My (22f) Husband (29M) keeps telling me to come to Reddit about our arguments. so here I am. Do all men feel how my husband feel?
A young mother reached out to Reddit to share her struggles in a challenging marriage. She describes feeling unappreciated and overwhelmed as she juggles caring for their infant, managing household chores, and navigating her husband’s expectations about gender roles and respect.
Despite her efforts, her husband criticizes her, withholding affection unless she meets his standards. The user asks for honest input, as her husband will also be reading the responses.
‘ My (22f) Husband (29M) keeps telling me to come to Reddit about our arguments. so here I am. Do all men feel how my husband feel?’
I (22f) have been with my partner (29m) for coming up on 3 years, and our daughter is 4 months old. He makes sure to let me know how lazy I am, even though I’m the only one to care for our daughter or clean our house.
He works a lot and when he comes home, he spends a couple hours on the game and he might hold our daughter for a couple minutes. He says that since I’m staying home caring for our infant alone I should have dinner made, the dogs and p** should be fed, watered (obviously), and walked.
Trash should be burned. Dishes should be clean. Floor swept and mopped. His other kids rooms clean. Every surface wiped down. He also says that there ARE gender roles and this is what a woman should do to keep her man happy.
According to him I don’t deserve to be loved on until I’ve finished the chores and put the baby to sleep by myself and made sure that he feels loved and cared for. Our daughter won’t take a bottle and he won’t help me with bottles so I can’t go back to work but I’m also not helping financially.
He doesn’t stay up with our daughter. If I don’t initiate s** we don’t have s**. He straight up said he’s won’t touch me in ways that please me Because he’s “not in high school”. I feel crazy. He’s obsessed with the concept of disrespect.
Everything I do is disrespectful- if the dishes aren’t clean, if the floors not mopped, if I leave little trinkets around the house, if I started projects that I didn’t get to finish and forgot about when the baby woke up, or.
If the baby has been a little fussy and I’m feeding her when he gets home I’m a fat lazy waste of space and why didn’t I get anything done today. I don’t text him throughout the day telling him sweet little nothings, so I must not love him.
I can’t choose between being a mom and a partner even though sometimes I have to because my daughter ISNT CAPABLE OF CARING FOR HERSELF. it’s like he’s mad that I can’t be his mother for him, right? So Reddit. What do y’all think? Please be honest because he will absolutely be seeing every word.
Here’s what people had to say to OP:
KnitSheep − I’m going to go ahead and say there’s a reason why his other baby mama is proudly wearing her title of EX and you should probably go ahead and explore that same title and also wear it with pride once achieved.
Minute-Aioli-5054 − I’ve read this and I want to divorce your husband for you.
sugarfoot00 − I’m assuming you’re going to show this thread to your husband, so I’ll just speak directly to him. Dude, you’re a grade-a cunt that doesn’t deserve this woman. I’m not expecting you to suddenly start respecting her as a human, because that’d require you respecting yourself first.
Real men are partners with their spouse. Real men spend time with their kids and their share of the parenting. Real men make their wives feel cared for and loved.
You’re just a boy. It’s probably why you chased down a naive 19 year old when you were 26- any woman your own age would have seen right through your b**lshit. But guess what? Now this one does as well.
MidnytStorme − And now you know why he’s knocking up women barely out of their teens instead of women his own age. Cause he thinks you won’t know any better. His mistake was telling you to come to Reddit. Cause now you know better. Now do something about it. Don’t let your kid grow up thinking this is how relationships should look. Get out.
MckittenMan − Well, good thing you came here… Your husband sounds like a total AH. He is more about ripping on you instead of loving you. Yes, in a stay at home set up like this… Each of you have your roles to play. However… He gets to come home from work and have time off.. Where is your time off?
Your job never ends. He also needs to be capable of giving you a break as well and play his part as a husband and father occasionally. Sounds like quite the a**sive relationship tbh. Like he loves having authority over you. We get into relationship to love each-other… Not be servants. He treats you like a servant.
yawaworthemn − He’s a monster.
2workigo − He doesn’t consider you a partner, he considers you an indentured servant.
thehellvetica − and p** should be fed, He talking about himself here or.. 🤔
staircasegh0st − Truly astonishing own-goal for the “dude with a video game addiction who got with a teenager with a giant age gap and has kids by 3 different women and won’t do chores” to think that sending someone to the Relationship Advice sub was going to make *you* look like the unreasonable one.
Do “all men” feel the way your husband feels? No, not outside of some very specific valleys on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.
Do you think the husband’s expectations are fair, or is the user right to feel overwhelmed and unsupported? How would you approach a relationship where one partner feels unappreciated while managing the household and childcare? Share your thoughts below and help this family find clarity and a path forward.
MALIGNANT NARCISSIST! R U N !!!
First, I suspect that he is (as others have pointed out) the sort of man who lacks so much in his masculinity that he sought out a very young woman because she was too ignorant (meaning ‘without the proper knowledge that experience and time allow’, not ‘stupid) of what her worth is. A woman his own age would know he was a worthless man. He sees that realization is dawning and sent you to Reddit to get what you’re getting. Encouragement to leave him. Then, he’ll find a new teen-queen to trick into spending a few years taking care of him like the idiot he is.
Your husband is an asshole who needs to grow up.
Sad to say, but this is learned behavior. Watch how his dad treats his mom. You should have had hints before you got married and had kids. He’s an ass, no doubt about it. It’s now up to you to change your circumstances. I never jump to divorce right off the bat, but you’re being mentally abused. Next will come the physical. Don’t put you and your daughter through that. Leave now while you still have the nerve to do it
This must be a man with an exceptionally low libido. Suggest some blue pills – crush and add to his coffee! LOL
All I could think about when I read this is how my father would laugh–after he beat the hell out of your husband. My Dad was a professional logger and lumberman most of his life. He often spent weeks living on his job site away from us–yet his first words in the door when he made it home were usually “Jude? Do you want me to grill tonight?” And when he grilled he didn’t just grill the meat, he grilled the whole meal after he prepped it. So think on this a bit Mr. “She’s home all day, she has the time.” If my father, after a day cutting down and topping trees on steep hillsides and a long drive home, can still find it in him to cook dinner so my Mom could have an evening off, what does that make you? Dad, and most of the men I grew up around, would call you a poser, a little boy playing at being a real man. And they’d laugh at you. I’m going to come right out and say it: Your husband is a disgrace to his gender. Pack your and your baby’s thing and GET OUT. Before the hitting starts. Because I can see that happening within a year or so. And that’s probably why his first wife is now an EX.
Ok, so here are some major red flags…
1. Your husband’s behavior towards you, the things he’s comfortable saying to you, the fact that he’s playing video games at almost 30 rather than pulling his weight around the house, and his clearly predatory behavior towards knocking you up so young concerns me deeply…not only is he verbally abusing you, but I’d put money on the fact that he likely has a porn addiction in addition to a video game addiction…
2. In short…Your husband is a man-child…dude no one owes you respect, respect is earned by being a respectable human, something you are clearly not doing. In order to behave this way towards not just women, but your wife, you’ve had to rewire your brain to see women as subhuman and like your property…. What’s scarier than the fact that you peddled this crap, is the fact that you thought Reddit would defend you. You BELIEVE this and that’s the most dangerous thing about you. You live in a different reality altogether.
3. When he says “he’s not in high school anymore” what he means is “you’re not in high school anymore” men who no longer want to offer pleasure to women their own age have generally become so lost in a sex addiction that they’ve developed a tendency towards pedophilia. This happens because as they give way to addiction and have rewired their brains they needed more and more shock to get off… chores are his excuse, not the real issue. Not to mention, men who never initiate sex are getting it elsewhere plain and simple. I know this sounds extreme, but I want you to not be surprised when this all comes out… if this is the case, and I’d be SHOCKED if it isn’t…it’s only a matter of time before he preys on another 18/19 year old, or someone younger (if he’s not already).
4. HUGE red flag… 🚩 him not helping you transition to bottle so you can go back to work is because he does not want you to have the independence to leave AND he wants to keep you in a subservient (read-subhuman) role. He’s so desperate he’s playing by the “he who holds the purse-strings” rule…Your age gap is and always was a power move, so is keeping you in an economic position to not be able to leave.
5. Your husband A. Has NO clue what he’d have to pay someone else to do what you do… and B. how many hours of work he’s expecting you to do… I’m in a big city, if you’re not you can cut these by about 30% but… my husband and I both work FT, split as much house work and kid duty as possible, and we outsource what we can’t get done… so let me give you a rough idea of the worth of your work (and if you need to get out, which it sounds like you might, how you could easily find an employer to replace your abusive husband and be much happier). We have 2 house cleaners come every other week. I pay them $28/hr each. We live in a small house (roughly 1700 square feet) and it takes them roughly 3-4 hours each time they come. (So let’s say $400-500 a month, and I tip 20% which is standard if your cleaner is good). In between their visits my husband and I clean together. We split laundry, and dishes. FT daycare is $2500-$3000 where we live, but if you want a nanny… that’ll cost more a fair estimate is $25/hr times all the hours you are responsible for which sounds like more than 40. Each additional kid raises the price. If you have 2 kids $30-35, 3? $35-40 etc, by the way if you are also the night nurse and he does zero midnight feedings night nurses make more, think $40-60/hr. So don’t forget to calculate the cost of a night nurses…dog walkers and animal care takers range in price, but assume about $15/hr. for that, laundry service is $1.50-$3 per pound, that’s usually about $15 per load of laundry. And let’s not forget about wanting you to be a personal chef…usually ranging between $22-30 per hour… if you’ve kept up with the math or calculating the number of hours your working relative to what he’s likely doing… I’m guessing he couldn’t afford you.
Also, just for reference, my husband and I were both in high paying careers and decided we wanted to, as a family contribute more to the world than money. I left my corporate job to work in non-profit and took a major pay cut…My husband makes about 3x as much as me now and we still split everything. It’s always “our money,” and “our chores,” and “our kids” because we are in this together. If the floor needs mopped and one of us notices it we do it. We’re not trying to go tit for tat, we’re trying to serve one another and our family well. That’s what partners do, they don’t power struggle, they take ownership and work together. When one person does more we NEVER withhold intimacy as punishment (good Lord that’s gross, manipulative, and screams I need attachment therapy)… instead we tell our partner we need help and feel overwhelmed and we work together to rebalance. Some weeks you will do more than your partner, some weeks they’ll do more than you… hopefully most weeks everything gets done and you both win.
But at the end of the day… the chores fight at your house sounds like symptoms of a much deeper more complicated problem that therapy may or may not be able to fix, depending on your husbands willingness to be a partner rather than your keeper.
I hope your husband will get help, and I hope you know his behavior towards you is unacceptable.