QuestionHi,
My wife refuses to iron my clothes. She washes them and piles them up on top of the dryer for months. I don't have clothes to go to work. I also work, and on top of that I do all the maintainance/repair work or our house, inside and outside, and keep the maintainance and repair of three vehicles, plus taking care of all the unplanned/casualties that happen now and then.
Sometimes I ask her to do something and she tells me flat out to do it myself! And believe me, I prefer to do something myself than any of the following:
-have someone do something they don't want to
-have something done poorly
-have something done and mess up something else
So most times I ask my older daughter--previous marriage--or even my 70 year old mother to help me out!
She astonishes me, it gives me the impression that simple things seem impossible/undoable to her. Stuff that I've been doing when I was single... she tells me in a challenging way "why don't you do it yourself?" like it's a big challenge. I just tell her "honey, I've done that every day when I was single. It's no big deal"
For example, she finishes washing the dishes and there are always several places where water runs down the doors of the kitchen ounters under the sink, all the way down. It damages the counters in the long run. Well, she doesn't dry them. If I point it to her, she challenges me to do it myself. And every time I wash the dishes there's no water anywhere after I'm done, and if there was some I dry it asap. It's no science, it's not heroic, it's not forced labor... it's simply part of what you're doing, the part called cleanup.
I don't care about that or her not helping me when I need, but do I have to iron my own clothes too? Nowadays people think that b/c they work out/have a career they don't have to do anything else? What the heck? I also have a career!
Righ now my jeans have been piled up waiting to be ironed for 6 months? I have 2 left... please help me here or I'll have to go to work in boxers (c8
Thanks in advance,
John
AnswerJohn, John ....
Thanks for writing me.
I must say, your letter isn't really clear -- doe your wife work, too? Whether she does or doesn't, who ever decided that SHE was the one to iron your jeans? Was that an agreement between the two of you, or have you created expectations of this out of thin air?
At my house, we both work, and my man does his own laundry and irons his own stuff. However, my man is a wonderful man who is affectionate, kind, and generous. If he told me that he would love it if I would iron his jeans, I would do it for him because I love to please him. I love to please him because he does so many wonderful things for me. However, if he did little for me that made me feel loved by him, and unilaterally decided I should do that for him without discussing it with me and created an expectation of me, I would not want to do it.
My guess is that your wife is not feeling cherished by you. You are not loving her the way she needs to feel loved. And while you are not doing these necessary loving things, her love for you is dying. My recommendation to you is to stop focusing on what she is not doing for you, and instead look at where you are falling short in loving her. Ask her what she needs, then do it. Start putting yourself into loving her with all of your effort. This means, ask her what makes her feel loved by you, and then do it. No woman will respond lovingly to demands and expectations. That is a recipe for resentment.
Act loving to get love, my friend. You will get the love out of a relationship in equal parts to what you put into it.
I hope this helps.
Doctor Becky
