Asking for a friend

Your problems solved by The Midults

Q:Dear A&E, I used to be fun and fancy-free – my husband always complimented me on how easy-going I was – but a marriage, a mortgage and a child later, I’m not the same. I’m constantly begging my husband to help with housework and our baby. I sound like a nag – and he treats me like one. Am I asking too much to expect him to help with the basics? We both work, but as I’m freelance, it all falls on me. — Naggy

Dear Naggy, we all have our roles, don’t we? No matter how we grow and evolve, other people’s ideas of us are somehow cast in bronze. Immovable. Eternal. And yet circumstances can often profoundly alter our characters. They want us to stay ‘fancy-free’ and yet we find we have become… naggy. Who is right and who is wrong?

One thing we can be sure of is that your husband didn’t expect to find himself inhabiting his current persona either. When you were Fancy-free, perhaps he was Sexily Hilarious. And Sexily Hilarious didn’t think he’d be recast as Unhelpful Sexist, did he? This works both ways.

We’ve heard this story so often from parents of small children. It’s not the ideal, but it is definitely the norm. And when it is a heterosexual couple, it’s almost always the woman who bears the brunt.

In our experience, men often think in the short term. So, they may do one thing, solve one problem – wash up, do a feed, buy a high chair, cook some dinner or wrestle with a Hoover – and then feel vindicated. Yes, they’ve helped, but you are air-traffic control; he landed this particular plane, but you made sure no other planes crashed into it while simultaneously dealing with passport control and some idiots flying drones in your airspace. And when he does that one heroic thing, everyone gasps in wonder and shock and awe, and you feel... well… ‘naggy’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But remember that you can’t have two CEOS. Someone always needs to run the show, and how would you feel about relinquishing control? Not so hot, we reckon. You need to make sure that your resentment doesn’t spill over into contempt for him. Because that way lies marital crisis.

So, you need to communicate and you need to be organised. Psychologist Nadia Al-khudhairy suggests that you start by thinking about the root reasons for this situation, and that you ask yourself, ‘Which parts of me get triggered and make me take responsibility for doing it all?’ Once that is established, she suggests that you ‘get a babysitter and meet your husband for a coffee outside the home’. And use ‘I’ statements, rather than ‘you’ statements… This gets the other person to listen, rather than leap to the defensive.

Next, sit down, look at the shape of the week and start by giving him a slot. One slice of responsibility. Let’s imagine that he takes the baby to nursery on a Friday morning. Nothing can get in the way of this. It is a commitment. So, he knows that there can be no meetings at that time and you know that you can have a sleep, do some exercise, have a pedicure or get some work done, uninterrupted. This could be a gift for both of you. You will no longer be trying to pour from an empty cup and he will no longer feel cornered and a bit guilty.

If he refuses, Al-khudhairy suggests ‘more coffee mornings outside the house and finding a way to suggest that there is a culture developing in the relationship whereby you do everything and he resists helping’. Then see what he says.

But, if the chat goes well (which, we predict, it probably will), from there you can start to divide up the chores according to what people are good at. See it like a business. Play to each other’s strengths. For example, if he quite likes doing the ironing, then get him on that while you do the food shopping. Or if he likes sweating over the recycling, then he can have the rubbish while you get dusting (dusting is so easy it’s not even a job, which is why we have given it to you). Next thing you know... Hello, Fancy-free and Sexily Hilarious! They’re back!

Remember that you can’t have two CEOS. Someone always needs to run the show