I (41f) and husband (45m) married 13 years, I’m realising I can’t carry the burden of organising/ being responsible for our lives/finances/goals anymore
I (41f) and husband (45m) married 13 years, I’m realising I can’t carry the burden of organising/ being responsible for our lives/finances/goals anymore
My husband is an incredible Dad and a very kind person who I love deeply. I had a chaotic life before him (abuse, bad relationships) and his love and support are 100% what enabled me to turn my life around.
After some years of therapy I dealt with my stuff and now have a wonderful daughter, career, partner and life.
But I feel like my husband is a passenger sometimes? For the last 10 years I’ve gone really hard in my career because financial stability is very important to me (raised by a single mum etc). He’s had some longer periods of unemployment and is working now. During this time we’ve bought a house and, are fairly set up due to me paying for and organising it.
My current challenge is 2-fold and I’m not really even sure what is the bigger deal to me right now?
1 I feel like I’m wholly responding for our lives turning out well - earning the majority of our $, paying all the bills, managing retirement accounts and mortgage projections and investments. We’ve emigrated so have to go through a residency process also.
I’ve tried over the years to get him involved in this (I really don’t think there’s anything I haven’t tried) and have now gotten to a crisis situation. I was really overwhelmed (massive projects for work, covid impacts, family stuff) and he took on the responsibility for 3 diff tasks I’d always do. All 3 ended up in a pretty bad way (loosing life insurances, a car off the road for almost a year due to paperwork, structural house problems not being fixed).
We’re working through getting this stuff sorted - but I can’t keep working so hard at everything and take all the responsibility for this stuff. And then on the rare occasion it’s not just me his avoidance and lack of ability to prioritise this stuff leaves me dealing with things 10x worse.
We’ve had similar problems in the past (eg thousands worth of toll fines he clocked up never checking he was on a toll road that he took everyday for work) and then lying about this kind of stuff so I don’t really know what’s going on.
2 The other issue is the long term implications of this stuff I guess - I feel entirely responsible for our lives. Our kids’ (6f) schooling costs, the mortgage, our retirement, planning and paying for travel to see both our families who live overseas.
I think this is really about not feeling “taken care of” - which feels unfair because he completely does take care of me and our daughter. He does all the cooking and nearly all the cleaning (we both work full time however my hours are longer and less flexible).
I guess I’m scared with everything we’ve tried, if I can’t find a way to meet some of my needs here this might actually be a dealbreaker for me - which sounds like a vile thing to even think - but I really don’t know how to deal with this.
TLDR: I feel solely responsible for our daily lives/ finances and long term goals and my husband cannot seem to help at all (exclusively makes if worse). This is a big issue for me and I’m running out of ways to try and change this dynamic.