looking for, but who is an "okay fit" who happened to be at the right place at the right 
time.

He also keeps bringing up that he wants us to move back to his country, and I am everything but a fan of the idea. I would earn significantly less money due to not being able to work similarily challenging positions - if I even found a job there at all - and he would just continue to do his thing. 
Also, although he keeps saying it wouldn't be the case, I am basically certain that he would still not do our taxes and so on, meaning I would just have to do to it myself in a country I am not very familiar with and in a language that I am not completely fluent in, and I am pretty sure the combination would make me miserable.
I would like to try and buy a place in this area, since we will never be out of work here, house prices only ever go up and childcare and schools are great, he doesn't, "because I don't think we will live here in 5 years time", so I forsee some serious conflicts regarding this a few years down the road.

Right now, it feels like there is nothing he brings to the table and like I am taking care of two babies, although that sounds terribly stereotypical. 
I don't think I like him enough to continue dragging his ass through life indefinitely, and it makes me depressed to think that there may very well be people out there with whom I would be a lot happier and that I might be wasting the best years of my life with someone I am tempted to describe as a deadbeat (after potentially already having wasted my youth on him on top of that).
At the same time, we work reasonably okay when I see past the fact that I carry all of the weight, so I am worried I might be throwing away something that is far too good to be canned, especially since there's a toddler in the line of fire. What if I am doomed to always end up disappointed in my partners, except future partners would also be arseholes?


I always knew marriages required work and thought people who got divorced just had a throw-away mentality and didn't want to work on their relationships...I never wanted to be a single mom and I never wanted my son to grow up with divorced parents, and he is basically the one thing that's making me second guess myself. 
I know they say children are better off with divorced parents than with miserable parents, but I am not miserable (at least not yet),
I can just man up and carry on, much like I have done in the past. I just don't know if I that's what I should be doing with my life,
and I feel like even thinking that is incredibly selfish and immature.


Right now, I am basically postponing having to actually decide anything, as I have been telling myself that I would "see what happens when I work again", which will happen in two months. I will be out 35h+ per week including driving from and to daycare plus two weekly activities with the kid that I will continue to do, resulting in the same out of house "workload" as my husband. If I still end up having to do the brunt of the housework and childrearing by myself while he sits on his ass and complains about how hard his life is, I think I should start working on an exit strategy.

Thanks for bearing with me...any thoughts?


P.S.: Reading this again, the first few paragraphs some like a clown car full of bad decissions, which is sad, since I am an extremely rational person and was able to justify each of these decissions at the respective times..


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## Complexity (Dec 31, 2011)

No offence but reading this, you come off as incredibly self centred bordering narcissistic.


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## Acorn (Dec 16, 2010)

I would recommend before making any more big decisions that you consider getting yourself some individual counseling.

There are a lot of things going on in your post that you might look at differently if you looked inside a little bit.

From my eyes, it really doesn't appear you love or have ever really loved your husband that much. The affair, the disrespect... he may be having some of the same thoughts you are. Just something to think about.


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## alphaomega (Nov 7, 2010)

How do you get narcissistic out of that? The OP is asking a genuine question. She has every right to her emotional feelings.

I used to be that guy. With me, it was depression, so I tried to escape everything as often as I could. I'm sure it frustrated my wife. 

With him, without background, it sounds like complacency. Comfort. And maybe a bit laziness.. He knows you will pick up the slack so he gets away with what he can, and he does.

As far as broaching the subject with him again? In a way that is constructive? I'm not sure. With myself, I had to get out of my own funk. He will most likely need to fix himself too, but to get him to understand your concerns with more empathy? I'm at a loss.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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