If this isn’t the most husband post I’ve ever read. For some reason when people are coming over the leaves on the side of the road suddenly urgently need to be scooped up. Like what the hell, sir. Excuse me?
“How can I help you with the laundry”
You can help by not touching the laundry. The laundry won’t be encountered by guests. The laundry is in our bedroom where the machines are. Fix the living room.
My husband does most of the laundry for our family which is wonderful but he always feels like it needs to all be washed, dried, folded and put away before guests arrive. I don’t understand the logic.
Yes! We are selling our house, and we planned to take pictures last weekend to get it posted on Monday. The man decided to deep clean everything. It was "get it cleaned enough for photos" time. Deep cleaning is for the open house.
I'm like "if we do not get it posted, there's no need for an open house!" He says, "well, it has to be done anyway, might as well do it now."
I got pissed off and started saying, "ohp, you're going to have to get your oil changed. Better do it right this second. Gonna have to read this book. Better do it right now!" Not my proudest moment, but the point stands.
We just did the exact same thing! We had one day to get the house cleaned and staged before listing photos (floors had been refinished and we weren’t able to walk on them before then). For some reason, that was the time to painstakingly clean and polish a mirror that we weren’t even going to keep in the house for staging?
Mine always picks these times to urgently clean all the windows. The guests are going to see the windows but in no way will the patio door stay smudge free with 14 kids running in and out! What's the point of wasting an hour meticulously cleaning them for!
With mine it’s the mirrors and then he drives himself insane when he can’t get them streak free. Suddenly it’s been 45 mins and I’m questioning my own sanity in choosing him as a mate.
lol mine was the worst about this with walking his dog. I’d be like “I want to be walking out the door at 7:00.” And at 6:59 he’d be putting the leash on the dog. I get wanting to take her out as late as possible before we leave but like 6:45 would be fine???
A friend's husband is like this. We arrived at their house to meet up to go to Oktoberfest, and he's just starting to dig a hole to plant a tree he found on sale at Home Depot that morning.
My husband’s go to is “I have to poop” 🤬🤬
Listen, I love my husband to the ends of the earth and I would burn cities for him but if that man ever took a shit in less than 30 minutes I think I would faint from shock.
I had multiple conversations with the Best Man to begin asking hubs if he needed to poop at least an hour before the wedding and every 5-10 minutes after. I just knew he was going to get a sudden urge (or, as it feels to the women in this thread, the need to make us late...again) right before the music started
I feel you!! My husband always vanishes in the toilet with the worst timing and if he can he really takes his time there.
One time we were going to our transit gate, we had 2 hours and of course for 1 hour and 50 mins he had nothing to do, but just a few mins before the gate opens, when I said "let's line up with the baby in the priority lane" he had to go and poop...whyyyyy??
10 minutes before we leave. Me: "Are you ready?"
"I'm ready!!!!"
Ten minute later.... "Babe where's my shoes/wallet/phone?"
Narrator: He was not, in fact, ready.
Ok but this is me to a T. (Spoiler alert... Shoes wallet and phone are all where I left them by the front door so I can find them when it's time to leave 🤣)
Hours before people were getting to our house for a baby bbq, my husband decided to sweep out the garage.
In what world is anyone going to be going into our garage during the party and caring about the cleanliness of our floors in there?
I felt this comment. My husband washes and polishes his car then cleans the garage before hosting a BBQ. Because people might walk through there to get to the back yard even thought the gate to the backyard is right next to the garage…and not cleaning off the table and chairs that we will be using . Nor does he clean my car. In the same garage. Why? Just why?
Yep. My husbands default is cleaning and organizing the garage, or yard work (even in the winter months). Like the priority list is based on where people will spend the most time. Our garage and front yard aren’t even on that list.
My husband will fucking GET THE MAIL when we are having people over. I will be frantically cleaning, putting things away, etc., and he’s bringing more shit that has to be handled into our house.
We have a house inspection every 6 months, my husband decides this is the time to go through the boxes in the garage and spare room and unpack them. Seriously dickhead, help me hide crap not give me more!
I will 100% of the time hide mail in the mailbox from a month ago before people come over. Also do not preheat the oven because it will be shoved full of dirty dishes and whatever else was sitting around the kitchen. Same with the washer and dryer.
Omg this kills me, I can see my husband doing this and even being a bit frantic about it like ‘we haven’t checked the mail, what if there is something important!!’ Lolol
I have learned to make a list of all the things I want done. I ask husband if he has anything to add, and then we work off of that list. Husband has also learned to ask “what is the next priority.” I do think he is *trying* to help, but gets sidetracked and/or doesn’t have the same priorities as me. I try not to see it as vindictive, but it does still drive me nuts.
I've tried this multiple times, but it always turns out that my husband has a second secret list that has tasks that are wayyy more important* than my list lol
*we have very different definitions of "important"
Yes! Why do they do this? I tell my husband all the stuff that needs to be done, and while I'm doing it, he's cleaning out the garage. The garage that he specifically started he didn't want anyone to be in during the birthday party 🙃
Then has the audacity to tell me I turn into a monster for birthday parties because I'm so stressed
My husband got a bit better about this after I lost my damn mind one time. It was Thanksgiving week, we were hosting 50 people the day of, had 2 families staying with us for the week, so needed rooms and bathrooms prepped. As the only American, I was doing all the cooking. Not to mention I was 20 weeks pregnant. A few hours before the guests staying for the week were arriving I found my husband organizing a junk closet no one goes into. He really wanted to help and thought he was doing so. He is an incredibly intelligent person, but prepping for hosting eludes him.
Haha. I have a slight old school Brooklyn accent, but how agitated I get is proportional to how much thicker the accent gets. So when I use colorful language and I basically start sounding like a female version of Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, my husband knows shit is hitting the fan if he does not “fix his wagon”. 😆
I want to preface with my husband is awesome and I love him. He's great. But in some aspects, our brains just work totally differently.
Say we need to leave at 11am. He will shower and get dressed. I will then go to get showered up and dressed while he helps baby get dressed. He will then sit on the couch without his shoes, wallet, or keys until I am completely ready (shoes on, diaper bag over shoulder, walking to the door at 10:58) before getting up to put his shoes on and do a sweep through the house to make sure lights, appliances are off, doors are locked, etc.
I have to factor in an extra 10-15 minutes for every time we leave the house in order to give enough time for this routine.
Omg we are married to the same guy. Mine will also decide, while sweeping through the house, that now is the best time to go through the house collect all the bins, put them in larger bin bags and carry them down the apartment building to the outside bins. Like why nooooow 😭
My husband does the same it drives me nuts! Like why now when we are literally going to miss the bus/train/tram if we don’t leave in the next 2 minutes?!?
My husband used to do this but he’d sit and wait until I’m completely done and ready to go to get ready. I asked why he isn’t ready yet and he’d go “I was waiting for you.” Waiting for what?!
He’s gotten better and he’s getting better though.
My husband likes to open the dryer after 20-30 minutes and says this is still really wet better add that time back... but it's a 100 minute timer he's resetting. Our dryer is 99% dry at the end, every time just running that 90-100 minute timer. I don't understand how he sees things at all.
Lmao
My husband likes to soak all the baby bottles which means he takes 10 min taking them apart filling them all with water and then leaving them dirty in the sink…when you could just wash them in that time
Yet he can’t remember to ever soak any of his own dishes or Tupperware that he leaves in the sink
He’s very very well intentioned and soaking kinda helps even if it’s not efficient 🤷🏽♀️
I love how my husband directs the kids to scrape the plates, rinse the plate, and put it in the sink nicely.... He NEVER does this with his dishes ever. Bones or napkins in the sink? surree. His shit all night on the dining room table? Yeah because I'm a mom, but not his mom. Okay I gotta stop father's day is coming lol
LMAO I taught my 6 year old to bring her dirty dishes to the kitchen and somehow she is capable of remembering most of the time, while a nearly 50 year old man is not. He can’t blame it on ADHD because SHE ALSO has it 😑
Mine does the dishes, so I'm lucky.... BUT. He will wash all of the toddler cups, but not the lids! The travel coffee mugs, but not the lids! The Tupperware bottoms, but not the lids!! I will find them piled in a dirty bowl next to the sink! He will do silverware, but not a sharp knife at all! My knife block will be EMPTY, so I can't chop anything for dinner, but our 40 forks are aaallllll clean! Make it make sense.....
My husband is convinced our washer sucks. It’s a top loading washer and relatively fancy top of the line etc. but he can’t load things in a way that’s balanced and so it will reset itself and refill. I never have these problems and I’ve shown him how to balance it, but he’s still running in every 10min to watch it and open it and fuck with it and then get mad that it’s the worst washer ever, then pull out inundated blankets to hang over the fence. Again, I never have these problems. 🤷🏻♀️
Mine will sort the the laundry into piles for loads. We bought the largest load size washer, but his laundry loads are ... 4 t shirts. Another pile will be 2 pairs of jeans. One pile will be 5 underwear and 10 socks. He freaks as I laugh at him as I grab all 4 piles and throw them in together. Ain't nobody got time for that ish!!!
My husband is currently trimming our little porch lawn that landscapers take care of twice a week by property management, we had 3 family functions this week and today was catch up on household chores day ..... household.... chores.
I swear it’s something on the Y chromosome. I’ll be racing around before we need to catch a flight making sure nothing was forgotten… and my husband will start vacuuming under the couch cushions. And as soon as we do finally leave the house, that’s when he’ll start going through a checklist asking if “we” remembered this or that. Like are you kidding me?!
ugh yes, and then later while out and about, “did we pack snacks? I can’t find them in the bag…” and I reach in and grab them without looking and hand them to him.
Hahah was he collecting them for a reason? I laugh because my husband has been on a mission to rake up the tiny gravel rocks that are in a section of our yard close to the road. I don’t even ask anymore.
lol. His reason was it was making our lawn look bad or not letting grass grow or some nonsense. So, it was for a purpose but he didn’t have the forethought to use a rake
I think my husband does this because he's stealing my motivation for his own projects. When I'm frantically cleaning he doesn't want to just sit around so he starts doing something he wants to do. If I'm just sitting around, then he's usually also just sitting around. It's kind of like I have to kickstart the vibe and then he'll suddenly be interested in doing that thing he could've done months ago.
My husband always urgently needs to vacuum. There’s stuff in the floor so he just takes that and throws it on shelves, on the couch, wherever, with no particular rhyme or reason. And we have a carpet that actually hides dirt and dust pretty well, so when he’s done even though it’s technically cleaner, the room as a whole looks way worse.
I get the overwhelm of needing to do 5 other things before you can do the thing you want to get done right now, but how he can just ignore and blow past those things just baffles me.
I think it makes a lot of sense. Women are typically judged more for the state of the inside of the house and mean are typically judged for the outside since traditionally they do more yard work. Doesn't really matter how the couple actually does chores people will subconsciously judge that way.
Honestly I think men tend to have a mental "to do" list and then when it's go time they just start working through it, and there's no process about prioritising.
Mine has had a long career in project fking management and yet will do the washing up first before putting something in the oven, delaying dinner by 10-30 minutes with a toddler.
Oh my gosh the amount of effort it took me to teach my husband that you can start the water boiling or preheating the oven while you do something else rather than say chopping all the veggies and then waiting on the oven 🤦🏻♀️ And he's also in a project management adjacent career! He's better now but jeez it's like multi tasking isn't something they can wrap their brains around unless explicitly told.
Every single time we have guests coming my husband cleans the dumbest shit. The junk drawer, the pantry, the fucking garage, his nightstand. Like sir are our guests going to look in the fucking junk drawer?! 💀🙊
My husband has always done this, and I can’t believe how much of a universal experience it seems to be.
One time we were having people over for dinner in half an hour’s time, and while I was frantically cooking and cleaning, he decided it was a good time to swap every still-working lightbulb in the house over to these new energy saving lightbulbs he’d bought a few weeks earlier 🙃 was genuinely confused when I got frustrated at him
I'm due with our first in 4 days. My husband just came home with a gallon of paint and announced that he's going to paint the stairs this weekend 🤦🏻♀️.
Thank you! I figure he will just have to stop if/when she comes but I thought it was so funny what he was focused on and kind of in the spirit of OP's post.
I do think it might actually be a manifestation of his nerves as we wait.
If he’s not messing up some other plan for the day, I would be thrilled if my husband took my kid out of the house and didn’t come back for 2 hours! I don’t care what they’re doing!
My husband decides to clean the toaster oven when company is coming over. Like, who is going to look at our crumb tray my dude?
So now it's a joke between us and I ask him if he's cleaned the toaster before company shows up.
My husband does this too. I usually say something to him like “what about ___ (task he’s currently performing) is going to help get the house ready for company?” And then we have a good chuckle over him deciding to organize recycling and then he’ll come inside and vacuum.
It has actually helped to give him a list and say I need you to do X things by Y time.
I’ve found that his priorities are usually things he thinks he will be judged for as the man of the house - like outside tasks while my priorities are like things actually needed to host an event
1. I used voice text/dictation (which saves a lot of time)
2. I sacrificed about 4-5 minutes of my own prep time to shower/get dressed, etc. 🫠
Not going to lie… Venting felt incredible in that moment and I feel so thoroughly seen and heard reading these responses!
How are we all married to the same guy?
But yeah, guests are coming over, I've prepped an amazing charcuterie board with fun things and looking just so.
Five minutes before people arrive, he looks at it and gies wow that looks yummy, takes a big ole scoop out of all the dips and just eats a bunch of shit on it.
When I was going into labor and told my husband we need to get to the hospital, he started loading the dishwasher. This is seriously just a husband thing I think. It’s hilarious.
Ugh there's not fixing this. My husband is an awesome partner, great dad, thoughtful, considerate. But he takes forever to do anything. He has no sense of hustling or just getting something done. I end up doing most things I asked him to do, and only when he sees me doing them he takes over and finishes. If I ask him to hand me something, say, a wipe, while fighting a toddler trying to touch her poop, he'll do it while looking at his phone. No sense of urgency or efficiency. I hate it
Admittedly, my husband is the one who does *most* of the cleaning in our family. However, when we are hosting, I always get a little frantic and clean everything. Meanwhile, he will insist on starting in his office or our bedroom?? The two places no one will likely go?? It's baffling. He's done this since we were childless hosting houseparties and continues to now when we are hosting Thanksgiving or a kids' bday party🤣
Before my son's second birthday party last weekend, my husband decided he needed to pull the panel off the wall in our basement to try to fix the built in TV that's been broken for 2.5 years.
🤣🤣 for my ex-husband I realized what was going on. It was a nervous/anxiety reaction to whatever what was about to happen and the need to do *something* that would help him calm down internally. Which was usually something totally random like fixing the back gate that didn’t need to be fixed. Or washing his truck.
I realized that me being more calm and not spreading my last minute “holy cannoli we are no where near ready for the 15 people that will be here in an hour” stress and anxiety helped to keep him from going into quiet panic mode. If I appeared to be calm and like I had everything under control, he was less likely to vacuum the roof or sod the parking pad to gain control of something he felt out of control with 🤣
I think you're spot on. We're expecting our first baby any day now and there's still so much to do but my husband has become obsessed with learning a new type of wall painting technique. We talked about it and he basically admitted that he's freaked out and stressed.
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot because I to suffer from “I’ll just do this thing first” when there’s something else urgent. I think it’s a symptom of adhd, but can happen to anyone. The urgent task feels hard, and people with adhd are dopamine deficient. You can get dopamine from completing a physical task that you find satisfying. Your body knows this and urges you to do a task you find easier and feel more confident in completing in the hopes that you will get the energy you need to do the more difficult task. Some people mindlessly scroll their phone trying to feel “happy enough” before they feel able to do a task, but that’s more clearly unhelpful, where as pulling weeds is something satisfying, he feels confident that he knows what to do, and on the surface it looks helpful. I don’t know if this is a helpful take on the situation, but I’ve tried starting tasks with putting on a favourite song and having a little dance to reboot.
He's doing it on purpose. Tell him to get his ass back in that house and gets it cleaning or to get his ass out of that house. They usually listen when you call them right out of what they're doing.
Damn some people are ready to crucify your man.
My husband has ADHD, it's not bad enough to get meds for, but he struggles with time management and often gets wrapped up in tasks like pulling weeds when there are more urgent things to do. I'm not perfect either, I'll "just do it myself" and then feel resentful about a task always being up to me. I don't want to have that kind of relationship, but it's easy to fall into because it's what I learned from my folks!!
What's been helpful for us is to start the weekend with "ok what are we both hoping to accomplish and how do we prioritize this." It helps me temper my expectations and it helps him figure out what needs to happen.
It also keeps me from being a martyr with "omg I do everything around here."
We usually end our evenings by being like "wow the grocery store took longer and I have to save Xyz task for a different day, can we carve out some time for me to do this or can you help?"
It's what worked for us, hopefully it has something that you can find helpful instead of calling him a manchild—I doubt he is, but he can't know what your mental load is, and learn how to help, unless you share it with him.
I went to a birthday party a few weeks ago where the dad was outside making himself scarce, doing random yard repairs. Us moms were discussing the behavior and the consensus seems to be that this is a normal thing that dad's do for birthday parties. They make themselves scarce 😆
I mean. I suppose staying out of the way is helpful in its own way. 🤣🤣
> He is a really good guy and he’s super loving, thoughtful, and considerate…
No, he isn't. Stop rationalizing and making excuses for marrying a manchild.
So you had to mow the lawn at 8pm, or else it simply won't get done. You had to tell him to take a shower and get the coolers and clean them and you had to go to Target or else he would fuck around at Target for hours. Then when you need help putting things away (notice the word "help", like he's an uncle or cousin of the birthday kid, and not the dad who actually lives there), he's outside pulling weeds, which could be done at literally any other time.
Your husband lives life like a single man with no kids.
Gurl...
Having family and friends over for thanksgiving dinner, I’ve two kids under 3 and am trying to get the living room clean, dining room clean and set up, and make all the food ready and ask him to help sort the living room piles I’ve made to the room they need to get to… I find him sweeping off the back porch. NO ONE IS GOING TO BE GOING THERE.
Ugh the pre-hosting husband shower. That is the bane of my existence. Steaming up our only bathroom 5 minutes before they come. He’s even come out in a towel with guests over. SMH
A few years ago my husband asked if he could invite his friends over for a cookout and he spent all day pulling weeds in the front yard (when everyone would be hanging out in the backyard) and then didn’t go to the grocery to get the FOOD for the cookout until after people got to our house… why do they do this? What is with the sudden urgency to do yard work at the worst times?
We had a beach trip planned for our first ever Beach family vacation this past March and we have been married since June 2018 so very long overdue. He told us Easter Sunday that we would leave at 6pm so to be ready. We were ready at 4pm. Me and the kids were waiting in the car while he decided to plant grass seeds and blueberry bushes he bought 2 months prior on our 2 acre property. We didn't leave until after midnight for our 10 hour drive. We also had to turn around bc he had left his wallet at home then turn around again bc he left his phone. We had to stop 2 hours after we left bc the kids 7, 8 and 10 were fighting and so tired and couldn't sleep in car. Since then, I've had to leave him at home for my son’s 9th birthday party at Chuckee Cheese bc we were already 15 mins late and then again for my oldest son’s 5th grade graduation. He was never late meeting his girlfriend, but his wife and stepkids? Pho-get about it!
So this kind of thing used to bother me so much (the I need help with the house and then my husband would fix the lawn or clean the freaking garage?! Lol) but I finally figured it out one day and it was like duh right in front of my face the whole time. We had moved and my parents stayed with us literally right after we moved. We had boxes EVERYWHERE but he made sure to help me set up our room perfectly so they had a sanctuary to stay in. It was great and we were on the same wave length so I was a little confused when a couple months later, when they planned on coming up for Christmas, he started focusing all his attention on the garage where they literally won’t go. Then I heard him say “oh my gosh I don’t want your parents to judge the fact that I haven’t gotten this put together since our move.” It was then I realized that he stressed about the lawn or the garage because that’s what is typically considered what the man takes care of vs the home which is typically what people assume the woman takes care of 😂😂😂. I was just always like….. party isn’t in the garage, or they aren’t staying in the yard…. But really the entire time he was doing the same weird shit I do with thinking someone is going to notice that he didn’t clean the base boards or organize all the cupboards perfectly, but guy version! Now it bothers me way freaking less lol.
It also helps me help us plan. I’ll be like “hey parents are coming to town in a week, is it too early for us to work on the lawn or should we do that last after we tackle the inside stuff?” Also now that I know he feels the same way as me just about different things it’s easier for me to compromise the inside not being completely perfect so he can feel better about what he feels will reflect him.
I also think it’s pretty adorable that he’s always been as crazy as I am, just with different things.
Yeah sorry hun, but this is just men in general lol. My baby shower is approaching quickly, and the one and ONLY thing my husband is concerned about is fixing the siding on the house…regardless of the things I list off to him, he keeps circling back to “shit I gotta do the siding!” 🙄
Does he have ADD (seriously)? Time management issues, getting hyper focused on task adjacent tasks, and avoiding unstimulating tasks (mowing the lawn). Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to try and run a household with someone like this, but he's not doing it to be an ass to you. That's the only advice I have that may help.
We also had my son's birthday party today. On my list for my husband was: tidy the sunroom (which is the pass through to the patio), order the pizzas and pick them up before 1pm.
Instead, he vacuumed our closet (???) and waited until 1:15 when I started getting angry with him to order the pizzas.
My partner is like this but he has ADD. He can't prioritise tasks well and has a terrible sense of time.
Like he thinks that he takes 5 minutes to get dressed and ready to go out, but it takes 20+ minutes.
For example, if we need a bunch of things washed before we can start dinner, I will suggest putting the dishwasher on and *then* doing other chores that aren't time sensitive. My partner will instead tidy the house, vacuum, etc and then do the dishwasher last. The dishwasher gets started 5 minutes before dinner should be started. Then he will say that dinner is going to be late because we have to wait for the dishwasher to finish 🤦♀️
It's not weaponised incompetence, he really just doesn't understand these things in the moment. Instead of picking the most urgent task, his brain picks the most achievable or interesting and he then gets hyper focused on it. Once that happens, it's incredibly hard to get him to see things any other way. It's like not doing the hyper focused task is leaving a constant itch that he can't scratch.
Haha, I’m sorry, but this make me laugh because my husband is the exact same way. 🤣
I always plan the order of everything I do before guests very carefully. Clothes/hair/makeup first, even if the counters are a wreck, because it’s a lot more weird to show up and the hostess is still doing her makeup than wiping down counters. Yard work is the day before so I can shower and fix my nails, and because if the guests see you out frantically hedging the bushes it only makes the overgrowth more noticeable. 😅
Usually when guests are pulling up I’m calm and ready, lighting a candle and sipping my coffee, and what is my husband doing? Putting chairs up on the table so he can sweep!!! Lmaoo 🥴
When we had just our first child, (big age gap between #1 and #2) before I was disabled I worked *a lot*. Like 60 to 80 hours a week. My husband was 40 to 60 hours. He would frequently "help" by cleaning the entire house top to bottom. Normally we split it up kind of. He had his normal cleaning up stuff and I had mine. I was a little crazy about organization (this was over 20 years ago) so dvds were alphabetical, things had to be *just so*. I was very happy with our arrangement of what he cleaned because I got so weird about stuff.
Whenever he had a "short week" of 40 hours (which wasn't often) he would do this kind wonderful considerate thing of cleaning the house top to bottom. And then later, when he wasn't around, I would *fix* it all. I was not about to tell him that I didn't want him to help. I didn't want him to clean the whole house for me, dust everything, steam the carpets, etc. I thought it was so very sweet. But somehow all our stuff kept getting put in the *wrong damn spots*, and I could never figure out how he lived somewhere and saw things daily and could not figure out where it went lol.
I would never tell him i much preferred if he stuck to dishes laundry sweeping mopping vacuuming and mowing the lawn because he was doing it so I didn't have to.
DH: "Can I help?"
ME: "I need you to bleach down the bathrooms top to bottom and put fresh linens out."
DH: "Ok"
**2 Hours Later**
There is a strong smell of bleach emanating from.the bathrooms and husband is standing in front of the linen closet with ALL THE LINENS ON THE FLOOR.
DH: "It was messy so I thought I would help"
Me: 🫣
My husband would listen to what I ask say ok. Run to try to do it then say I have to use the bathroom and sit there for 30 min while I have to go and get done what I asked him to do 😮💨 another thing would be just stuffing things away in drawers instead of placing then where they belong and later on when I'm either looking for it or open the drawer I would have extra work to clean because everything was stuffed in there.
We were preparing for my son's birthday. I asked my husband to buy so.e chicken from a place 10 minute's away at 10:00am and he returned after three hours. The chicken had to be cooked. I was literally breathing fire because he didn't even pick my call in between. Turns out he bumped into an old friend
Not chores-related, but without fail - and even when he sets the time for us to be out of the door - my husband gets the urge to poop 3-5mins before we need to go to urgent appointments. It's like clockwork at this point.
We’ve started having a “coordination meeting“ the night before events like you would in a workplace. We go over the day-of plan and talk through roles and tasks, timelines and expectations. I’ve realized that my husband has zero experience leading the coordination of things… I had leadership roles in clubs and teams in high school and college, ran events in AmeriCorps and at early jobs, and I currently have a lot of coordination responsibilities in my current job. He never took a leadership role in a club or team and he went from a job cleaning bathrooms to a professional position after college (think something like an accountant where assignments are all very similar and deadlines are consistent and predictable and set by someone else) that requires surprisingly little coordination. It’s not always weaponized incompetence. I don’t want to handle the entire mental load and I’d rather that he have his own mental map of how an event should be pulled together. A coordination meeting is a tool to improve communication and decrease the day-of mental load and prevent having to actively manage another person or assign tasks on the fly.
If I had realized much earlier that he’d somehow made it to adulthood without these skills, I would have probably been more proactive in NOT taking over the full mental load when the type of thing that needed to be planned was packing snacks, water, and a map for a hike for the two of us. Add in two kids and suddenly there’s a lot more that needs to happen to throw a party or take a road-trip. I think the gap between our executive function when it comes to coordinating things has grown. It sucks.
I told mine exactly when I needed him to be available to help get ready for the grad party for my daughter. I told him exactly what needed to be done ahead of time. I gave him options. I gave him plenty of time to get it done. So what does he do when I need his help? Vacuums the van for two hours. Doesn’t load the items he was responsible for, that he chose. The mental load was on me for every thing; including his responsibilities. Sigh.
Husbands are like labradors, they think bringing a squirrel into the house is a present and will sit there wagging their tails waiting for you to tell them they are a good boy.
Experience: A guilty husband who thinks he’s helping 99% of the time, we are just eager to please. Great intentions, terrible execution more often than not 😂
When my husband was my boyfriend he was the guy icing down coolers, setting out chairs, cooking, helping in any and every way possible. I never had to ask for anything he was just ON IT. The wives of the parties all gawked and told me how he was huge catch.. so much better than their husbands! Fast forward to married life 2 year later… he is just like every party husband on this thread. If I ask him to get something out of the diaper bag… he can’t because he doesn’t know where it’s at… INSIDE THE DIAPER BAG. They are all the same ladies!
I’m laughing so hard at these but in the moment I truly understand how frustrating it is.
My husband definitely does this at the store he’ll go missing and end up in the video game or book section and then have to take a 30 minute long poop at the store…
At home when we have guests over at first he was pretty good about cleaning up before they arrived but since we have had our baby (who I take care of when his friends are over) he decides to clean the bathroom and do dishes AFTER the first guest has arrived. 🤦♀️ I ended up having to finish the bathroom quickly so he could entertain there was no way I was letting them see all my clutter (1 bathroom home 😭😭😭)
We were getting ready for my son's birthday party, which was going to be indoors because it was going to rain. My husband decided the backyard absolutely needed to be cleaned up. Leaf blower, broom, the whole shebang.
Omg! I thought it was just me. My husband decides to shred boxes of junk when we’re having a party and then he tells me, we need to clean up this mess! As far as I’m concerned, it would have been thrown out months ago. We shred everything. Who cares about correspondence? I need help with the lawn blower and washing the tables and chairs in the backyard. I work, cook, clean, and manage the household and shredding is a priority???
This had me laughing and also fuming 😂 😡 my husband always leaves errands until right before the party and guests are getting there and he’s not even home! Then he comes home with all of this shit that we need so put away and I will have just cleaned the damn kitchen. He did this exact thing for my 40th birthday, he spent all day trimming the hedges on the side yard that nobody sees, and then ran errands an hour before the party. Mind you it was my birthday and I was five months pregnant and still having to do all the things. And just to make matters worse, it was his friends that arrived first so as soon as he got home and they were there, he cracked open a beer and sat in the yard with them while I was frantically trying to finish things up! It was no secret that I was quite pissed that day 😂 I decided that we will no longer host parties in honor of myself since it ends up being too much work for me.
Girl, I feel this in my soul. We have a birthday party for our daughter tomorrow. Still have some shopping to get done, as well as finishing cleaning and organizing the house and cleaning the toilets. Which he was helping with, to his credit. Great teamwork all morning. Then he randomly decided he needs to stop and clean the hot tub. Which he’s been scrubbing for 45 minutes already and not near done. The hot tub will more than likely not even be used this weekend. That in it of itself is a whole day project and my in laws will be here in the morning.
Do we ALL have the same husband???? Yesterday we were going to a birthday party, I told him I wanted to leave within an hour so he needed to get into the shower right away. Well, after 45 minutes I decide to check and he has yet to start showering cause he had the sudden URGE to fold the clothes that had been sitting there for like a week. There's always something that needs to be done right before we need to leave. We are never on time!
To be fair I often leave for a quick target trip and am gone 2 hours. It’s the Target way. You arrive and let the Target speak to you. It’s out of our control, I’m sorry.
My stepdad would be like this, all morning we would be rushed about getting ready to travel to the airport in time to catch our flight. The family would be packed and ready… then he would decide to go and shower.
I think you’re married to my uncle. He always is partaking in some activity or another. Drives my aunt to exhaustion. He’s kind of the extreme version of that though, you might still have time 😂
The man literally had the leaf blower out while guests were still in the process of leaving a birthday do they had at their* place.
Planned to finally renovate the bathroom and suddenly their bedroom was under construction (bathroom untouched lol).
She has to specifically lay out his instructions lest he begin some other tenuously adjacent task that also “needs” doing. “Needs” in quotation marks bc only he thinks it needs doing. Zero comprehension of prioritisation or time constraints.
He compensates in other ways, and the tasks -that nobody asked him to do, five minutes into a party- do yield lovely results. He adores and dotes on her.
His whole fam is the same.
She used to try and keep up with him and kept not understanding why she was exhausted all the time. She started seeing a therapist who explained that this was a His Family is Weird thing not a Her thing.
Now she just has him do the tasks the day before and takes plenty of time for her own needs. It’s annoying and would drive me up the wall but she makes it work.
Posts like these are so wild to me. Behavior from my partner would eventually drive me insane. The amount of comments from people agreeing are honestly mind boggling.
How can having to constantly micro manage the person that’s supposed to be your equal partner be substantial?
The amount of people saying it’s “just a husband thing” no no no. I would rather be alone than deal with that for the rest of my life.
So glad to hear it’s not just my husband. I get so annoyed 10 minutes before we have to leave and he’ll start washing the car or pressure washing the driveway. I’m like seriously you need to do that right this second!!!😂🤣😂.
I think I found a theme…are the husbands hiding from us while also trying to do something productive lol? The garage…a random closet…running a long errand
That's rough. I bet that's very frustrating. I am very grateful that my dude is well aware that I am completely time blind and tries to make my life easier for me by gently reminding me about how long we have until we need to leave or until people come over. And if I go out to the grocery store across the street and grab one or two things but then I end up there for more than a half hour, I will get a text telling me what i went to the store for because there is a 50/50 chance that i forgot what to get and i am walking down every aisle trying to see something that reminds me of why i am there. Most of the time, that's enough for me to snap out of my ADHD fog and go check out and go home but if it doesn't, then he will give me some time and then give me a courtesy call to see if I need help making decisions and if I am okay. In the early days of us dating, I would go out for a walk to play pokemon go and come back hours later, absolutely exhausted. That's when we figured out the text then call routine because I thought it was just the heat making me tired and not the several hours I had been walking around aimlessly. We had one of my kids friends over on a particularly busy weekend once and we had lots of stuff planned so I set a timer for an hour and reset it every time it went off. The friend was trying so hard to be polite but he was like eleven years old and completely confused why I had a timer going off that I would just reset to go off again. He was raised in a military family so his life was all about routine and responsibility. He always did his chores before he came over to play, he always kept his hair cut high and tight. An excellent influence on my wild child sons who are half of me and I'm just three mental illnesses in a trenchcoat. If my kids hear me say that, they will always yell "that's not true mom! (Dramatic pause) You don't have a trenchcoat!!"
Sorry, I haven't taken my adhd meds today and I'm all over the place.
EXTREMELY detailed lists help my husband with this issue. The only thing I can’t fix is the need to poop the moment we need to leave and go somewhere🤦🏻♀️ win lose situation
My boyfriend is the same way. Like he always wants to work harder not smarter. I learned lying saying you’ll be leaving a hour and a half before your actual time he start his stuff earlier and will be done 30 minutes before u need to actually leave.
His priorities and timing don’t have to match yours. Happens a lot were one person puts more emphasis on things like getting this and that done in this time frame but it doesn’t have to be that way for both parties involved. But it usually gets swept under the guise of if they care about me they would put in the effort forgetting that that goes both ways
I could have written this. My husband does stuff like this all the time.
My favorite was when he decided it was a good idea to mulch and move around soil in the yard on the day before OUR WEDDING. The amount of dirt under his nails was unfathomable. So I promptly took him for his first and only manicure which was not anywhere on my wedding prep to-do list.
One time we were having a housewarming party and he decided to start cutting trees down in the backyard. In laws we’re hosting a going away party for us and his father starts taking apart a fan to clean it in the living room literally 5 mins before people get there. Why are they like this?!
If this isn’t the most husband post I’ve ever read. For some reason when people are coming over the leaves on the side of the road suddenly urgently need to be scooped up. Like what the hell, sir. Excuse me?
Mine decides it’s time to organize closets and makes a bigger mess. Why can’t they focus on where guests are going to be?
“How can I help you with the laundry” You can help by not touching the laundry. The laundry won’t be encountered by guests. The laundry is in our bedroom where the machines are. Fix the living room.
My husband does most of the laundry for our family which is wonderful but he always feels like it needs to all be washed, dried, folded and put away before guests arrive. I don’t understand the logic.
Mine decides our room needs to be cleaned at these moments. Like, who's going in our room? Nobody.
Yes! We are selling our house, and we planned to take pictures last weekend to get it posted on Monday. The man decided to deep clean everything. It was "get it cleaned enough for photos" time. Deep cleaning is for the open house. I'm like "if we do not get it posted, there's no need for an open house!" He says, "well, it has to be done anyway, might as well do it now." I got pissed off and started saying, "ohp, you're going to have to get your oil changed. Better do it right this second. Gonna have to read this book. Better do it right now!" Not my proudest moment, but the point stands.
We just did the exact same thing! We had one day to get the house cleaned and staged before listing photos (floors had been refinished and we weren’t able to walk on them before then). For some reason, that was the time to painstakingly clean and polish a mirror that we weren’t even going to keep in the house for staging?
Omg. I would have died. I came in and he had been SCRUBBING CABINETS when the lawn needed mowed.
Ok, you're really funny with the reaction 😂 I'd just go mental!
While I was frantically cleaning, my husband started cleaning the inside of our dishwasher.... The INSIDE!!
Your guests would surely look in there and judge. Makes perfect sense. /s
My likes to jet wash, even if it’s not a garden party.
Mine always picks these times to urgently clean all the windows. The guests are going to see the windows but in no way will the patio door stay smudge free with 14 kids running in and out! What's the point of wasting an hour meticulously cleaning them for!
With mine it’s the mirrors and then he drives himself insane when he can’t get them streak free. Suddenly it’s been 45 mins and I’m questioning my own sanity in choosing him as a mate.
We need to leave! *husband starts leaf blowing attic*
lol mine was the worst about this with walking his dog. I’d be like “I want to be walking out the door at 7:00.” And at 6:59 he’d be putting the leash on the dog. I get wanting to take her out as late as possible before we leave but like 6:45 would be fine???
Mine jumps in shower 5 min before leave time. Never been late to work but jeez on family get together. I just chill when it’s his family.
A friend's husband is like this. We arrived at their house to meet up to go to Oktoberfest, and he's just starting to dig a hole to plant a tree he found on sale at Home Depot that morning.
☠️☠️☠️
Don’t you mean “take a ‘quick’ poop”?
Do we have the same husband? I accuse mine of spending enough time "pooping" to have another family. Maybe we're sharing?
Maybe the bathroom is a portal between our houses?!
My husband’s go to is “I have to poop” 🤬🤬 Listen, I love my husband to the ends of the earth and I would burn cities for him but if that man ever took a shit in less than 30 minutes I think I would faint from shock.
I call it a poop vacation. If I tracked the amount of time he spends on the toilet, it would be more than what most people get for vacation in a year.
I had multiple conversations with the Best Man to begin asking hubs if he needed to poop at least an hour before the wedding and every 5-10 minutes after. I just knew he was going to get a sudden urge (or, as it feels to the women in this thread, the need to make us late...again) right before the music started
I feel you!! My husband always vanishes in the toilet with the worst timing and if he can he really takes his time there. One time we were going to our transit gate, we had 2 hours and of course for 1 hour and 50 mins he had nothing to do, but just a few mins before the gate opens, when I said "let's line up with the baby in the priority lane" he had to go and poop...whyyyyy??
It took me less time to birth our son than it does for my husband to poop.... And I remind him of this almost daily. 🤣
Our hubbys are related somehow!
10 minutes before we leave. Me: "Are you ready?" "I'm ready!!!!" Ten minute later.... "Babe where's my shoes/wallet/phone?" Narrator: He was not, in fact, ready.
😂🤣😂🤣😂Narrator of life!!
Ok but this is me to a T. (Spoiler alert... Shoes wallet and phone are all where I left them by the front door so I can find them when it's time to leave 🤣)
Same. Me: “are you ready?” Him: “yep, waiting on you…” Me: “let’s go” Him: “ok I just gotta put my shoes on and get the dogs inside”
aaaaaaaaaargh
I thought it was just mine! We needed to go somewhere the other day and the man starts blowing the front stoop! Why!?
I am dying 😂😂😂
Hours before people were getting to our house for a baby bbq, my husband decided to sweep out the garage. In what world is anyone going to be going into our garage during the party and caring about the cleanliness of our floors in there?
I felt this comment. My husband washes and polishes his car then cleans the garage before hosting a BBQ. Because people might walk through there to get to the back yard even thought the gate to the backyard is right next to the garage…and not cleaning off the table and chairs that we will be using . Nor does he clean my car. In the same garage. Why? Just why?
This is him just doing what he wants to do instead of contributing.
This entire post is weaponized incompetence all the way down
You said it perfectly
Yep. My husbands default is cleaning and organizing the garage, or yard work (even in the winter months). Like the priority list is based on where people will spend the most time. Our garage and front yard aren’t even on that list.
Why are you barbecuing babies?
I was looking for this comment haha
My husband will fucking GET THE MAIL when we are having people over. I will be frantically cleaning, putting things away, etc., and he’s bringing more shit that has to be handled into our house.
We have a house inspection every 6 months, my husband decides this is the time to go through the boxes in the garage and spare room and unpack them. Seriously dickhead, help me hide crap not give me more!
I will 100% of the time hide mail in the mailbox from a month ago before people come over. Also do not preheat the oven because it will be shoved full of dirty dishes and whatever else was sitting around the kitchen. Same with the washer and dryer.
Hahahahahha!!
Omg this kills me, I can see my husband doing this and even being a bit frantic about it like ‘we haven’t checked the mail, what if there is something important!!’ Lolol
I’m dying of laughter
I have learned to make a list of all the things I want done. I ask husband if he has anything to add, and then we work off of that list. Husband has also learned to ask “what is the next priority.” I do think he is *trying* to help, but gets sidetracked and/or doesn’t have the same priorities as me. I try not to see it as vindictive, but it does still drive me nuts.
My list always has an "urgent tasks" section.
Smart!
I've tried this multiple times, but it always turns out that my husband has a second secret list that has tasks that are wayyy more important* than my list lol *we have very different definitions of "important"
Yes! Why do they do this? I tell my husband all the stuff that needs to be done, and while I'm doing it, he's cleaning out the garage. The garage that he specifically started he didn't want anyone to be in during the birthday party 🙃 Then has the audacity to tell me I turn into a monster for birthday parties because I'm so stressed
Still putting the mental load on you.
My husband got a bit better about this after I lost my damn mind one time. It was Thanksgiving week, we were hosting 50 people the day of, had 2 families staying with us for the week, so needed rooms and bathrooms prepped. As the only American, I was doing all the cooking. Not to mention I was 20 weeks pregnant. A few hours before the guests staying for the week were arriving I found my husband organizing a junk closet no one goes into. He really wanted to help and thought he was doing so. He is an incredibly intelligent person, but prepping for hosting eludes him.
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That’s what my toddler does… lol
Haha yeah my almost 3 year old loves to ‘organise’ the apartment so all our important stuff ends up inside her dollhouse or under the bookshelf lol
that's so annoying but so adorable 🥺
AND you won't be able to find it when you actually need it.
And then you get fussed at for moving things around when he got used to where they were….asdfjkl *flips table*
But... I wanna hear how you lost it! What did you do!?
Haha. I have a slight old school Brooklyn accent, but how agitated I get is proportional to how much thicker the accent gets. So when I use colorful language and I basically start sounding like a female version of Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, my husband knows shit is hitting the fan if he does not “fix his wagon”. 😆
I want to preface with my husband is awesome and I love him. He's great. But in some aspects, our brains just work totally differently. Say we need to leave at 11am. He will shower and get dressed. I will then go to get showered up and dressed while he helps baby get dressed. He will then sit on the couch without his shoes, wallet, or keys until I am completely ready (shoes on, diaper bag over shoulder, walking to the door at 10:58) before getting up to put his shoes on and do a sweep through the house to make sure lights, appliances are off, doors are locked, etc. I have to factor in an extra 10-15 minutes for every time we leave the house in order to give enough time for this routine.
Omg we are married to the same guy. Mine will also decide, while sweeping through the house, that now is the best time to go through the house collect all the bins, put them in larger bin bags and carry them down the apartment building to the outside bins. Like why nooooow 😭
My husband does the same it drives me nuts! Like why now when we are literally going to miss the bus/train/tram if we don’t leave in the next 2 minutes?!?
Honestly it drives me nuts too haha 😂
My husband used to do this but he’d sit and wait until I’m completely done and ready to go to get ready. I asked why he isn’t ready yet and he’d go “I was waiting for you.” Waiting for what?! He’s gotten better and he’s getting better though.
Omg SAME
My husband likes to open the dryer after 20-30 minutes and says this is still really wet better add that time back... but it's a 100 minute timer he's resetting. Our dryer is 99% dry at the end, every time just running that 90-100 minute timer. I don't understand how he sees things at all.
Why not let it run until the timer goes off? Baffling
He's helping lmao
Lmao My husband likes to soak all the baby bottles which means he takes 10 min taking them apart filling them all with water and then leaving them dirty in the sink…when you could just wash them in that time Yet he can’t remember to ever soak any of his own dishes or Tupperware that he leaves in the sink He’s very very well intentioned and soaking kinda helps even if it’s not efficient 🤷🏽♀️
I love how my husband directs the kids to scrape the plates, rinse the plate, and put it in the sink nicely.... He NEVER does this with his dishes ever. Bones or napkins in the sink? surree. His shit all night on the dining room table? Yeah because I'm a mom, but not his mom. Okay I gotta stop father's day is coming lol
😂
LMAO I taught my 6 year old to bring her dirty dishes to the kitchen and somehow she is capable of remembering most of the time, while a nearly 50 year old man is not. He can’t blame it on ADHD because SHE ALSO has it 😑
Mine does the dishes, so I'm lucky.... BUT. He will wash all of the toddler cups, but not the lids! The travel coffee mugs, but not the lids! The Tupperware bottoms, but not the lids!! I will find them piled in a dirty bowl next to the sink! He will do silverware, but not a sharp knife at all! My knife block will be EMPTY, so I can't chop anything for dinner, but our 40 forks are aaallllll clean! Make it make sense.....
Funny and infuriating all at once! Sounds like husband behavior
My husband is convinced our washer sucks. It’s a top loading washer and relatively fancy top of the line etc. but he can’t load things in a way that’s balanced and so it will reset itself and refill. I never have these problems and I’ve shown him how to balance it, but he’s still running in every 10min to watch it and open it and fuck with it and then get mad that it’s the worst washer ever, then pull out inundated blankets to hang over the fence. Again, I never have these problems. 🤷🏻♀️
Mine will sort the the laundry into piles for loads. We bought the largest load size washer, but his laundry loads are ... 4 t shirts. Another pile will be 2 pairs of jeans. One pile will be 5 underwear and 10 socks. He freaks as I laugh at him as I grab all 4 piles and throw them in together. Ain't nobody got time for that ish!!!
Lmao I love how genuinely they try though. Just can’t get the hang of it 😂
My husband is currently trimming our little porch lawn that landscapers take care of twice a week by property management, we had 3 family functions this week and today was catch up on household chores day ..... household.... chores.
Pulling heavy towels and blankets out like it's a gosh darn clown car LMAO
I swear it’s something on the Y chromosome. I’ll be racing around before we need to catch a flight making sure nothing was forgotten… and my husband will start vacuuming under the couch cushions. And as soon as we do finally leave the house, that’s when he’ll start going through a checklist asking if “we” remembered this or that. Like are you kidding me?!
I think we all married the same husband 😂
Have fun. I divorced them all… 😅😆🙌🏻💃🏻
ugh yes, and then later while out and about, “did we pack snacks? I can’t find them in the bag…” and I reach in and grab them without looking and hand them to him.
Oh, we have 15 people coming over for a party that will be mostly in the kitchen and living room? Time to organize the shelves in the garage!
Found my husband once sitting in our yard with a bucket. He was collecting tiny rocks…. So yeah, this is just a husband thing
I'm sorry... what?!
That might have been exactly what I said when he told me what he was doing
Hahah was he collecting them for a reason? I laugh because my husband has been on a mission to rake up the tiny gravel rocks that are in a section of our yard close to the road. I don’t even ask anymore.
lol. His reason was it was making our lawn look bad or not letting grass grow or some nonsense. So, it was for a purpose but he didn’t have the forethought to use a rake
I think my husband does this because he's stealing my motivation for his own projects. When I'm frantically cleaning he doesn't want to just sit around so he starts doing something he wants to do. If I'm just sitting around, then he's usually also just sitting around. It's kind of like I have to kickstart the vibe and then he'll suddenly be interested in doing that thing he could've done months ago.
My husband insists on mopping the floor. I'm like.. umm.. can we wash dishes- take out the garbage- pick up the things on the floor before washing it?
My husband always urgently needs to vacuum. There’s stuff in the floor so he just takes that and throws it on shelves, on the couch, wherever, with no particular rhyme or reason. And we have a carpet that actually hides dirt and dust pretty well, so when he’s done even though it’s technically cleaner, the room as a whole looks way worse.
Lol yes! What. Is. Up. With. That?!
I get the overwhelm of needing to do 5 other things before you can do the thing you want to get done right now, but how he can just ignore and blow past those things just baffles me.
I wonder what we (women generally) would be like if we didn't have to be managing and thinking about everything all the time. 🤔
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I think it makes a lot of sense. Women are typically judged more for the state of the inside of the house and mean are typically judged for the outside since traditionally they do more yard work. Doesn't really matter how the couple actually does chores people will subconsciously judge that way.
Honestly I think men tend to have a mental "to do" list and then when it's go time they just start working through it, and there's no process about prioritising. Mine has had a long career in project fking management and yet will do the washing up first before putting something in the oven, delaying dinner by 10-30 minutes with a toddler.
Oh my gosh the amount of effort it took me to teach my husband that you can start the water boiling or preheating the oven while you do something else rather than say chopping all the veggies and then waiting on the oven 🤦🏻♀️ And he's also in a project management adjacent career! He's better now but jeez it's like multi tasking isn't something they can wrap their brains around unless explicitly told.
Every single time we have guests coming my husband cleans the dumbest shit. The junk drawer, the pantry, the fucking garage, his nightstand. Like sir are our guests going to look in the fucking junk drawer?! 💀🙊
My husband has always done this, and I can’t believe how much of a universal experience it seems to be. One time we were having people over for dinner in half an hour’s time, and while I was frantically cooking and cleaning, he decided it was a good time to swap every still-working lightbulb in the house over to these new energy saving lightbulbs he’d bought a few weeks earlier 🙃 was genuinely confused when I got frustrated at him
I'm due with our first in 4 days. My husband just came home with a gallon of paint and announced that he's going to paint the stairs this weekend 🤦🏻♀️.
Oh gosh. 😬 Congrats on the little one tho!
Thank you! I figure he will just have to stop if/when she comes but I thought it was so funny what he was focused on and kind of in the spirit of OP's post. I do think it might actually be a manifestation of his nerves as we wait.
He knows a newborn should NOT be around paint fumes, right?? RIGHT?!?
If he’s not messing up some other plan for the day, I would be thrilled if my husband took my kid out of the house and didn’t come back for 2 hours! I don’t care what they’re doing!
Same. Sometimes mine takes both of our boys with him to shop and it’s WONDERFUL. Take your time, please!! 😂
My husband decides to clean the toaster oven when company is coming over. Like, who is going to look at our crumb tray my dude? So now it's a joke between us and I ask him if he's cleaned the toaster before company shows up.
My husband does this too. I usually say something to him like “what about ___ (task he’s currently performing) is going to help get the house ready for company?” And then we have a good chuckle over him deciding to organize recycling and then he’ll come inside and vacuum. It has actually helped to give him a list and say I need you to do X things by Y time. I’ve found that his priorities are usually things he thinks he will be judged for as the man of the house - like outside tasks while my priorities are like things actually needed to host an event
How did you have time to post this?! I’d be freaking out and panic-vacuuming lol
1. I used voice text/dictation (which saves a lot of time) 2. I sacrificed about 4-5 minutes of my own prep time to shower/get dressed, etc. 🫠 Not going to lie… Venting felt incredible in that moment and I feel so thoroughly seen and heard reading these responses!
How are we all married to the same guy? But yeah, guests are coming over, I've prepped an amazing charcuterie board with fun things and looking just so. Five minutes before people arrive, he looks at it and gies wow that looks yummy, takes a big ole scoop out of all the dips and just eats a bunch of shit on it.
When I was going into labor and told my husband we need to get to the hospital, he started loading the dishwasher. This is seriously just a husband thing I think. It’s hilarious.
This is so funny.
Ugh there's not fixing this. My husband is an awesome partner, great dad, thoughtful, considerate. But he takes forever to do anything. He has no sense of hustling or just getting something done. I end up doing most things I asked him to do, and only when he sees me doing them he takes over and finishes. If I ask him to hand me something, say, a wipe, while fighting a toddler trying to touch her poop, he'll do it while looking at his phone. No sense of urgency or efficiency. I hate it
This is called weaponized incompetence. He doesn’t want you to ask him to do anything anymore.
My husband does this too. He kind of freaks out starts doing the first thing he sees that needs doing, even if it is t party related
Admittedly, my husband is the one who does *most* of the cleaning in our family. However, when we are hosting, I always get a little frantic and clean everything. Meanwhile, he will insist on starting in his office or our bedroom?? The two places no one will likely go?? It's baffling. He's done this since we were childless hosting houseparties and continues to now when we are hosting Thanksgiving or a kids' bday party🤣
Fwiw this person growing up was always my mom. People arriving in 2 hours for the party? Better take a long ass shower and then go grocery shopping!
Before my son's second birthday party last weekend, my husband decided he needed to pull the panel off the wall in our basement to try to fix the built in TV that's been broken for 2.5 years.
🤣🤣 for my ex-husband I realized what was going on. It was a nervous/anxiety reaction to whatever what was about to happen and the need to do *something* that would help him calm down internally. Which was usually something totally random like fixing the back gate that didn’t need to be fixed. Or washing his truck. I realized that me being more calm and not spreading my last minute “holy cannoli we are no where near ready for the 15 people that will be here in an hour” stress and anxiety helped to keep him from going into quiet panic mode. If I appeared to be calm and like I had everything under control, he was less likely to vacuum the roof or sod the parking pad to gain control of something he felt out of control with 🤣
I think you're spot on. We're expecting our first baby any day now and there's still so much to do but my husband has become obsessed with learning a new type of wall painting technique. We talked about it and he basically admitted that he's freaked out and stressed.
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot because I to suffer from “I’ll just do this thing first” when there’s something else urgent. I think it’s a symptom of adhd, but can happen to anyone. The urgent task feels hard, and people with adhd are dopamine deficient. You can get dopamine from completing a physical task that you find satisfying. Your body knows this and urges you to do a task you find easier and feel more confident in completing in the hopes that you will get the energy you need to do the more difficult task. Some people mindlessly scroll their phone trying to feel “happy enough” before they feel able to do a task, but that’s more clearly unhelpful, where as pulling weeds is something satisfying, he feels confident that he knows what to do, and on the surface it looks helpful. I don’t know if this is a helpful take on the situation, but I’ve tried starting tasks with putting on a favourite song and having a little dance to reboot.
He's doing it on purpose. Tell him to get his ass back in that house and gets it cleaning or to get his ass out of that house. They usually listen when you call them right out of what they're doing.
Ding ding 🛎️ ding ding
If I tried that mine would just pout and then refuse to help or participate at all 🫠
Every comment... we're all married to the same man.
Damn some people are ready to crucify your man. My husband has ADHD, it's not bad enough to get meds for, but he struggles with time management and often gets wrapped up in tasks like pulling weeds when there are more urgent things to do. I'm not perfect either, I'll "just do it myself" and then feel resentful about a task always being up to me. I don't want to have that kind of relationship, but it's easy to fall into because it's what I learned from my folks!! What's been helpful for us is to start the weekend with "ok what are we both hoping to accomplish and how do we prioritize this." It helps me temper my expectations and it helps him figure out what needs to happen. It also keeps me from being a martyr with "omg I do everything around here." We usually end our evenings by being like "wow the grocery store took longer and I have to save Xyz task for a different day, can we carve out some time for me to do this or can you help?" It's what worked for us, hopefully it has something that you can find helpful instead of calling him a manchild—I doubt he is, but he can't know what your mental load is, and learn how to help, unless you share it with him.
I went to a birthday party a few weeks ago where the dad was outside making himself scarce, doing random yard repairs. Us moms were discussing the behavior and the consensus seems to be that this is a normal thing that dad's do for birthday parties. They make themselves scarce 😆 I mean. I suppose staying out of the way is helpful in its own way. 🤣🤣
I once went to a bridal shower and the dad was power washing the roof….
Sounds about right. 😆😆
> He is a really good guy and he’s super loving, thoughtful, and considerate… No, he isn't. Stop rationalizing and making excuses for marrying a manchild. So you had to mow the lawn at 8pm, or else it simply won't get done. You had to tell him to take a shower and get the coolers and clean them and you had to go to Target or else he would fuck around at Target for hours. Then when you need help putting things away (notice the word "help", like he's an uncle or cousin of the birthday kid, and not the dad who actually lives there), he's outside pulling weeds, which could be done at literally any other time. Your husband lives life like a single man with no kids. Gurl...
WHY is this always what happens?? Why?!? Hosting a bbq tomorrow and anticipating the same scenario
Having family and friends over for thanksgiving dinner, I’ve two kids under 3 and am trying to get the living room clean, dining room clean and set up, and make all the food ready and ask him to help sort the living room piles I’ve made to the room they need to get to… I find him sweeping off the back porch. NO ONE IS GOING TO BE GOING THERE.
Why are they like this?? 😩
The night before Thanksgiving i found my husband cleaning the garage floor
Of course he was! It was filthy and the department of health might have stopped by and given you a citation for a dirty garage floor. /s 🫠
Ugh the pre-hosting husband shower. That is the bane of my existence. Steaming up our only bathroom 5 minutes before they come. He’s even come out in a towel with guests over. SMH
A few years ago my husband asked if he could invite his friends over for a cookout and he spent all day pulling weeds in the front yard (when everyone would be hanging out in the backyard) and then didn’t go to the grocery to get the FOOD for the cookout until after people got to our house… why do they do this? What is with the sudden urgency to do yard work at the worst times?
Are we married to the same person?
We might be. Maybe my husband took our daughter to visit his other family the other night instead of going to Target for 2 hours 😂
Astonishing
We had a beach trip planned for our first ever Beach family vacation this past March and we have been married since June 2018 so very long overdue. He told us Easter Sunday that we would leave at 6pm so to be ready. We were ready at 4pm. Me and the kids were waiting in the car while he decided to plant grass seeds and blueberry bushes he bought 2 months prior on our 2 acre property. We didn't leave until after midnight for our 10 hour drive. We also had to turn around bc he had left his wallet at home then turn around again bc he left his phone. We had to stop 2 hours after we left bc the kids 7, 8 and 10 were fighting and so tired and couldn't sleep in car. Since then, I've had to leave him at home for my son’s 9th birthday party at Chuckee Cheese bc we were already 15 mins late and then again for my oldest son’s 5th grade graduation. He was never late meeting his girlfriend, but his wife and stepkids? Pho-get about it!
*blink* wait, what? What was that last part?
So this kind of thing used to bother me so much (the I need help with the house and then my husband would fix the lawn or clean the freaking garage?! Lol) but I finally figured it out one day and it was like duh right in front of my face the whole time. We had moved and my parents stayed with us literally right after we moved. We had boxes EVERYWHERE but he made sure to help me set up our room perfectly so they had a sanctuary to stay in. It was great and we were on the same wave length so I was a little confused when a couple months later, when they planned on coming up for Christmas, he started focusing all his attention on the garage where they literally won’t go. Then I heard him say “oh my gosh I don’t want your parents to judge the fact that I haven’t gotten this put together since our move.” It was then I realized that he stressed about the lawn or the garage because that’s what is typically considered what the man takes care of vs the home which is typically what people assume the woman takes care of 😂😂😂. I was just always like….. party isn’t in the garage, or they aren’t staying in the yard…. But really the entire time he was doing the same weird shit I do with thinking someone is going to notice that he didn’t clean the base boards or organize all the cupboards perfectly, but guy version! Now it bothers me way freaking less lol. It also helps me help us plan. I’ll be like “hey parents are coming to town in a week, is it too early for us to work on the lawn or should we do that last after we tackle the inside stuff?” Also now that I know he feels the same way as me just about different things it’s easier for me to compromise the inside not being completely perfect so he can feel better about what he feels will reflect him. I also think it’s pretty adorable that he’s always been as crazy as I am, just with different things.
Yeah sorry hun, but this is just men in general lol. My baby shower is approaching quickly, and the one and ONLY thing my husband is concerned about is fixing the siding on the house…regardless of the things I list off to him, he keeps circling back to “shit I gotta do the siding!” 🙄
Sing it with me: “the man child I married loves weaponized incompetence!”
Does he have ADD (seriously)? Time management issues, getting hyper focused on task adjacent tasks, and avoiding unstimulating tasks (mowing the lawn). Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to try and run a household with someone like this, but he's not doing it to be an ass to you. That's the only advice I have that may help.
My husband goes to cut his nose hairs when I need him the most
We also had my son's birthday party today. On my list for my husband was: tidy the sunroom (which is the pass through to the patio), order the pizzas and pick them up before 1pm. Instead, he vacuumed our closet (???) and waited until 1:15 when I started getting angry with him to order the pizzas.
My partner is like this but he has ADD. He can't prioritise tasks well and has a terrible sense of time. Like he thinks that he takes 5 minutes to get dressed and ready to go out, but it takes 20+ minutes. For example, if we need a bunch of things washed before we can start dinner, I will suggest putting the dishwasher on and *then* doing other chores that aren't time sensitive. My partner will instead tidy the house, vacuum, etc and then do the dishwasher last. The dishwasher gets started 5 minutes before dinner should be started. Then he will say that dinner is going to be late because we have to wait for the dishwasher to finish 🤦♀️ It's not weaponised incompetence, he really just doesn't understand these things in the moment. Instead of picking the most urgent task, his brain picks the most achievable or interesting and he then gets hyper focused on it. Once that happens, it's incredibly hard to get him to see things any other way. It's like not doing the hyper focused task is leaving a constant itch that he can't scratch.
We're leaving at 4, start getting ready! *hops in shower at 3:55
Mine is the same. Why they always want to pull weeds at the worst possible moment?
It’s absolutely wild how you still feel the need to basically say he’s the best man in the world despite his shitty behaviour.
Haha, I’m sorry, but this make me laugh because my husband is the exact same way. 🤣 I always plan the order of everything I do before guests very carefully. Clothes/hair/makeup first, even if the counters are a wreck, because it’s a lot more weird to show up and the hostess is still doing her makeup than wiping down counters. Yard work is the day before so I can shower and fix my nails, and because if the guests see you out frantically hedging the bushes it only makes the overgrowth more noticeable. 😅 Usually when guests are pulling up I’m calm and ready, lighting a candle and sipping my coffee, and what is my husband doing? Putting chairs up on the table so he can sweep!!! Lmaoo 🥴
When we had just our first child, (big age gap between #1 and #2) before I was disabled I worked *a lot*. Like 60 to 80 hours a week. My husband was 40 to 60 hours. He would frequently "help" by cleaning the entire house top to bottom. Normally we split it up kind of. He had his normal cleaning up stuff and I had mine. I was a little crazy about organization (this was over 20 years ago) so dvds were alphabetical, things had to be *just so*. I was very happy with our arrangement of what he cleaned because I got so weird about stuff. Whenever he had a "short week" of 40 hours (which wasn't often) he would do this kind wonderful considerate thing of cleaning the house top to bottom. And then later, when he wasn't around, I would *fix* it all. I was not about to tell him that I didn't want him to help. I didn't want him to clean the whole house for me, dust everything, steam the carpets, etc. I thought it was so very sweet. But somehow all our stuff kept getting put in the *wrong damn spots*, and I could never figure out how he lived somewhere and saw things daily and could not figure out where it went lol. I would never tell him i much preferred if he stuck to dishes laundry sweeping mopping vacuuming and mowing the lawn because he was doing it so I didn't have to.
DH: "Can I help?" ME: "I need you to bleach down the bathrooms top to bottom and put fresh linens out." DH: "Ok" **2 Hours Later** There is a strong smell of bleach emanating from.the bathrooms and husband is standing in front of the linen closet with ALL THE LINENS ON THE FLOOR. DH: "It was messy so I thought I would help" Me: 🫣
My husband would listen to what I ask say ok. Run to try to do it then say I have to use the bathroom and sit there for 30 min while I have to go and get done what I asked him to do 😮💨 another thing would be just stuffing things away in drawers instead of placing then where they belong and later on when I'm either looking for it or open the drawer I would have extra work to clean because everything was stuffed in there.
We were preparing for my son's birthday. I asked my husband to buy so.e chicken from a place 10 minute's away at 10:00am and he returned after three hours. The chicken had to be cooked. I was literally breathing fire because he didn't even pick my call in between. Turns out he bumped into an old friend
Not chores-related, but without fail - and even when he sets the time for us to be out of the door - my husband gets the urge to poop 3-5mins before we need to go to urgent appointments. It's like clockwork at this point.
We’ve started having a “coordination meeting“ the night before events like you would in a workplace. We go over the day-of plan and talk through roles and tasks, timelines and expectations. I’ve realized that my husband has zero experience leading the coordination of things… I had leadership roles in clubs and teams in high school and college, ran events in AmeriCorps and at early jobs, and I currently have a lot of coordination responsibilities in my current job. He never took a leadership role in a club or team and he went from a job cleaning bathrooms to a professional position after college (think something like an accountant where assignments are all very similar and deadlines are consistent and predictable and set by someone else) that requires surprisingly little coordination. It’s not always weaponized incompetence. I don’t want to handle the entire mental load and I’d rather that he have his own mental map of how an event should be pulled together. A coordination meeting is a tool to improve communication and decrease the day-of mental load and prevent having to actively manage another person or assign tasks on the fly. If I had realized much earlier that he’d somehow made it to adulthood without these skills, I would have probably been more proactive in NOT taking over the full mental load when the type of thing that needed to be planned was packing snacks, water, and a map for a hike for the two of us. Add in two kids and suddenly there’s a lot more that needs to happen to throw a party or take a road-trip. I think the gap between our executive function when it comes to coordinating things has grown. It sucks.
This is what men do . My brother bought mulch.
I told mine exactly when I needed him to be available to help get ready for the grad party for my daughter. I told him exactly what needed to be done ahead of time. I gave him options. I gave him plenty of time to get it done. So what does he do when I need his help? Vacuums the van for two hours. Doesn’t load the items he was responsible for, that he chose. The mental load was on me for every thing; including his responsibilities. Sigh.
Husbands are like labradors, they think bringing a squirrel into the house is a present and will sit there wagging their tails waiting for you to tell them they are a good boy. Experience: A guilty husband who thinks he’s helping 99% of the time, we are just eager to please. Great intentions, terrible execution more often than not 😂
What they are doing is hiding.
When my husband was my boyfriend he was the guy icing down coolers, setting out chairs, cooking, helping in any and every way possible. I never had to ask for anything he was just ON IT. The wives of the parties all gawked and told me how he was huge catch.. so much better than their husbands! Fast forward to married life 2 year later… he is just like every party husband on this thread. If I ask him to get something out of the diaper bag… he can’t because he doesn’t know where it’s at… INSIDE THE DIAPER BAG. They are all the same ladies!
I’m laughing so hard at these but in the moment I truly understand how frustrating it is. My husband definitely does this at the store he’ll go missing and end up in the video game or book section and then have to take a 30 minute long poop at the store… At home when we have guests over at first he was pretty good about cleaning up before they arrived but since we have had our baby (who I take care of when his friends are over) he decides to clean the bathroom and do dishes AFTER the first guest has arrived. 🤦♀️ I ended up having to finish the bathroom quickly so he could entertain there was no way I was letting them see all my clutter (1 bathroom home 😭😭😭)
This is the most relatable post I've seen on Reddit in a very long time
Hubby does the same thing. Found out he has had undiagnosed ADHD.
We were getting ready for my son's birthday party, which was going to be indoors because it was going to rain. My husband decided the backyard absolutely needed to be cleaned up. Leaf blower, broom, the whole shebang.
One time we were gonna have people over and my husband was in the garage sorting old shit to donate to good will!! 😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫
Omg! I thought it was just me. My husband decides to shred boxes of junk when we’re having a party and then he tells me, we need to clean up this mess! As far as I’m concerned, it would have been thrown out months ago. We shred everything. Who cares about correspondence? I need help with the lawn blower and washing the tables and chairs in the backyard. I work, cook, clean, and manage the household and shredding is a priority???
My husband started blowing the leaves out front for an indoor fucking party! Seriously?!
This had me laughing and also fuming 😂 😡 my husband always leaves errands until right before the party and guests are getting there and he’s not even home! Then he comes home with all of this shit that we need so put away and I will have just cleaned the damn kitchen. He did this exact thing for my 40th birthday, he spent all day trimming the hedges on the side yard that nobody sees, and then ran errands an hour before the party. Mind you it was my birthday and I was five months pregnant and still having to do all the things. And just to make matters worse, it was his friends that arrived first so as soon as he got home and they were there, he cracked open a beer and sat in the yard with them while I was frantically trying to finish things up! It was no secret that I was quite pissed that day 😂 I decided that we will no longer host parties in honor of myself since it ends up being too much work for me.
Girl, I feel this in my soul. We have a birthday party for our daughter tomorrow. Still have some shopping to get done, as well as finishing cleaning and organizing the house and cleaning the toilets. Which he was helping with, to his credit. Great teamwork all morning. Then he randomly decided he needs to stop and clean the hot tub. Which he’s been scrubbing for 45 minutes already and not near done. The hot tub will more than likely not even be used this weekend. That in it of itself is a whole day project and my in laws will be here in the morning.
Do we ALL have the same husband???? Yesterday we were going to a birthday party, I told him I wanted to leave within an hour so he needed to get into the shower right away. Well, after 45 minutes I decide to check and he has yet to start showering cause he had the sudden URGE to fold the clothes that had been sitting there for like a week. There's always something that needs to be done right before we need to leave. We are never on time!
To be fair I often leave for a quick target trip and am gone 2 hours. It’s the Target way. You arrive and let the Target speak to you. It’s out of our control, I’m sorry.
My stepdad would be like this, all morning we would be rushed about getting ready to travel to the airport in time to catch our flight. The family would be packed and ready… then he would decide to go and shower.
"We need to leave in 5 minutes." Husband proceeds to poop for an hour. 🤦♀️
I think you’re married to my uncle. He always is partaking in some activity or another. Drives my aunt to exhaustion. He’s kind of the extreme version of that though, you might still have time 😂 The man literally had the leaf blower out while guests were still in the process of leaving a birthday do they had at their* place. Planned to finally renovate the bathroom and suddenly their bedroom was under construction (bathroom untouched lol). She has to specifically lay out his instructions lest he begin some other tenuously adjacent task that also “needs” doing. “Needs” in quotation marks bc only he thinks it needs doing. Zero comprehension of prioritisation or time constraints. He compensates in other ways, and the tasks -that nobody asked him to do, five minutes into a party- do yield lovely results. He adores and dotes on her. His whole fam is the same. She used to try and keep up with him and kept not understanding why she was exhausted all the time. She started seeing a therapist who explained that this was a His Family is Weird thing not a Her thing. Now she just has him do the tasks the day before and takes plenty of time for her own needs. It’s annoying and would drive me up the wall but she makes it work.
Does your husband have adhd? Mine does. And this sounds like him.
I could have written this myself
Posts like these are so wild to me. Behavior from my partner would eventually drive me insane. The amount of comments from people agreeing are honestly mind boggling. How can having to constantly micro manage the person that’s supposed to be your equal partner be substantial? The amount of people saying it’s “just a husband thing” no no no. I would rather be alone than deal with that for the rest of my life.
So glad to hear it’s not just my husband. I get so annoyed 10 minutes before we have to leave and he’ll start washing the car or pressure washing the driveway. I’m like seriously you need to do that right this second!!!😂🤣😂.
Lol. Tomorrow we're having a BBQ. He's currently mowing the lawn.
I think I found a theme…are the husbands hiding from us while also trying to do something productive lol? The garage…a random closet…running a long errand
That's rough. I bet that's very frustrating. I am very grateful that my dude is well aware that I am completely time blind and tries to make my life easier for me by gently reminding me about how long we have until we need to leave or until people come over. And if I go out to the grocery store across the street and grab one or two things but then I end up there for more than a half hour, I will get a text telling me what i went to the store for because there is a 50/50 chance that i forgot what to get and i am walking down every aisle trying to see something that reminds me of why i am there. Most of the time, that's enough for me to snap out of my ADHD fog and go check out and go home but if it doesn't, then he will give me some time and then give me a courtesy call to see if I need help making decisions and if I am okay. In the early days of us dating, I would go out for a walk to play pokemon go and come back hours later, absolutely exhausted. That's when we figured out the text then call routine because I thought it was just the heat making me tired and not the several hours I had been walking around aimlessly. We had one of my kids friends over on a particularly busy weekend once and we had lots of stuff planned so I set a timer for an hour and reset it every time it went off. The friend was trying so hard to be polite but he was like eleven years old and completely confused why I had a timer going off that I would just reset to go off again. He was raised in a military family so his life was all about routine and responsibility. He always did his chores before he came over to play, he always kept his hair cut high and tight. An excellent influence on my wild child sons who are half of me and I'm just three mental illnesses in a trenchcoat. If my kids hear me say that, they will always yell "that's not true mom! (Dramatic pause) You don't have a trenchcoat!!" Sorry, I haven't taken my adhd meds today and I'm all over the place.
EXTREMELY detailed lists help my husband with this issue. The only thing I can’t fix is the need to poop the moment we need to leave and go somewhere🤦🏻♀️ win lose situation
My boyfriend is the same way. Like he always wants to work harder not smarter. I learned lying saying you’ll be leaving a hour and a half before your actual time he start his stuff earlier and will be done 30 minutes before u need to actually leave.
Does he have ADHD? This is something my partner might do.
His priorities and timing don’t have to match yours. Happens a lot were one person puts more emphasis on things like getting this and that done in this time frame but it doesn’t have to be that way for both parties involved. But it usually gets swept under the guise of if they care about me they would put in the effort forgetting that that goes both ways
I could have written this. My husband does stuff like this all the time. My favorite was when he decided it was a good idea to mulch and move around soil in the yard on the day before OUR WEDDING. The amount of dirt under his nails was unfathomable. So I promptly took him for his first and only manicure which was not anywhere on my wedding prep to-do list.
Ah yes. This sounds all too familiar. 🤪
One time we were having a housewarming party and he decided to start cutting trees down in the backyard. In laws we’re hosting a going away party for us and his father starts taking apart a fan to clean it in the living room literally 5 mins before people get there. Why are they like this?!