My Husband is Useless and Does Nothing

4 min readFeb 25, 2021

Some days I’m on the verge of kicking my husband out. I don’t know how long I can live like this. My husband has always been very lazy with chores and has always been a gaming addict. Other than that he has always been the sweetest, most supportive man in the world, who always made sure I felt loved and special, and whom I was sure would be an amazing father. Before deciding to have children we sat down and had a long talk about what would be expected of him as a father and what he’d have to give up. He said he was fine with all of that.

The first two months after our baby was born were amazing. He was truly doing 50% of the work, if not more some days when my body was still recovering. But it’s just deteriorated completely by now, and I’m starting to truly resent this person. I feel like I am in charge of literally everything.

CHILDCARE
I am undoubtedly the “main parent”. If I leave the baby with my husband he will forget to feed him, forget to take his diaper, forget to brush his teeth, forget to clothe him properly, ignore him when he’s crying, and if I desperately ask for a little break for self-care he will let the baby walk over to me and watch as he cries to be picked up. “It’s not my fault he wants to go to you.”

CHORES
It feels like he is genuinely TRYING to make the apartment messy. I keep asking him to take the baby so I can clean up a little, but he’ll refuse and keeps saying “he’ll get to it.” But he never gets to it. So I’ll have the baby full-time, and the apartment keeps deteriorating. I find his socks and clothes everywhere, he leaves dirty dishes in the weirdest places for me to find, he’ll watch me clean, make a spill or drop something on the floor, and then he’ll just WALK AWAY FROM IT. If he does do something like “washing the kitchen counters”, there’ll still be so much food and so many stains I’m wondering if he even wet the cloth he used to go over it. But if I say it’s not good enough, he acts like I’m incredibly high maintenance. Every morning the apartment looks worse than the day before, and it’s absolutely affecting my mental health. At this point, I just want to cry.

PLANNING
I have to be in charge of everything, doctor’s appointments, special days, Christmas gift shopping, buying baby clothes or supplies, he still doesn’t even know what diaper brand we use, I have to remind him every time he goes to the store. I have to remind him of his OWN things, as he’s liable to forget work meetings, deadlines, personal bills, etc. if I just leave him to it.

SPECIAL DAYS
I had to plan, find and buy ALL Christmas presents myself, including the ones for his family and for our child. The only gift he was in charge of was the one for me, and he just… Forgot about it? He gave me a belated Christmas present in mid-January. Today is Mother’s Day in my country, and he had promised me emphatically that he’d clean the apartment and let me sleep in. He let me sleep for one hour (although the baby kept crying so I couldn’t really), then came in pissed off at the baby for being screaming, dumped the baby on me, and asked if he could sleep a bit too. I take the baby and leave the bedroom just to find the apartment is still a pigsty. It’s actually worse than before. I let him sleep an hour, he asks for more, I let him sleep 20 more minutes, he still refuses to get up.

Some days all of this just hits me so hard, and I just want to melodramatically lock myself in the bathroom and cry. I’ve tried talking to him, I’ve tried yelling at him, I’ve tried reasoning with him, bargaining with him, crying to him, telling him how much it’s affecting me. He just keeps saying “I’m sorry, I’ll do better”, but nothing ever gets better. And when I point it out he gets grumpy and huffy like I’m attacking him. I end up comforting HIM because he’s upset that he feels inadequate. I just don’t know what to do anymore.

My Husband is Useless and Does Nothing

Written by Dana Forlan