‘My slob of a husband is driving me up the wall’

"He never makes any plans and spends any spare time after the children are in bed on the sofa watching Clarkson’s Farm and drinking cans of lager, while I work." Photo / Doug Sherring

OPINION:

When I met my husband 10 years ago, I’d just come out of a relationship with a career-­focused narcissist. He’d spend hours each night going over work papers, change outfits three times before brunch, and make bitchy comments about my clothes / hair / career choices. He was super-bright and very funny, but our relationship was hard work. I felt like I had to be on my A-game at all times.

When I met my husband, he seemed his gloriously relaxed opposite: shaggy, outdoorsy, with a huge circle of adoring friends. Not obviously career-driven, his non-materialism really appealed to me. I loved his sunny, uncomplicated, each-day-as-it-comes attitude, perhaps because I have a tendency to catastrophise. I felt I had nothing to prove, he loved me exactly the way I was.

We’d go out all the time ­­­­– parties, restaurants, boozy weekends with his friends in the country – and lie in bed all day recovering from hangovers while he made me bacon sandwiches and told me how wonderful I was.

"When [our children] fall over they ask for him, not me, and it breaks my heart." Photo / The New York Times

Ten years later, he’s driving me up the wall. I should have bailed when he asked me to lend him money to cover his rent. He never repaid it. Instead, he moved in with me. Oh, the idiocy. He is in the same job, at the same level, and hasn’t received a pay rise in years, while I work like a slave to pay the ­mortgage and keep the show on the road for our two children.

We can’t afford to go on holiday or move to a bigger house – ours is tiny and shabby – mainly because his salary is so pitiful it barely covers our food shop. If I didn’t think it would be the final nail in the coffin of our relationship – and he wasn’t such a slob – I’d ask him to stay at home to look after the kids so we could at least save on the eye-watering wraparound childcare.

This cost of living crisis and the insane costs of our two under-threes (now almost £3000 [NZ$6209] a month on nursery alone) keeps me up at night. Our mortgage is due for renewal in three months, which I’ve been ruminating on, but am too scared to even speak to our mortgage adviser. He, meanwhile, just tells me to stop biting my nails and blithely assures me it’ll all work out.

I can’t really see how it will, as we are stretched to the limit. I recently had a pay rise – which means I now work longer hours, with more pressure piled on – but it’s been swallowed up by a huge bump in nursery costs of £400 per child, per month.

I work 12-hour days in a very boring corporate job that I hate (to which I returned after six months’ maternity leave, for each child) and feel I barely see our children. Because he works a relaxed 10-5, he does drop-offs, pick-ups and play-dates and takes the kids to the park, hanging out with all the other parents. They all love him and barely know my name. I bitterly resent it all: I feel like I’m missing their ­childhood. When they fall over they ask for him, not me, and it breaks my heart. He, meanwhile, coasts at a non-­demanding job because he knows I will pick up the bills.

It isn’t that he hasn’t changed and I have (well, not totally) – he has. He rarely sees any of his friends, never makes any plans and spends any spare time after the children are in bed on the sofa watching Clarkson’s Farm and drinking cans of lager, while I work.

I look at my friends with their ­successful, grown-up husbands, their lovely holidays and their nice houses and cars (ours is a banger on its last legs) and think – how did I end up here, with this man, in this life?