Feminist Advice Friday: My husband doesn't do anything when he's sick--and he's sick all the time.
A reader wants to know how to split household labor when her husband spends many weeks of each year sick, with no end in sight.
A reader asks…
My husband and I have a fairly equitable division of labor as far as I'm concerned: I work fewer hours so do slightly more household labor. We do not have children.
My problem is that my husband is often sick or injured; he is not disabled but seems to be fairly delicate generally. He has missed many weeks of life over the past year due to various illnesses.
When he is sick/injured, he tends to sort of "check out" and stop participating in general life as well as household tasks. I am running out of patience/compassion for this although I know he's not intentionally trying to be sick/injured. What do you think?
My answer
The reader disclosed a number of the sorts of injuries and sicknesses her husband had been out for in her letter, and I edited them out to protect her privacy. It’s always so hard to judge another person’s pain or injury, but my assessment is that he’s generally taking quite a bit more time out of life for his various injuries than would be typical.
Is this because he has a chronic illness? Because he tends to inflate his symptoms? Because he wants an excuse to get out of daily life? A low pain tolerance?
I don’t know, but the reason doesn’t matter.
When people show us who they are, we must believe them. And your husband has shown that, whether or not he can control it, he is someone who is going to have a lot of injuries and illnesses that are going to require a longer-than-usual recovery.
So, can you live with that for the rest of your life? Can you manage it if you have children?
If the answer is yes, or if you want to stick around for the time being, then you need to have a conversation about dividing up household labor. If that feels like something you can’t do, if he balks at such a conversation, or if the discussion ends in conflict, then he’s telling you he does not intend to ever change (and also telling you that things will probably get worse when you have kids).
As you contemplate how to have this discussion, here are some questions I want you to ask yourself:
How is his behavior when I am sick? Does he pick up more slack? If he doesn’t, if he expects you to continue working when sick, or if the house falls into chaos when you are unwell, this is a pretty significant red flag, and it almost certainly means that if you ever have kids, he won’t pick up any slack when you’re recovering from birth.
What can we do to lighten the load when he is sick? Surely he’s not going to be totally debilitated most of the time. Can he take over work that can be done from bed, such as ordering groceries, paying bills, etc.?
What can you do to balance things when he is well? I talk to a lot of disabled women, or women with chronic or frequent illnesses. You know what they all share in common? They still do more than their fair share of household labor. And they feel guilty when their disabilities compel them not to help. Your partner should understand that two, three, and four weeks of leaving everything to you is exhausting. What is he doing afterward? He should be willing to do more work when he’s well. I also think that balancing things this way will help you test the extent to which he is embellishing his illnesses.
Just remember, that he’s probably going to be sick for three weeks with an apparently minor illness right after you give birth, when you are pregnant, and when you are sick. I want you to think about whether that challenge is worth whatever rewards this relationship offers.
If you don’t think you can manage this forever or with children, it will never get easier to leave than it is right now. A life of servitude once you have kids is a life of misery, and leaving becomes extremely difficult.
So make all decisions with the possibility in mind that this may get steadily worse.
To put this into a little more perspective, Letter Writer: My late female partner had cancer. Chemo and radiation knocked her on her ASS--her team had never cared for anyone so sensitive to the treatments. She HAD to be in bed for weeks due to the nausea, weight loss, and exhaustion.
And still--when she felt a little better, when the pain wouldn't let her sleep, or she was just stir crazy--she would do things around the house. Cook, bake, laundry. I even once found her on the bathroom floor scrubbing at 3 AM. Because she hated watching me work full-time and go to nursing school while she did "nothing." She loved me and wanted things to be as equal as they could possibly be under the circumstances.
If you got cancer tomorrow, I bet you would do something similar. The question is: Would your husband?
This hits home so much for me. My partner had a serious physical illness a few months ago. He’s pretty much fully recovered, but continues to use the very vague complaints of “I don’t feel well” or “I have a headache” on a daily basis. This results in him napping for hours & hours at a time. He’s been to the doctor a couple of times, and there is no lingering or new illness.
He barely participated in our life together before he got sick, but now he has this “free card” that he pulls constantly. If I say anything or act put out, he accuses me of having no compassion. I’m a helper by nature and I work in health care, so I take it to heart when I’m accused of not having empathy for an ill person. I just don’t believe he’s physically ill when he claims to be. Especially because he always seems to make a miraculous recovery each evening when most of the household responsibilities are already taken care of, and he’s had hours of rest.
There is also longstanding depression at play on his part, but he does not pursue treatment. Writing it out here makes me wonder WTF I’m still doing in this marriage.