Conceptualizing “help” differently
Hello, new here and grateful to have found this community. I’ve been married to my dx (newly medicated, intermittent therapy) husband for a little over a year, together for 3 although friends for much longer. I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around a difference in perspective that we are having.
It started this morning when my husband asked me to do something that’s usually his responsibility (take the dog out). He had hours to do it, but did other things instead, and then realized when he was getting ready to leave for a computer repair appt. I work overnights and had already done a million things, and was about to get in the shower and go to bed. It really bothered me that he asked when he was just relaxing all morning while I was running around, and the one task he had to be responsible for someone else, he didn’t do. This has come up before and I always tell him how I feel. I do not want to be responsible for his time management failures! I feel like I’m enabling him by picking up the slack, and I feel taken for granted. I want to feel cared for by my husband, not treated like a backup plan. I told him all this and his response was, “I want us to be able to ask each other for help”. This upset me even more because obviously I want that too, and 95% of the time when he asks for help I’m there. Unfortunately a lot of the time when I ask for help with parking in the mornings he “doesn’t see the text” or doesn’t hear his phone. I can feel the resentment building and I really don’t want it to continue like that. How do you deal with your partner’s time management issues? Do you consider this type of thing to be normal helping between partners or do you set boundaries around what type of help you’re willing to provide, if it relates to a behavior that he’s working on? I feel like I’m in the deep end here and we’re having a hard time communicating about it.