My DH Can't Keep Daycare & Personal Separate

[MarinaVanessa]

I'm not sure if this will help, but maybe read about passive agressive disorder. A classic sign is agreeing to something but not meaning it. It's a way of avoiding confrontation and it's also very dishonest.
And also very demeaning to me.
I will look into the disorder. I do think that I personally behave in a passive or passive aggressive way towards him. I fished out my old Assertiveness Workbook for myself and will be taking it with me on vacation for reading. I need to stand firm but I don't want to be loud or mean about it so I need the review. I just need to stop getting pulled into these things.

Last night I talked with him calmly again about some issues and for now we're at an agreement to just enjoy our vacation.

It helped DH (i. e. helped me) to show that there was a name for this stuff and where it came from. Men who weren't supported as kids in expressing themselves can easily become passive aggressives.
Probable in DH's case. He came from an unstable home, abusive father, a mother who left their abusive dad and left the four of them with the abusive father etc.

If your DH constantly agrees to things but doesn't mean it/follow through, then you are not working well as a team, and it's important in marriage to work well as a team. It's a lot of the point of marriage!
You're preaching to the choir sister ::

Keep telling him this stuff. You want to feel treated well. Your feelings matter. Working well with him matters. Being able to trust someone to do what they agree to does matter. When he runs down something you feel is important, you feel run down by him. etc etc Keep telling him this stuff.
I have and will continue to. This is a fight I have with him several times a week.

We are just 2 people who are damaged from life, and are trying to do the best we can, together.

There is hope.
Thank you for this. I'm willing to keep trying but he has to put effort in too so I hope he'll get it together.

THIS conversation should have happened right off the bat! Next time lead with this conversation and it will nip everything in the bud. You already know what he is going to do so don’t give him any more chances
I have this talk with him on a weekly basis. Not even joking. He says he'll do better but we end up back at square one. We're just stuck.

Nothing about what you are doing is unfair. That kind of questioning is what got you in trouble in the first place. Thinking you are being unfair or too uptight makes you waver on your boundaries. You are the smart one here, trust yourself :hug:
Thank you, that's a relief to hear

I can always count on you here to give me different perspectives and ideas. Thanks ladies. Don't worry if you don't hear from me for the next week. I haven't murdered him, I'll just be on vacay.

[midaycare]

Have fun! I'm jealous! :hug:

[Michael]

I was reading through a lot of the post here. I don't know if its my place to comment but from a guy's point of view I can relate to several issues that your husband is having.

When one party in a relationship is highly organized and responsible, the other party can sometimes take advantage of it. Its not as though they are lazy but the other party is so good at it, that they tend to let the better one "take the job".

Your husband may not understand how much you do for the business and your relationship. I think you would want your husband to have the leadership traits that you possess. That may wear on the respect that you have for him, which is not good for a man's position in a relationship.

I do not think he will change unless he actually believes you will leave him. Sometimes, a guy needs a kick in the teeth to wake him up before its too late.

The other option is to accept who he is. Did he change since your marriage? Sometimes people expect others to change and that's most likely not going to happen unless something major happens that causes them to realize they "must" change.

[Josiegirl]

Enjoy your vacation!!! Hope it renews your marriage in many ways and brings you both back, able to work on a fresh start!

[Denali]

My boundaries aren't being honored by my DH in almost every other aspect though. I can't say I had no fault in all of this either because when my DH told them yes I could have said no but I didn't in an effort to not fight with my DH, which inevitably always happens when I stay firm.

Sometimes I don't even get a chance to say no to them before my DH says yes. I do not like to argue in public or in the presence of other people so if I don't agree with DH in front of others I will stay quiet. I think that's a huge part of my problem.

Later when we are home and alone and I bring it up to my DH it's like it doesn't matter what I think on the subject. I have reached out privately to them and spoke up to them about how I would not be able to accommodate something and my husband will just reach back out to them and say that we got it figured out on our end and that now it's ok. I then stay quiet out of embarrassment.

He has done it when his sister needed someone to watch her kids one weekend. I didn't want to do it. My DH told her that he would do it but then he left and left the kids here without telling me.

Or once when I had a workshop to attend one weekend and DH was going to watch our kids while I attended. That morning he told me he wasn't going to be able to watch them after all because he was going to be out of town all day to pick up some truck part and that I needed to find someone else to watch them. I ended up not being able to go to the workshop.

He has thrown away possessions and paperwork of mine that he thought were unimportant because he wanted to de-clutter the house but will not get rid of his own things.

Not too long ago we made an agreement that he could buy a new TV as long as I could get a new large rug for the living room. He got his TV and then said that the rug wasn't a priority (the money was going to come out of his paycheck because I make enough to cover the daycare expenses, the utilities, my van payment and have just a little left over for gas and extras).

So I think I'm going to talk to BF and get back to regular pickups and if they need a later time no hard feelings if they choose to go elsewhere. I feel like I should at least give it a chance since really they have no real idea that this whole thing has been happening behind the scenes. They can't change something that I haven't told them is an issue. BF wil be here in 30 minutes so I'll know more about how he'll react then.

Honestly, from someone’s whos been in your shoes, id straight out ask your DH if he feels and believes you are expendable? If he feels you are less then his friends? If he feels that you are so unimportant that he feels he has the right to treat you like you are nothing? Ask him if he even likes spending time with you? Tell him that his actions tell you that he does not love you. Does not care about your feelings and you as his WIFE.

Be blunt. Be cruel. Do not back down. He needs to hear exactly what his actions are doing to the person that he is supposed to spend the rest of his life with. I mean does he even know (or care) that Divorce is in his future if he doesn’t start treating you at least like a person that matters in his life? If he’s not going to treat you like his wife then He needs to at least treat you like the mother of his children and not some nameless red shirt that has no bearing on his life.

This is emotional abuse honey. Gas lighting.

I had to literally tell my DH that if I didn’t see him start treating me better and him change his behavior towards me, I’d be divorcing him by the end of the year.