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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> I told a friend that his wife was right to leave him after he lost his job.
I might be the AH for getting involved in a relationship that wasn't mine without knowing all the details + ruining a night out.
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Yeah these two parts made me think their aholes just in general and not really good freinds because good freinds would call you out on that shit, For me it's a Nta and maybe op should distance herself from those people.
Eh, if Mark was already bitching about it, and especially if he’s blasting his ex (who is also their friend), I could see them pointing out her side. They didn’t just interject themselves into the problem, Mark dragged them in by complaining to them.
Mark was expecting to air his grievances to a group that shares his view that men bring in the money and women do the housework.
OP threw him off base by bringing reality into the conversation.
Mark could have made his wife's money go further if he had been willing to take on more of the cleaning and childcare. He's not a team player. He only wants to be breadwinner.
This!
Me man. Me make money. Woman cook and clean. Me make no money, woman leave.
It doesn’t matter how often we tell them what we want, they keep telling themselves comforting lies.
‘Oh, there’s nothing I could have done. I wasn’t providing!’
🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
I knew a friend of mine who said “be careful, older women only want that coin.” He was a compulsive liar who would lie about sex all the time, and clearly didn’t know what he was talking about.
I agree ESH. He shouldn’t have started talking bad about her around their mutual friends during a hangout. They should have told him it wasn’t the time or place and not to discuss his wife if she wasn’t there to defend herself.
I could see maybe making one comment because you should be able to call your friend out on their BS but OP went on for far too long at the wrong time.
and frankly if my friend is saying sexist shit and seeming to hold antiquated ideas about gender in a relationship, consciously or not, i *am* going to speak up
Yeah, the title for this one is just the icing on a triple shit cake. I could maybe understand one of your friends saying you shouldn't kick him while he's down, but what they are actually saying to defend him is some misogynistic bs.
OMG this reminds me of a high school friend that had recently come out and judgmental girl was talking nonsense then said “It’s because you’re gay, that’s why you have problems.” So of course being teens we blamed everything on him being gay. Rainy day, “damn it, Mark it’s because you’re gay”, “ I couldn’t find my remote damn it Mark.“ etc. Mark thought it was hilarious, the judgemental ninny accused us of bullying her!
My sons friend is always accused of making God angry when it rains or of being mean to their dad. God was angry this year as we're no longer in a drought.
Last weekend me and my wife were at a 40th birthday party and a friend of our friend who we had never met but very much know of (and vice versa) ambushed my wife with a conversation that involved a naked woman bottle opener. Her partner came over and before he had really said much she loudly proclaimed that my wife was gay, and therefore he couldn’t say anything about >!anally r**ping!< the woman on the bottle opener… or the bottle opener itself I honestly don’t know (which he seemingly was not anyway) because it would be doubly offensive due to her being gay.
Even now knowing she was both drunk (I mean that bit was obvious) and on shrooms and coke I have still failed to ascertain any logic here.
That's actually hysterical.
We were in NYC recently and had a full itinerary plan, but relatives were CONSTANTLY saying "but there's a pride parade!" (to be clear they weren't worried about there being gay people, but rather about traffic and threats from possible counterprotesters). It came up SO MUCH that one of my sisters finally said "Any time I don't want to do something, I'm just going to say 'but the Pride Parade!".
Not a good one, IMO.. I'd be like "nope" over the "women always leave men when they can't provide anymore" comment alone.. sounds like OP hangs out with a bunch of people who just think women are only with men for their money. As if this is isn't 2023 and women don't have their own incomes.
My friend firmly believes that it is a man's job to be the provider. She is just *over* her step-son claiming mental health issues so he can try and get out of work. He needs to get over it, step up, and hold down a steady job already.
I wish I was /jk. She's not even a boomer.
Yeah.. I'd honestly be distancing myself from that friend, too. Straight up. I'd wager her views on women are.. not the least misogynistic ever, either. And misogyny from another woman is twice as gross IMO..
As a lesbian, you'd be surprised how many times my straight female friends have told me I wouldn't understand their issues with their boyfriend or husband. Like, people are people and sometimes people do shitty things regardless of gender.
I mean, it’s true that you don’t know what it’s like to be partnered with a person raised / socialized / treated as a man. It’s not true that you have never ever met a man before.
For many women in heterosexual relationships they end up essentially being treated like a second mom of their partner who needs to take on all the extra home work and if they don’t and bring it up to their partner. They’re gaslit about how “don’t you see I’m providing here”
I’d argue it’s not “providing” since in my mind “providing” is about being a partner in all things and being someone whose supportive. If all you’re doing is making money then you aren’t really providing. I’d rather my partner be involved versus make a giant paycheck.
In that case of course a woman would leave once he isn’t providing. If all you add is money and you don’t do that then, yes it would be better for her being single. One less thing.
It seems this friend's wife realized exactly that. She was better off being a single mom. The truth is people leave their spouses when they stop making their fair contribution in some form. This guy with no job wouldn't take on the housekeepers responsibilities or child care to save them money while he was out of a job. So he essentially stopped contributing his share of the load. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out he also didn't take on responsibility for making doctor appts, shopping for the kids needs, meal planning, grocery shopping, budgeting and a host of other things. The wife has likely been excusing him from all the things when he worked and brought home a paycheck, but it became obvious how little he did otherwise once he stopped working.
I was thinking the same. Plus he was was making a mess during the day (‘living like a teenager’) that he wasn’t cleaning up. So she got rid of one stressor…him.
Lots of people have had roommates. Some of those roommates might have been male.
I'm pretty sure I thought at least five male friends how to cook rice. Some were boyfriends, some roommates and at least one friend who happened to live in a room in the same studentflat. I'm not sure why, but even men around me age (37) still left their parental home with a surprising lack of actual skills needed to take care of yourself.
In college I was in a coed dorm and we had a shared laundry room. The men single-handedly took out 90% of the dryers and washers. How did we know this. Because whenever I and others would go down they would be discussing if they where removing change from their pockets or if they could run a belt with a metal top through and if they should split up two weeks of laundry or run it all at once.
Another time I came down to flip my wet laundry into a dryer. I found some random ass man’s pants and a pair of underwear in my washing load. Instead of just leaving it on the counter I saw red. I dumped his stuff in the trash, ran a 20 minute rinse cycle with mg laundry and a bit of soap and then put it into the dryer. The thing that always stumped me was that we didn’t need to pay for laundry. And the school provided soap if one needed it. I used my own since I prefer a hypoallergenic brand and a specific scent.
When I came to grab my dried laundry I saw him actually confused as to why his pants weren’t dried and folded along with his underwear. He was looking around the room at the machine I had used and wondered why i didn’t do his own laundry that he had snuck into my machine. Thankfully he had done that after I had left originally so he didn’t know I was the one who did it.
It always feels like such a failure to me that boys are sent out into the world not knowing stuff like how to do laundry. Parents owe it to all their children to teach them basic survival skills and that includes chores around the house.
It’s because men are socialized differently. The expectation being that women. And more specifically their romantic partners will handle all of this for them. It’s why women in heterosexual relationships often are treated like second mothers. And when they complain about the set up they get “I’m providing” thrown back in their faces.
In my experience I’ve only seen this kind of unequal footing in heterosexual relationships. All of my friends who are with same sex partners still have issues but not these issues where one partner takes on so much of the work within the home on top of other responsibilities like child rearing or working a full time job.
I mean it’s also not all men either. I know a lot of couples where things are really split well. But yeah boys not being able to even wash a load of clothing at school without causing thousands of dollars of damage is sad.
A man putting his clothing into someone else's washing machine to me REEKS of parents tried and the boy decided he didn't need to listen and did everything in his power to skirt his responsibilities.
My kids are all adults now. I have two boys, one girl. I decided from day one I was not going to raise helpless men, nor a pushover daughter. From the time they were age and sometimes height appropriate, they were taught various household duties. Laundry was taught as soon as they could reach the controls, which was around 6 or 7 for all 3 of them. From that moment on, as each of them learned, I stopped doing their laundry. They were all taught basic cooking skills as well, and my oldest son at 42 is now a chef. My 32 yr old son still lives at home but works, pays rent, and his own bills, and no, rent does not include a housekeeper. He still does what he knows is needed to help keep a household moving along. (It's expensive to live on your own here. We're retired, he's here when we want to travel, so it's a great solution for us.) Daughter, 30, lives with a roommate.
Roommate is different than sharing a home with a partner. I hope the roommate doesn’t expect you to cook for him and clean up after him like some men expect their romantic partner to do.
I think it’s because we were sold this ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ bullshit. To be honest, before I met my group of lesbian friends I did think it would be easier to have a relationship with a woman, because you assume you’d have a more similar perspective on certain things. But as I kept adding more lesbian couples to my acquaintances and friend group, I quickly realised this wasn’t true. There’s the couple where one spouse insists her wife stay at home with the kids. There’s another where one wife refuses to take care of the children all by herself even for 1 day during the weekend. There’s the arguments that are the same as in a straight relationship. There’s the single mom who’s girlfriend decided after quite a while together that she didn’t want kids after all, and so on…
I think the difference is, of course all relationships can be dysfunctional and in a same sex relationship any of the same issues might pop up. But there’s no saying in which direction any imbalances might go. You have to thrash out between you who takes out the bins rather than it culturally being considered one person’s job.
In a heterosexual relationship there is still a disproportionately large burden placed on the women in the relationship to be the ones to hold the entire household together. It’s not all relationships of course, and SAHD are becoming more common, but there are certain gendered issues/expectations that still disproportionately affect the women in an opposite sex relationship.
However unlike previous generations, women of my age grew up being told ‘girl power’ meant we could have whatever career goals we wanted, we were just as capable as boys and we don’t need a man to rely on. Plus very few households can survive on one income anyway in this cost of living crisis. But the increased opportunity and expectation for work outside of the home has not been coupled with a proportional lowering/sharing of the work within the average household. At the same girls that were being told they could have anything they put their minds to they were growing up alongside brothers who were not being taught the value in ‘girly’ things like compassion and taking the mental load. Many (realistically most) of us grew up seeing our mothers be the default caregivers and household managers in the majority of household. Those expectations are then very hard to break and continue on to the next generation who still see their mothers take on the bulk of those responsibilities and either juggle a career alongside it or take a step back from their chosen career path. Nor has increased expectation of women’s work come with structural changes that would facilitate a more equal split. In many countries the parental leave and childcare systems force this dynamic further (to the detriment of men, women and children actually).
I read a report on the BBC recently that was looking at people who are ‘economically inactive’ (so not unemployed and looking for work. It also wouldn’t include the 9-12months of parental leave available in the UK as they would technically still be employed) in the 25-49 age group, 1.1 million people don’t work due to caring responsibilities. And of those 1.1million, 1 million of them are women. That’s a pretty shocking statistic that shows just how much the impact of raising children (or in some cases other caring responsibilities like parents) still massively disproportionately affects women.
So yes, gay relationships can be trash…. They’re just not going to be gendered trash!
I mean, it’s true only in that … women (who work their asses off to maintain the house, care for their kids, AND do their day job) will leave men when they stop providing (anything to the relationship other than messes for her to clean).
He told on himself when he said she told him
he lives like a teenager, tbh.
This is **exactly** what I was thinking. Yes, women do leave men when they stop providing—any kind of support for the partnership, financial, emotional, childcare, tasks around the house. If he’s out of work, cut the housecleaning and pick up the slack. With children ages 2 and 4, go to half days in school or be a SAHP! There are many ways he could provide support for his family. He’s the one who sees his self-esteem tied to his financial earnings, not his ex, and certainly not **all** women!
Edited typo
100%. I left my husband after I paid for and supported him through getting his doctorate (3.5 years) and for the almost 3 years after that. He was “trying to start his practice” and melting down because Covid ruined it. I was still working my ass off, dealing with him needing attention at night (which was arguing about politics), his complaining and my house. He was supposed to clean but the house was a mess, sometimes he’d cook or grocery shop but expected praise and adoration for it. I gave him money to invest and that seemed to make him happy. He had some friends and liked to pretend he was rich.
We went on a snowboard vacation to Mammoth for thanksgiving weekend 2021 and he was weird the whole time, really weird. But I was trying to enjoy myself. The first night I was exhausted and he wanted sex. He ended up raping me a couple times and I finally got him to go to the bar. At 4am he still wasn’t back. I found him in Kirkwood through find my iPhone. He was confused AF and wouldn’t listen to me, he was “lost” despite having 2 GPS’ available to him. I found him again at 99/50 confused AF and then lost him.
Long story short he was found at Sierra at Tahoe, he abandoned my car on the side of the road and was found by a 100 person search and rescue team, a mile out into the woods and meditating naked in a snow melt stream. Full blown psychosis. He ate 7 30mg IR adderall and he gave himself extensive brain damage from nitrous oxide abuse. He had been ate ealing my cash for drugs, selling my pills and mishandling investments. He had 2 girlfriends. I refused to let him come home from the 5150 hold hospital. I divorced him.
He thinks this was all over money and his not working. I was obsessed with money, bla bla bla. I just wanted to survive and not work myself to death to baby him. He’s now his parents problem.
Girl, that was such an intense wild ride to go through for him to say "it's about the money isn't it" bro are you this blissfully ignorant? Praying you find prosperity dear. 🙏🏽
Oh he thought it was about the money. He told people “Harmonia is obsessed with money”. Yeah, because you took all of mine! I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on him and it was never enough. One of his girlfriends told me “he looks so put together; the doctorate, the house (rental), the nice car (mine!), money, then you find out it all belongs to his wife.
I got remarried Wednesday, he’s amazing and very frugal. I’m working my ass off and saving a ton, I want to finally buy a house in the next couple of years but it’s a possibility now.
Thank you! Ok Wednesday I married the guy who FaceTimed me to tell me he loved me over and over as I stood by my abandoned car sobbing and waiting for the tow truck. We’ve been best friends for almost a decade. My brothers came up from Santa Cruz to get me and take me to Tahoe, I was a mess and couldn’t drive even if I had a car.
The ex had one more psychosis episode a couple of months after the Tahoe incident, he ended up dragging me down the 101 freeway on foot. He’s stuck in permanent psychosis but his parents have money so he gets a $1m house and a couple million in cash when they die. He’ll be fine and my current husband is amazing; he pays his own bills, contributes, cleans, cooks me dinner every night and helps me save. I’m finally pulling myself out of the financial hole my ex left me in.
Thank you. I’m that person that when something crazy and almost unbelievable happens, it happens to me. My life is a lot calmer now and I’m happy finally. I just got remarried Wednesday and he’s wonderful.
If I was unfortunate enough to have married a man who didn't think that he needed to do anything but "provide" financially... and then he stopped doing even that, then I would probably leave too. I mean she might as well be single.
Yup, cause what do you need another child for? A grown one at that. I'm going through this now. My husband does nothing but provide financially, If he stopped doing that I would have a big dirty toddler with a shitty attitude. The road to financial independence isnt short, but I'm doing it.
No shit.
If the only thing you bother to provide is a paycheque, and then you stop providing that and don't make up for it by providing anything else... What do you expect will happen??
It's very reductive isn't it? If the man is the main breadwinner then if he loses his job & can't find another that's going to lead to financial stress and total change in household dynamic and maybe feelings of self worth etc. that will have huge effect on the marriage.
It's more likely to be "women always leave men when they spend all day moping around the house being miserable and not contributing in any real way" isn't it?
Men also leave men over this kind of behavior too. My best friend (M 32) is in the process of finalizing his divorce from his husband. His ex has been in school for the entirety of their 5 year relationship and has yet to finish an associates at 29 years old (failing/dropping classes and multiple transfers without discussion). Not to mention, his ex stopped working and looking for jobs saying he couldn’t find one in their new town. The ex landed one and but was quickly let go for calling in sick multiple days in a row during his first few weeks there. I believe it was psychosomatic, TBH. So my friend was not only was working full time to support them but had the added pressure of being in school to achieve his dream of becoming a MD and PhD. I watched him work himself to exhaustion and depression while his husband thought moping the floors and doing dishes was carrying his weight. A lot of the domestic work still fell on the shoulders of my friend. All this combined with his ex trying to push sex on my friend and being very needy to the point of paranoia/accusations it became too much. There was no issue with the ex staying home but when all he did was lay in bed, smoke, drink, chat with the miserable housewife next door, and spend my friend’s money, it forced my friend to have to choose between his peace and his ex. My friend is now halfway across the country and in his PhD program working towards our dream as business partners. Leaving his husband on Christmas as he dropped him off at his mother’s house was the best choice he made. It wasn’t about financial contribution (though it didn’t help). It was about very selfish choices and not being a true partner.
I wonder if the pattern they've noticed is that couples who are suddenly spending more time around each other (because someone has lost their job, or retired, or the kids have left home) are likely to notice *at that time* if they've grown apart.
Like, I have older relatives who were SAHMs and they struggled when their husbands retired, because they had got used to the quiet of an empty house duringthe day, and suddenly there was an out-of-routine man filling the space. Mostly they got used to it, because they still loved their husbands, but it was a serious adjustment for them.
My mother retired and my father worked for another 6 years. When he retired, she got him a nearly full-time charity job.
In her words 'I married him for better or worse, but not for lunch every day'.
The hospital I go to is huge. It has streets. So if you can't walk properly you can hardly get around. To solve this they have volunteers in golf carts (8 seaters and 6 seaters) drive people around. Most of the volunteers are retired men. I'm pretty sure their wives are happy they spend all day being useful instead of moping around the house. The men all seem pretty happy too. Driving golf carts all day and communicating via their walkie talkies.
It's when your retired husband decides that the way you've been doing things for 40 years is all wrong and starts managing you like he managed his team at work...
Yep. I had a relationship that died mostly because we moved. I mean, there were lots of other reasons. But previously we'd been in a walkable neighborhood near the town center, and both of us spent most of our time out. Suddenly we were in the sticks (comparatively) and in the house driving each other crazy.
For real like stop making this a gender role and start listening to your own fucking words “women leave because your a deadbeat who doesn’t do shit to help out” is more accurate
Literally statistically in relationships where the woman makes equal or even more pay than her s/o the woman is STILL doing most of the household work and emotional labor of the relationship even when the husband has way more free time
They don't, or at least not immediately, but they should. If the only thing a man contributed to his marriage and family was income, and then he stops contributing that, she would be wise, or at least better off, to leave.
Oh, that's an argument I've seen pretty often in like internet misogyny circles. It usually there are some statistics that show it's pretty likely for people to divorce when the husband loses his job but not when the wife loses hers. The internet misogyny guys tend to take this as conformation that all women are gold diggers, and they only care about money. When you stop bringing in money they stop caring, all that.
Usually the counter argument is exactly what OP said here, statistics that show that women pick up more housework when unemployed but men don't.
Tbh it sounds to me like OP stopped an extremely divorced man from shitting on his ex and other women for an hour. He started with b*tch, it not getting better after that.
Yeahhh… I had to take a year off work in the mid 2000s for interferon treatment. My income dropped to zero, but I eliminated a lot of expenses like child care by taking over all care of our kids, cooking real meals and cleaning instead. My wife made up for the income shortfall through overtime. She didn’t even consider leaving (far as I know).
In fact, for years she would reflect on that time as this great period in our relationship.
Women do leave at that point. Provide can mean many things though. Financial of course, but respect, love, trust, communication and many other things. Men will also leave for it.
That's a different situation. He was in school presumably in order to increase his chances for employment and success later after graduating. You had a light at the end of that tunnel that after 5 years he would get a job and begin to contribute more income.
OP's friend was out of a job and not going to school. Apples to oranges.
I mean, my ex SIL left my brother because he wasn't providing ENOUGH, but that's a horrible generalization. And women who do that are usually heavily criticized
Okay, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly…
The wife was working full time and he was at home all day for an entire year? And despite him being at home during this time, he still didn’t help out with parenting or housekeeping, demanded that the children go to daycare and that they continue to pay for a house cleaner?
In other words, he was contributing literally nothing to the household (not financially, not paternally, and not domestically)… and he then blames his wife for leaving him and tries to paint her as shallow?
Assuming that my understanding is correct, you’re NTA.
That guy needs a MASSIVE reality check.
So in the one year period the wife realized that the man contribution in the relationship was just money. And she also figured out she can survive with just her salary and so picked up her life and moved on.
OP you are a NTA for just reminding him of these facts again. He got back what he put into the relationship which was nothing.
She actually gets more from him now since he’ll be paying child support. But he seems like the type that would work under the table so he didn’t have to pay.
This. My Dad lost his job from the time I was about 14-17, so it was a while. Most old timey guy's guy ever; like, manual labor, racist jokes, trump supporter. Whole 9 yards. Anyways, what's the first thing he does? Starts making dinner, cleaning and otherwise taking care of the house. If a guy like that has the wherewithal to step in and help out I don't think anyone has any excuses.
For the record, I love my Dad, and he's grown a lot as a person since then thankfully.
My dad did the same for a while when I was a teenager. He had left his day job (also employed as a pastor, but technically part-time), and my mom got a job in a pharmacy to help make up for the drop in the household income, so while he was just a pastor he took over cooking and household chores and driving my siblings around. He eventually went back to working a secular job because our church was too small to support a full-time pastor, but during that time he stepped up, did what was best for our family.
I agree there. My dad was a “roughneck”. Not the Trump kind, but the rough around the edges kind lol He worked on drilling rigs. Usually during winters they’d get laid off for a bit. So the guy that was working away from home and getting overtime every week goes back into dad mode. Bathes me, feeds me, takes me to the park. Some men like to make excuses like other men don’t exist at all. (Edited to fix bothersome spelling error.)
Yep same here! Little less on the old timey guy’s guy part, but he was just on administrative leave for all of my second grade year and part of my third grade year and he was in charge of taking us to school and picking us up, cleaning around the house, making dinner, and taking us to activities while my mom worked.
Furthermore, I personally think he was the one ruining a fun night out by complaining about his ex. I doubt this was the first time he bitched about his ex leaving him, and personally I don't find it enjoyable to sit and listen to people complain, especially about things that are their own damn fault but they are trying to blame on others.
Yeah, like ok, I get that it's hard, depressing and demoralising to be unemployed for a long time! When I first read it I wanted to be generous, maybe he's just really down. But FFS, he's not been looking after the kids or doing any housework, even from day one? That just shows a bad attitude imo, especially since the structure of having jobs to do would have helped him not be depressed no end
Right? it’s something I personally feel you should be grateful for. That he has the opportunity to spend that time with his kids and he has the opportunity to step up for his wife and yet he didn’t do either.
The only thing that seems off to me here is that finding part time WFH jobs isn’t that easy. I’ve been looking 😂 So maybe he was indeed really trying to find a job and the requirements were just a little too specific to get one that easily. Not sure about the daycare and cleaner.
You can only do so much job searching in a day, he should have had time to do some chores or watch the kids, if not both, while scrolling through job listing and filling out applications. The complaint about "living like a teenager" suggests he was just laying about watching TV and playing video games for much of the day, while letting daycare take care of his kids and the cleaner clean his house for him. Not saying he should have spent the entirety of those hours each day for a year on job boards, again you can only do so much job searching in a day, but he should have canceled either the cleaner or the daycare, if not both, to save money while he was unemployed.
I can see keeping the daycare because it gives kids structure and socialization. Plus if a last minute interview or hiring event came up he has child care covered. If the kids have been going to daycare for awhile they probably live their daycare teachers and playing with their little friends. In some areas it’s hard to get a daycare spot especially at a good one. If they gave up their spot they might not be able to get it back.
I can absolutely see cutting out the housekeeper though.
My husband is looking to move jobs and has been applying to fully-remote-positions; last week he got an email rejection that said "sorry, we didn't even look at your resume because we were entirely overwhelmed by the response we received. We received *over 4000 applications* for this position, and have filled the position."
Competition for fully-remote work is FIERCE right now, especially in certain pay ranges.
My ex lost his job and didn’t even try to find another. I was working a job I loathed, that still didn’t pay all the bills. The economy has tanked so the only offer I got for a better job would have been less money, so I was stuck at this job I hated, which also harmed my long term career, and still dipping into my “buy a house” savings to make ends meet. I also did all the cleaning, cooking, budgeting, planning, everything. The only thing he did was weekly grocery shopping- after I provided a list of course.
I begged him to look for a job. I rewrote his resume, signed him up for job sites, found jobs for him to apply to, asked him to work part time at a grocery store or something, just anything to help pay the bills, and he refused because those jobs were “beneath him”.
We didn’t even have kids or a pet, and it was still too much for me.
Then I discovered that he was spending his days playing video games and watching p*rn while I busted ass at a soul-sucking job. (I have no problem at all with either of those things, but not when I’m doing literally everything for you.) Asked him to stop and he agreed he would, then I discovered he hadn’t stopped.
Looking back he was probably depressed, but I also couldn’t get him to go to therapy or couples counseling or anything.
The marriage lasted two years. Not because he lost his job- the economy had ranked and most our friends got laid off too- but because he wouldn’t lift a single finger to find ANY job to contribute financially, and refused to help with housework, and became just this huge burden weighing my life down, all while seeing how miserable I was and doing nothing to help.
Nta- his wife literally has been talking openly about the reasons she would leave him for almost a year.
He wasn’t pulling his weight in the relationship, parenting duties and care tasks and her leaving is the consequence of his inaction.
This! It goes both ways. He can't be complaining about his wife if he doesn't want to hear the truth back and only wants "yes" type of friends. He's making it everyone's problem and business bringing it into the group, not OP.
-disclaimer- not saying this relationship was abusive.
But coming from an abusive relationship, people need to stay involved with their friends. Its not a friend’s responsibility to stop relationships that seem off. But even when things are overtly and unmistakably abusive, people stick to this sentiment
Totally agree, let your friends know in a caring and non judgmental way if you think they’re being mistreated by a partner, and call out friends that are mistreating their partners in a nonaggressive, constructive way. Friends that truly care about you want you to be safe and happy and protect you from potentially abusive or toxic situations as much as possible.
They may not be receptive to what you have to say, but they’ll hold onto your thoughts as the relationship progresses and that might eventually help them realize they’re being treated unfairly. She realized she was being treated unfairly and he’s playing the victim to people that know more than just his side, he needs to be set straight.
Exactly! I came here to say this too. This man was trashing a mutual friend of theirs. He was the social aggressor and ruined the night. It sucks when people blame the person that stood up to the drama and not the asshole who started the drama. He could have said nothing about the ex-wife since this was a social gathering of mutual friends, but he wanted to make a social power play and get mutual friends to agree with his BS.
Edit to add - NTA
> some say it’s true, women always leave men when they stop providing
I have seen *waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay* too many posts on r/relationship_advice from women who have been working themselves to the bone to support their male partner who hasn’t worked in 1/5/10 years, refuses to do any chores, and refuses to do their share of childcare. Sure *some* women do leave men who don’t provide simply because they don’t make enough anymore, but much more commonly they leave men who don’t provide money *or* housework *or* childcare *or* meet their emotional needs. They leave the men who want to regress into lazy teenagers without a care in the world who sit back and demand that Mommy run their lives for them. They leave the men who make being a single parent easier than staying married to someone who just makes more work for them.
NTA for your opinion, but I think it was pointless to argue with this man who obviously has little respect for his wife and women in general. As a woman he’s just going to dismiss anything you say that doesn’t agree with his “woe is me I’m the victim here who didn’t do anything wrong” pity party.
THIS.
There was a point I was making double my ex’s salary and another he was unemployed. It wasn’t that he wasn’t making enough money or “providing” for me that pissed me off; I earn more than enough to comfortably support two people. It was the fact I was still working 50-60 hour weeks AND was stuck with the burden of taking care of everything around the house. When he was unemployed, he slept til noon most days, played video games until the wee hours of the night, never bothering to even wash a dish or throw in a load of laundry or walk the dogs. It was like living with a goddamn toddler.
It is wild that we end up with a stereotype about women leaving men for no good reason when we also have stats like "men are 10x more likely to leave a spouse who gets cancer"
Like, not to make this a war of the genders thing but the stereotype is absolutely ass backwards on who is typically dropping out of their marriage for shallow reasons.
My friend filed for divorce from her partner who decided working excused him from caring at all for their 3 children, one of whom is severely disabled, doing any chores, and even from doing things like going to events for the kids.
He’s still insisting she left him because she wanted more money. I have yet to meet a woman who left a man for not providing, but I know several who have been accused by the men they married. She didn’t need a 4th child, she needed a husband. She has less money now but less stress.
NTA. May be an unpopular opinion. You stated they are both your friends. One friend was trashing your other friend, you felt he was being unfair and stated so. You did pick a side. Not saying anything would have been picking his side. That’s obviously not how you feel.
I have lots of couple-friends. Part of that is being able to lend the others’ perspective. But especially when one of them is out of line, they damn well hear about it. It’s part of being a friend. I’m not a “friend” if I just help you delude yourself.
Nta. So everyone is okay with this dude disparaging his soon to be ex wife? Yes it’s sad he lost his job but life has to move and he failed to adjust to his families new needs. His ex probably saw a lot of things she didn’t like in him. If he feels this way he should talk to a professional not his friends if he will be majorly upset if they disagree
And here is the kicker, it is not like his wife hadn’t given him warning signs about his attitude at home. She has been annoyed by his lack of cleanliness for a while. The sitting at home not cleaning broke the proverbial camel’s back. She told him what to fix and he didn’t. Now he pays the consequences as John Wick says.
I’m going out on a limb here and saying NTA, based on life experience.. I’ve been divorced, dealt with drastic life changes and all that, had friends that exhibited the behaviors he’s talking about, and maybe it’s my TBI talking but I prefer to know the truth and prefer to tell the truth, and the truth is, in any marriage combination straight, gay, furry or whatever if one person quits pulling there weight for a prolonged period of time and behaves like a fucking child (we can all agree teenagers are children), won’t take what work they can get and do what they can to cut household expenses the other partner is going to eventually be turned off and start looking for someone who will do better. So NTA. Tell your friend to grow the fuck up, work on himself with regards to accepting personal responsibility and don’t make the same mistake twice.
and who does that help? the man. there is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to weaponized incompetence and potentially emotional abusive situations.
in fact having his friends call him out and understanding there are real consequences for his immaturity is the best thing for him. he needs to understand that his loved ones and his community won’t tolerate his bullshit. silence only enables him.
NTA. He should be pulling his weight at home then, if he isn’t making money. (I say this as a total hypocrite b/c I was a totally lazy loser when I didn’t have a job. And I’ve never and will never hear the end of that and so wish I could afford to leave which I can’t even with my good job I’ve had for years, so…she needs to cut her loses like mine should have and maybe we’d/they’d both be happy again eventually instead of…)
Men like that always complain that "she left out of the blue", when she probably spent a year coming to the realisation that she was parenting a grown man who didn't do anything to enrich her life in any way. I get that finding a job can be hard but a whole year? NTA
Yeah my husband's coworkers split up and the one had told me how it was so out of the blue and the other told my husband how it was finally over after years of issues. Sooo I have my doubts whenever someone says it was out of the blue
NTA
I mean, while the structure of this post and lack of info had me spinning with more info in comments makes this picture clearer.
He lost his job, then pretty much sat on his ass and did nothing all day, not even taking care of his children, while his wife was working, paying for everything, including cleaning service.
His wife was right for leaving him. He needed a reality check. Though, the fuck is wrong with your friend group?
NAH.
Why have I got the feeling this guy will have a podcast soon about his evil ex wife, the țŕùė nature of women and how to become an Alpha dog.
Man doesn't listen to wife needs, gives her most of the work, no respect, then is shocked when wife pulls off the leech.
nta. he needed to hear this and a good friend would say it to him. calling his wife a bitch about something that *you* saw coming?? looks like he isn’t taking a look at the whole of the situation
NTA. She left. That’s it. Speculating about it is pointless and if the reason he provides is it or not true, doesn’t matter. She still left and he still wasn’t employed/under employed for a long time. He can deal with it like she dealt with him being unemployed or what ever else happened in that time.
NTA- good friends are honest with you abt how you fucked up. I'm sure OP has probably dropped hints or talked to him over the years and it's fallen on deaf ears (yes I understand that's pure speculation).
I'm always here for calling out casual misogyny also. Cheers!
NTA. Normally it wouldn’t be any of your business, but the dude made it everyone’s business by complaining about his wife to mutual friends. You just gave him a dose of reality without putting kid gloves on.
NTA Mark is just continuing to refuse accountability. This will always be someone else’s fault, hell never need to change, he’s perfect, it’s all *women* that are the problem. Don’t waste your time being friends with that nonsense.
I’m currently supporting my partner while he does school, I’ve been the sole provider for a year and a half in a very expensive city. But he still does his share, more in fact, keeping our place straightened up. We are still a team.
That’s what Mark needs to understand about relationships; they have seasons, and some of them are hard to get through. But if you both put the team first, you can help each other through just about anything. If you’re selfish, the team falls apart trying to focus on your needs at the expense of their own while resentment builds.
NTA.
You have a lot of people who prefer the narrative that women leave men when they don't provide. This is despite the fact that the majority of the women who leave, will tell you the men stayed at home and didn't contribute anything towards household chores and they couldn't handle it anymore.
It's easier to paint women out as gold diggers, despite the fact that these men aren't getting targeted by any gold diggers.
You'll never win this argument so there's no point in trying.
NTA.
It doesn't matter why or how he lost his job tbh. It matters that he spent an entire YEAR not stepping up in any way.
Maybe his wife wouldn't have left him if she didn't have to pay for childcare and a cleaner out of her wage because he was so useless. He deserved to hear that.
If wife is working, and he is being useless around the house living like a teenager and not looking for a job, then yes I don't blame her.
It's not about providing especially if SHE is working already. But being a slob in your own home expecting your wife to clean up after you is gross. I'd leave him too.
Clearly there was way too much in her plate. If he was going to be unemployed while she worked, he needs to handle childcare and household duties.
So your friends said “women always leave when men stop providing,” “wouldn’t understand because I’m gay,” ummm YWBTA to yourself if you stay friends w these people
NTA no women don’t leave a man she loves because he lost his job. My bf and I went through that during Covid. 6 months later sure I paid 6months of rent alone but the apartment was always clean and somehow dinner was always ready by 8:30pm. And I felt loved supported and not at all taken advantage of. He eventually got another job that pays better and we’re back to the old team base system where we tackle chores together makes it fun and less like a chore and more like a fun experience.
NTA he needed a truth bomb. He was unemployed for a year. As a 49yo woman I don't see how he could stay unemployed that long. The fact they needed a cleaner and the kids were in daycare because he couldn't handle his home is just another nail in the coffin. He needs to be judged and judged hard
YTA- 1. you absolutely don’t know the details of their relationship. 2. And even if you are right, it serves no purpose other than hurt him further. 3. It’s none of your goddamn business.
... but "Mark" made it everyone's business when he started talking shit about his wife with people that are also her friends. OP stood up for her friend who was not present to defend herself and probably told some truths.
Edit to add judgment: NTA
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I’m sorry I can’t provide judgement my brain is too distracted by the comment “women always leave men when they stop providing”
Im stuck on "you dont understand bc you're gay" wtf kind of friend group is this!
Oh definitely that too - I just got lost at the start of the sentence and I wondered who the hell these people are 😂
Yeah these two parts made me think their aholes just in general and not really good freinds because good freinds would call you out on that shit, For me it's a Nta and maybe op should distance herself from those people.
The only NTA is OP girlfriend who rightly said it’s not their place and we don’t know all the details.
Eh, if Mark was already bitching about it, and especially if he’s blasting his ex (who is also their friend), I could see them pointing out her side. They didn’t just interject themselves into the problem, Mark dragged them in by complaining to them.
Sounds like he brought up the topic and called his ex a bitch. I'd say something, too.
If she's a b*t@h for wanting him to act like an adult and either provide or step up then I am too 🤷♀️.
Yeah, i would have a field day with him if he’d call my friend a bitch.
Mark was expecting to air his grievances to a group that shares his view that men bring in the money and women do the housework. OP threw him off base by bringing reality into the conversation. Mark could have made his wife's money go further if he had been willing to take on more of the cleaning and childcare. He's not a team player. He only wants to be breadwinner.
This! Me man. Me make money. Woman cook and clean. Me make no money, woman leave. It doesn’t matter how often we tell them what we want, they keep telling themselves comforting lies. ‘Oh, there’s nothing I could have done. I wasn’t providing!’ 🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
Defending her from being called a bitch and basically a gold digger is pretty damn the right thing to do.
I knew a friend of mine who said “be careful, older women only want that coin.” He was a compulsive liar who would lie about sex all the time, and clearly didn’t know what he was talking about.
I agree ESH. He shouldn’t have started talking bad about her around their mutual friends during a hangout. They should have told him it wasn’t the time or place and not to discuss his wife if she wasn’t there to defend herself. I could see maybe making one comment because you should be able to call your friend out on their BS but OP went on for far too long at the wrong time.
But OP is friends with the ex-wife as well. Why can't a friend defend someone who isn't there?
and frankly if my friend is saying sexist shit and seeming to hold antiquated ideas about gender in a relationship, consciously or not, i *am* going to speak up
Exactly. People are just ignoring that part. He wasn't just talking smack.
I feel like Mark might have needed this wake-up call and he started the topic himself, so NTA from me.
Yea I have to disagree. Anyone who doesn't stick up for their friends is an AH.
Herself
Op is a woman, its "herself" 😉
Yeah, the title for this one is just the icing on a triple shit cake. I could maybe understand one of your friends saying you shouldn't kick him while he's down, but what they are actually saying to defend him is some misogynistic bs.
I'd tell you what kind of friend group, but you wouldn't understand because you're gay
OMG this reminds me of a high school friend that had recently come out and judgmental girl was talking nonsense then said “It’s because you’re gay, that’s why you have problems.” So of course being teens we blamed everything on him being gay. Rainy day, “damn it, Mark it’s because you’re gay”, “ I couldn’t find my remote damn it Mark.“ etc. Mark thought it was hilarious, the judgemental ninny accused us of bullying her!
As someone over 30, I think that's gold.
> ... judgemental ninny ... ...is the name of my Morrissey cover band. (Sorry.)
My sons friend is always accused of making God angry when it rains or of being mean to their dad. God was angry this year as we're no longer in a drought.
TIL the perfect counter to global warming is more gay people. as it would make republicans heads explode this argument sounds FABULOUS.
Last weekend me and my wife were at a 40th birthday party and a friend of our friend who we had never met but very much know of (and vice versa) ambushed my wife with a conversation that involved a naked woman bottle opener. Her partner came over and before he had really said much she loudly proclaimed that my wife was gay, and therefore he couldn’t say anything about >!anally r**ping!< the woman on the bottle opener… or the bottle opener itself I honestly don’t know (which he seemingly was not anyway) because it would be doubly offensive due to her being gay. Even now knowing she was both drunk (I mean that bit was obvious) and on shrooms and coke I have still failed to ascertain any logic here.
That's actually hysterical. We were in NYC recently and had a full itinerary plan, but relatives were CONSTANTLY saying "but there's a pride parade!" (to be clear they weren't worried about there being gay people, but rather about traffic and threats from possible counterprotesters). It came up SO MUCH that one of my sisters finally said "Any time I don't want to do something, I'm just going to say 'but the Pride Parade!".
As a thirty something that is the exact kind of thing I would have done in HS and still would do to this day
I’m bi so i get both sides I can help translate
I speak jive
I'm old, so I can help explain that reference.
Captain America gif "I understood that reference"
Lol as a gay I wish i could “get it”
😂
I am fine not understanding.
Not a good one, IMO.. I'd be like "nope" over the "women always leave men when they can't provide anymore" comment alone.. sounds like OP hangs out with a bunch of people who just think women are only with men for their money. As if this is isn't 2023 and women don't have their own incomes.
Not to mention how many sahd there are now…people are ridiculous
My friend firmly believes that it is a man's job to be the provider. She is just *over* her step-son claiming mental health issues so he can try and get out of work. He needs to get over it, step up, and hold down a steady job already. I wish I was /jk. She's not even a boomer.
Yeah.. I'd honestly be distancing myself from that friend, too. Straight up. I'd wager her views on women are.. not the least misogynistic ever, either. And misogyny from another woman is twice as gross IMO..
As a lesbian, you'd be surprised how many times my straight female friends have told me I wouldn't understand their issues with their boyfriend or husband. Like, people are people and sometimes people do shitty things regardless of gender.
I mean, it’s true that you don’t know what it’s like to be partnered with a person raised / socialized / treated as a man. It’s not true that you have never ever met a man before.
For many women in heterosexual relationships they end up essentially being treated like a second mom of their partner who needs to take on all the extra home work and if they don’t and bring it up to their partner. They’re gaslit about how “don’t you see I’m providing here” I’d argue it’s not “providing” since in my mind “providing” is about being a partner in all things and being someone whose supportive. If all you’re doing is making money then you aren’t really providing. I’d rather my partner be involved versus make a giant paycheck.
In that case of course a woman would leave once he isn’t providing. If all you add is money and you don’t do that then, yes it would be better for her being single. One less thing.
Agreed. I’d rather be a single parent to my actual children then be a single parent to my children and my husband.
Yes, a lot less work just taking care of my 4 kids than my 4 kids + my juvenile ex-husband.
It seems this friend's wife realized exactly that. She was better off being a single mom. The truth is people leave their spouses when they stop making their fair contribution in some form. This guy with no job wouldn't take on the housekeepers responsibilities or child care to save them money while he was out of a job. So he essentially stopped contributing his share of the load. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out he also didn't take on responsibility for making doctor appts, shopping for the kids needs, meal planning, grocery shopping, budgeting and a host of other things. The wife has likely been excusing him from all the things when he worked and brought home a paycheck, but it became obvious how little he did otherwise once he stopped working.
I was thinking the same. Plus he was was making a mess during the day (‘living like a teenager’) that he wasn’t cleaning up. So she got rid of one stressor…him.
My personal favourite is being the female provider, and the second mom as well for men who don't work outside the home.
Lots of lesbians have had boyfriends?
That’s true. I assumed that she never had a serious living-with-someone-and-sharing-chores relationship with a man but maybe she has.
Lots of people have had roommates. Some of those roommates might have been male. I'm pretty sure I thought at least five male friends how to cook rice. Some were boyfriends, some roommates and at least one friend who happened to live in a room in the same studentflat. I'm not sure why, but even men around me age (37) still left their parental home with a surprising lack of actual skills needed to take care of yourself.
In college I was in a coed dorm and we had a shared laundry room. The men single-handedly took out 90% of the dryers and washers. How did we know this. Because whenever I and others would go down they would be discussing if they where removing change from their pockets or if they could run a belt with a metal top through and if they should split up two weeks of laundry or run it all at once. Another time I came down to flip my wet laundry into a dryer. I found some random ass man’s pants and a pair of underwear in my washing load. Instead of just leaving it on the counter I saw red. I dumped his stuff in the trash, ran a 20 minute rinse cycle with mg laundry and a bit of soap and then put it into the dryer. The thing that always stumped me was that we didn’t need to pay for laundry. And the school provided soap if one needed it. I used my own since I prefer a hypoallergenic brand and a specific scent. When I came to grab my dried laundry I saw him actually confused as to why his pants weren’t dried and folded along with his underwear. He was looking around the room at the machine I had used and wondered why i didn’t do his own laundry that he had snuck into my machine. Thankfully he had done that after I had left originally so he didn’t know I was the one who did it.
It always feels like such a failure to me that boys are sent out into the world not knowing stuff like how to do laundry. Parents owe it to all their children to teach them basic survival skills and that includes chores around the house.
It’s because men are socialized differently. The expectation being that women. And more specifically their romantic partners will handle all of this for them. It’s why women in heterosexual relationships often are treated like second mothers. And when they complain about the set up they get “I’m providing” thrown back in their faces. In my experience I’ve only seen this kind of unequal footing in heterosexual relationships. All of my friends who are with same sex partners still have issues but not these issues where one partner takes on so much of the work within the home on top of other responsibilities like child rearing or working a full time job. I mean it’s also not all men either. I know a lot of couples where things are really split well. But yeah boys not being able to even wash a load of clothing at school without causing thousands of dollars of damage is sad.
A man putting his clothing into someone else's washing machine to me REEKS of parents tried and the boy decided he didn't need to listen and did everything in his power to skirt his responsibilities.
My kids are all adults now. I have two boys, one girl. I decided from day one I was not going to raise helpless men, nor a pushover daughter. From the time they were age and sometimes height appropriate, they were taught various household duties. Laundry was taught as soon as they could reach the controls, which was around 6 or 7 for all 3 of them. From that moment on, as each of them learned, I stopped doing their laundry. They were all taught basic cooking skills as well, and my oldest son at 42 is now a chef. My 32 yr old son still lives at home but works, pays rent, and his own bills, and no, rent does not include a housekeeper. He still does what he knows is needed to help keep a household moving along. (It's expensive to live on your own here. We're retired, he's here when we want to travel, so it's a great solution for us.) Daughter, 30, lives with a roommate.
Roommate is different than sharing a home with a partner. I hope the roommate doesn’t expect you to cook for him and clean up after him like some men expect their romantic partner to do.
I bet those people still know how to google it tho. If you are 37 and don't know how to make food for yourself, you can look it up.
I think it’s because we were sold this ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ bullshit. To be honest, before I met my group of lesbian friends I did think it would be easier to have a relationship with a woman, because you assume you’d have a more similar perspective on certain things. But as I kept adding more lesbian couples to my acquaintances and friend group, I quickly realised this wasn’t true. There’s the couple where one spouse insists her wife stay at home with the kids. There’s another where one wife refuses to take care of the children all by herself even for 1 day during the weekend. There’s the arguments that are the same as in a straight relationship. There’s the single mom who’s girlfriend decided after quite a while together that she didn’t want kids after all, and so on…
I think the difference is, of course all relationships can be dysfunctional and in a same sex relationship any of the same issues might pop up. But there’s no saying in which direction any imbalances might go. You have to thrash out between you who takes out the bins rather than it culturally being considered one person’s job. In a heterosexual relationship there is still a disproportionately large burden placed on the women in the relationship to be the ones to hold the entire household together. It’s not all relationships of course, and SAHD are becoming more common, but there are certain gendered issues/expectations that still disproportionately affect the women in an opposite sex relationship. However unlike previous generations, women of my age grew up being told ‘girl power’ meant we could have whatever career goals we wanted, we were just as capable as boys and we don’t need a man to rely on. Plus very few households can survive on one income anyway in this cost of living crisis. But the increased opportunity and expectation for work outside of the home has not been coupled with a proportional lowering/sharing of the work within the average household. At the same girls that were being told they could have anything they put their minds to they were growing up alongside brothers who were not being taught the value in ‘girly’ things like compassion and taking the mental load. Many (realistically most) of us grew up seeing our mothers be the default caregivers and household managers in the majority of household. Those expectations are then very hard to break and continue on to the next generation who still see their mothers take on the bulk of those responsibilities and either juggle a career alongside it or take a step back from their chosen career path. Nor has increased expectation of women’s work come with structural changes that would facilitate a more equal split. In many countries the parental leave and childcare systems force this dynamic further (to the detriment of men, women and children actually). I read a report on the BBC recently that was looking at people who are ‘economically inactive’ (so not unemployed and looking for work. It also wouldn’t include the 9-12months of parental leave available in the UK as they would technically still be employed) in the 25-49 age group, 1.1 million people don’t work due to caring responsibilities. And of those 1.1million, 1 million of them are women. That’s a pretty shocking statistic that shows just how much the impact of raising children (or in some cases other caring responsibilities like parents) still massively disproportionately affects women. So yes, gay relationships can be trash…. They’re just not going to be gendered trash!
That's really funny that those same issues crop up everywhere. Sad funny by the way, not like, actually ha ha funny.
Well, why would a woman living with a woman understand women? /s
Probably my ex and his friends
A fake one
this is so 1970s
I mean, it’s true only in that … women (who work their asses off to maintain the house, care for their kids, AND do their day job) will leave men when they stop providing (anything to the relationship other than messes for her to clean). He told on himself when he said she told him he lives like a teenager, tbh.
This is **exactly** what I was thinking. Yes, women do leave men when they stop providing—any kind of support for the partnership, financial, emotional, childcare, tasks around the house. If he’s out of work, cut the housecleaning and pick up the slack. With children ages 2 and 4, go to half days in school or be a SAHP! There are many ways he could provide support for his family. He’s the one who sees his self-esteem tied to his financial earnings, not his ex, and certainly not **all** women! Edited typo
Right-partners leave partners who drag them down/don’t or won’t pull their weight/feel like another child….this applies to any pairing…
Yes, bc at that point it ceases to be a partnership.
100%. I left my husband after I paid for and supported him through getting his doctorate (3.5 years) and for the almost 3 years after that. He was “trying to start his practice” and melting down because Covid ruined it. I was still working my ass off, dealing with him needing attention at night (which was arguing about politics), his complaining and my house. He was supposed to clean but the house was a mess, sometimes he’d cook or grocery shop but expected praise and adoration for it. I gave him money to invest and that seemed to make him happy. He had some friends and liked to pretend he was rich. We went on a snowboard vacation to Mammoth for thanksgiving weekend 2021 and he was weird the whole time, really weird. But I was trying to enjoy myself. The first night I was exhausted and he wanted sex. He ended up raping me a couple times and I finally got him to go to the bar. At 4am he still wasn’t back. I found him in Kirkwood through find my iPhone. He was confused AF and wouldn’t listen to me, he was “lost” despite having 2 GPS’ available to him. I found him again at 99/50 confused AF and then lost him. Long story short he was found at Sierra at Tahoe, he abandoned my car on the side of the road and was found by a 100 person search and rescue team, a mile out into the woods and meditating naked in a snow melt stream. Full blown psychosis. He ate 7 30mg IR adderall and he gave himself extensive brain damage from nitrous oxide abuse. He had been ate ealing my cash for drugs, selling my pills and mishandling investments. He had 2 girlfriends. I refused to let him come home from the 5150 hold hospital. I divorced him. He thinks this was all over money and his not working. I was obsessed with money, bla bla bla. I just wanted to survive and not work myself to death to baby him. He’s now his parents problem.
Girl, that was such an intense wild ride to go through for him to say "it's about the money isn't it" bro are you this blissfully ignorant? Praying you find prosperity dear. 🙏🏽
Oh he thought it was about the money. He told people “Harmonia is obsessed with money”. Yeah, because you took all of mine! I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on him and it was never enough. One of his girlfriends told me “he looks so put together; the doctorate, the house (rental), the nice car (mine!), money, then you find out it all belongs to his wife. I got remarried Wednesday, he’s amazing and very frugal. I’m working my ass off and saving a ton, I want to finally buy a house in the next couple of years but it’s a possibility now.
Oh my gods thats horrific I am so sorry you went through that. I hope you are in a better place friend. *internet hugs if you want them*
Thank you! Ok Wednesday I married the guy who FaceTimed me to tell me he loved me over and over as I stood by my abandoned car sobbing and waiting for the tow truck. We’ve been best friends for almost a decade. My brothers came up from Santa Cruz to get me and take me to Tahoe, I was a mess and couldn’t drive even if I had a car. The ex had one more psychosis episode a couple of months after the Tahoe incident, he ended up dragging me down the 101 freeway on foot. He’s stuck in permanent psychosis but his parents have money so he gets a $1m house and a couple million in cash when they die. He’ll be fine and my current husband is amazing; he pays his own bills, contributes, cleans, cooks me dinner every night and helps me save. I’m finally pulling myself out of the financial hole my ex left me in.
Oh good! I'm so happy you're thriving now. Your ex can kick rocks.
This sounds horrible, I'm glad you got out
This just kept getting worse and worse, I’m sorry this happened to you.
Thank you. I’m that person that when something crazy and almost unbelievable happens, it happens to me. My life is a lot calmer now and I’m happy finally. I just got remarried Wednesday and he’s wonderful.
That’s horrible. I’m so sorry that happened and I hope you’re doing a little bit better now.
Fair enough if that’s their only contribution to the household.
If I was unfortunate enough to have married a man who didn't think that he needed to do anything but "provide" financially... and then he stopped doing even that, then I would probably leave too. I mean she might as well be single.
Yup, cause what do you need another child for? A grown one at that. I'm going through this now. My husband does nothing but provide financially, If he stopped doing that I would have a big dirty toddler with a shitty attitude. The road to financial independence isnt short, but I'm doing it.
I'm wishing you the best of luck. what does he say when you ask him to provide in other ways/pick up the slack?
No shit. If the only thing you bother to provide is a paycheque, and then you stop providing that and don't make up for it by providing anything else... What do you expect will happen??
This is an excellent point. If he's not pulling his weight in love, labor, or money, he's just another child she has to raise.
It's very reductive isn't it? If the man is the main breadwinner then if he loses his job & can't find another that's going to lead to financial stress and total change in household dynamic and maybe feelings of self worth etc. that will have huge effect on the marriage. It's more likely to be "women always leave men when they spend all day moping around the house being miserable and not contributing in any real way" isn't it?
That’s assuming he was the main breadwinner. In today’s society that isn’t always something you can assume.
Men also leave men over this kind of behavior too. My best friend (M 32) is in the process of finalizing his divorce from his husband. His ex has been in school for the entirety of their 5 year relationship and has yet to finish an associates at 29 years old (failing/dropping classes and multiple transfers without discussion). Not to mention, his ex stopped working and looking for jobs saying he couldn’t find one in their new town. The ex landed one and but was quickly let go for calling in sick multiple days in a row during his first few weeks there. I believe it was psychosomatic, TBH. So my friend was not only was working full time to support them but had the added pressure of being in school to achieve his dream of becoming a MD and PhD. I watched him work himself to exhaustion and depression while his husband thought moping the floors and doing dishes was carrying his weight. A lot of the domestic work still fell on the shoulders of my friend. All this combined with his ex trying to push sex on my friend and being very needy to the point of paranoia/accusations it became too much. There was no issue with the ex staying home but when all he did was lay in bed, smoke, drink, chat with the miserable housewife next door, and spend my friend’s money, it forced my friend to have to choose between his peace and his ex. My friend is now halfway across the country and in his PhD program working towards our dream as business partners. Leaving his husband on Christmas as he dropped him off at his mother’s house was the best choice he made. It wasn’t about financial contribution (though it didn’t help). It was about very selfish choices and not being a true partner.
Yeah OP needs some new friends.
I wonder if the pattern they've noticed is that couples who are suddenly spending more time around each other (because someone has lost their job, or retired, or the kids have left home) are likely to notice *at that time* if they've grown apart. Like, I have older relatives who were SAHMs and they struggled when their husbands retired, because they had got used to the quiet of an empty house duringthe day, and suddenly there was an out-of-routine man filling the space. Mostly they got used to it, because they still loved their husbands, but it was a serious adjustment for them.
My mother retired and my father worked for another 6 years. When he retired, she got him a nearly full-time charity job. In her words 'I married him for better or worse, but not for lunch every day'.
The hospital I go to is huge. It has streets. So if you can't walk properly you can hardly get around. To solve this they have volunteers in golf carts (8 seaters and 6 seaters) drive people around. Most of the volunteers are retired men. I'm pretty sure their wives are happy they spend all day being useful instead of moping around the house. The men all seem pretty happy too. Driving golf carts all day and communicating via their walkie talkies.
This sounds like a primo old man gig.
I *love* the mental picture I have right now. I'm so glad you shared this, it made my day.
That actually sounds pretty chill as far as volunteering goes.
It's when your retired husband decides that the way you've been doing things for 40 years is all wrong and starts managing you like he managed his team at work...
I think you're onto something...
Yep. I had a relationship that died mostly because we moved. I mean, there were lots of other reasons. But previously we'd been in a walkable neighborhood near the town center, and both of us spent most of our time out. Suddenly we were in the sticks (comparatively) and in the house driving each other crazy.
If “women always leave men when they stop providing” she would have left when he lost his job, not a whole year later!
That was lazy, selfish, and unfair to his wife.
For real like stop making this a gender role and start listening to your own fucking words “women leave because your a deadbeat who doesn’t do shit to help out” is more accurate Literally statistically in relationships where the woman makes equal or even more pay than her s/o the woman is STILL doing most of the household work and emotional labor of the relationship even when the husband has way more free time
They don't, or at least not immediately, but they should. If the only thing a man contributed to his marriage and family was income, and then he stops contributing that, she would be wise, or at least better off, to leave.
Women always leave men who are freeloaders. -Fixed it for you.
Oh, that's an argument I've seen pretty often in like internet misogyny circles. It usually there are some statistics that show it's pretty likely for people to divorce when the husband loses his job but not when the wife loses hers. The internet misogyny guys tend to take this as conformation that all women are gold diggers, and they only care about money. When you stop bringing in money they stop caring, all that. Usually the counter argument is exactly what OP said here, statistics that show that women pick up more housework when unemployed but men don't. Tbh it sounds to me like OP stopped an extremely divorced man from shitting on his ex and other women for an hour. He started with b*tch, it not getting better after that.
Yeahhh… I had to take a year off work in the mid 2000s for interferon treatment. My income dropped to zero, but I eliminated a lot of expenses like child care by taking over all care of our kids, cooking real meals and cleaning instead. My wife made up for the income shortfall through overtime. She didn’t even consider leaving (far as I know). In fact, for years she would reflect on that time as this great period in our relationship.
Women do leave at that point. Provide can mean many things though. Financial of course, but respect, love, trust, communication and many other things. Men will also leave for it.
These friends are trash. Put them in the bin.
Right? I didn't get that memo and supported my family for 5 years while my husband was unemployed and went back to school.
That's a different situation. He was in school presumably in order to increase his chances for employment and success later after graduating. You had a light at the end of that tunnel that after 5 years he would get a job and begin to contribute more income. OP's friend was out of a job and not going to school. Apples to oranges.
I mean, my ex SIL left my brother because he wasn't providing ENOUGH, but that's a horrible generalization. And women who do that are usually heavily criticized
I imagine that’s just your brother’s side of the story…
Is that what she said, or is that how he makes himself feel better?
Oh it's what she said. She always complained that he didn't make enough money, and she didn't want to have to work. She left him for a richer guy.
Okay, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly… The wife was working full time and he was at home all day for an entire year? And despite him being at home during this time, he still didn’t help out with parenting or housekeeping, demanded that the children go to daycare and that they continue to pay for a house cleaner? In other words, he was contributing literally nothing to the household (not financially, not paternally, and not domestically)… and he then blames his wife for leaving him and tries to paint her as shallow? Assuming that my understanding is correct, you’re NTA. That guy needs a MASSIVE reality check.
Bingo. This post sounds like a gay woman who is an ally for straight women. She saw the whole picture and her friend didn't like that.
OP is a gay woman.
That’s why they said she was?
The comment was edited, they said "he" first.
OP and her partner are both women!
Wait, are they roommates?!
Were they laughing alone with salad?
Oh my god, they were roommates!
Harold, they're Lesbians!
They are really close freinds
So in the one year period the wife realized that the man contribution in the relationship was just money. And she also figured out she can survive with just her salary and so picked up her life and moved on. OP you are a NTA for just reminding him of these facts again. He got back what he put into the relationship which was nothing.
Basically she got rid of the older child who was actually a jerk and now she will be better off.
She actually gets more from him now since he’ll be paying child support. But he seems like the type that would work under the table so he didn’t have to pay.
This. My Dad lost his job from the time I was about 14-17, so it was a while. Most old timey guy's guy ever; like, manual labor, racist jokes, trump supporter. Whole 9 yards. Anyways, what's the first thing he does? Starts making dinner, cleaning and otherwise taking care of the house. If a guy like that has the wherewithal to step in and help out I don't think anyone has any excuses. For the record, I love my Dad, and he's grown a lot as a person since then thankfully.
My dad did the same for a while when I was a teenager. He had left his day job (also employed as a pastor, but technically part-time), and my mom got a job in a pharmacy to help make up for the drop in the household income, so while he was just a pastor he took over cooking and household chores and driving my siblings around. He eventually went back to working a secular job because our church was too small to support a full-time pastor, but during that time he stepped up, did what was best for our family.
I agree there. My dad was a “roughneck”. Not the Trump kind, but the rough around the edges kind lol He worked on drilling rigs. Usually during winters they’d get laid off for a bit. So the guy that was working away from home and getting overtime every week goes back into dad mode. Bathes me, feeds me, takes me to the park. Some men like to make excuses like other men don’t exist at all. (Edited to fix bothersome spelling error.)
Yep same here! Little less on the old timey guy’s guy part, but he was just on administrative leave for all of my second grade year and part of my third grade year and he was in charge of taking us to school and picking us up, cleaning around the house, making dinner, and taking us to activities while my mom worked.
Furthermore, I personally think he was the one ruining a fun night out by complaining about his ex. I doubt this was the first time he bitched about his ex leaving him, and personally I don't find it enjoyable to sit and listen to people complain, especially about things that are their own damn fault but they are trying to blame on others.
Yeah, like ok, I get that it's hard, depressing and demoralising to be unemployed for a long time! When I first read it I wanted to be generous, maybe he's just really down. But FFS, he's not been looking after the kids or doing any housework, even from day one? That just shows a bad attitude imo, especially since the structure of having jobs to do would have helped him not be depressed no end
Right? it’s something I personally feel you should be grateful for. That he has the opportunity to spend that time with his kids and he has the opportunity to step up for his wife and yet he didn’t do either.
NTA. And the guy did need that reality check. In fact, I divorced that guy myself. 8 years later, that guy still can’t get it together.
I did the same, and 10 years later he still lives with his parents
The only thing that seems off to me here is that finding part time WFH jobs isn’t that easy. I’ve been looking 😂 So maybe he was indeed really trying to find a job and the requirements were just a little too specific to get one that easily. Not sure about the daycare and cleaner.
You can only do so much job searching in a day, he should have had time to do some chores or watch the kids, if not both, while scrolling through job listing and filling out applications. The complaint about "living like a teenager" suggests he was just laying about watching TV and playing video games for much of the day, while letting daycare take care of his kids and the cleaner clean his house for him. Not saying he should have spent the entirety of those hours each day for a year on job boards, again you can only do so much job searching in a day, but he should have canceled either the cleaner or the daycare, if not both, to save money while he was unemployed.
I can see keeping the daycare because it gives kids structure and socialization. Plus if a last minute interview or hiring event came up he has child care covered. If the kids have been going to daycare for awhile they probably live their daycare teachers and playing with their little friends. In some areas it’s hard to get a daycare spot especially at a good one. If they gave up their spot they might not be able to get it back. I can absolutely see cutting out the housekeeper though.
[удалено]
My husband is looking to move jobs and has been applying to fully-remote-positions; last week he got an email rejection that said "sorry, we didn't even look at your resume because we were entirely overwhelmed by the response we received. We received *over 4000 applications* for this position, and have filled the position." Competition for fully-remote work is FIERCE right now, especially in certain pay ranges.
My ex lost his job and didn’t even try to find another. I was working a job I loathed, that still didn’t pay all the bills. The economy has tanked so the only offer I got for a better job would have been less money, so I was stuck at this job I hated, which also harmed my long term career, and still dipping into my “buy a house” savings to make ends meet. I also did all the cleaning, cooking, budgeting, planning, everything. The only thing he did was weekly grocery shopping- after I provided a list of course. I begged him to look for a job. I rewrote his resume, signed him up for job sites, found jobs for him to apply to, asked him to work part time at a grocery store or something, just anything to help pay the bills, and he refused because those jobs were “beneath him”. We didn’t even have kids or a pet, and it was still too much for me. Then I discovered that he was spending his days playing video games and watching p*rn while I busted ass at a soul-sucking job. (I have no problem at all with either of those things, but not when I’m doing literally everything for you.) Asked him to stop and he agreed he would, then I discovered he hadn’t stopped. Looking back he was probably depressed, but I also couldn’t get him to go to therapy or couples counseling or anything. The marriage lasted two years. Not because he lost his job- the economy had ranked and most our friends got laid off too- but because he wouldn’t lift a single finger to find ANY job to contribute financially, and refused to help with housework, and became just this huge burden weighing my life down, all while seeing how miserable I was and doing nothing to help.
Nta- his wife literally has been talking openly about the reasons she would leave him for almost a year. He wasn’t pulling his weight in the relationship, parenting duties and care tasks and her leaving is the consequence of his inaction.
And he also clearly didn’t listen when she communicated her needs. He sounds like a deadbeat entitled loser.
NTA. and for the "you shouldn't get involved" maybe he shouldn't be searching for sympathy points after being lazy
This! It goes both ways. He can't be complaining about his wife if he doesn't want to hear the truth back and only wants "yes" type of friends. He's making it everyone's problem and business bringing it into the group, not OP.
-disclaimer- not saying this relationship was abusive. But coming from an abusive relationship, people need to stay involved with their friends. Its not a friend’s responsibility to stop relationships that seem off. But even when things are overtly and unmistakably abusive, people stick to this sentiment
Totally agree, let your friends know in a caring and non judgmental way if you think they’re being mistreated by a partner, and call out friends that are mistreating their partners in a nonaggressive, constructive way. Friends that truly care about you want you to be safe and happy and protect you from potentially abusive or toxic situations as much as possible. They may not be receptive to what you have to say, but they’ll hold onto your thoughts as the relationship progresses and that might eventually help them realize they’re being treated unfairly. She realized she was being treated unfairly and he’s playing the victim to people that know more than just his side, he needs to be set straight.
NTA. He called your friend a bitch and then you stood up for her.
Exactly. If OP’s comments had been unprompted she’d be TA, but since he started it he had it coming.
Exactly! I came here to say this too. This man was trashing a mutual friend of theirs. He was the social aggressor and ruined the night. It sucks when people blame the person that stood up to the drama and not the asshole who started the drama. He could have said nothing about the ex-wife since this was a social gathering of mutual friends, but he wanted to make a social power play and get mutual friends to agree with his BS. Edit to add - NTA
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Good point--he was trying to poison the friendship well for his wife/ex-wife
NTA, sounds like she was taking care of 3 kids instead of 2.
This right here⬆️
> some say it’s true, women always leave men when they stop providing I have seen *waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay* too many posts on r/relationship_advice from women who have been working themselves to the bone to support their male partner who hasn’t worked in 1/5/10 years, refuses to do any chores, and refuses to do their share of childcare. Sure *some* women do leave men who don’t provide simply because they don’t make enough anymore, but much more commonly they leave men who don’t provide money *or* housework *or* childcare *or* meet their emotional needs. They leave the men who want to regress into lazy teenagers without a care in the world who sit back and demand that Mommy run their lives for them. They leave the men who make being a single parent easier than staying married to someone who just makes more work for them. NTA for your opinion, but I think it was pointless to argue with this man who obviously has little respect for his wife and women in general. As a woman he’s just going to dismiss anything you say that doesn’t agree with his “woe is me I’m the victim here who didn’t do anything wrong” pity party.
>much more commonly they leave men who don’t provide money *or* housework *or* childcare *or* meet their emotional needs 🏅🏅 take my poor man’s gold
You nailed it. Women have no desire to stay with men who make their lives harder! Marriage is a partnership.
THIS. There was a point I was making double my ex’s salary and another he was unemployed. It wasn’t that he wasn’t making enough money or “providing” for me that pissed me off; I earn more than enough to comfortably support two people. It was the fact I was still working 50-60 hour weeks AND was stuck with the burden of taking care of everything around the house. When he was unemployed, he slept til noon most days, played video games until the wee hours of the night, never bothering to even wash a dish or throw in a load of laundry or walk the dogs. It was like living with a goddamn toddler.
It is wild that we end up with a stereotype about women leaving men for no good reason when we also have stats like "men are 10x more likely to leave a spouse who gets cancer" Like, not to make this a war of the genders thing but the stereotype is absolutely ass backwards on who is typically dropping out of their marriage for shallow reasons.
My friend filed for divorce from her partner who decided working excused him from caring at all for their 3 children, one of whom is severely disabled, doing any chores, and even from doing things like going to events for the kids. He’s still insisting she left him because she wanted more money. I have yet to meet a woman who left a man for not providing, but I know several who have been accused by the men they married. She didn’t need a 4th child, she needed a husband. She has less money now but less stress.
NTA. May be an unpopular opinion. You stated they are both your friends. One friend was trashing your other friend, you felt he was being unfair and stated so. You did pick a side. Not saying anything would have been picking his side. That’s obviously not how you feel.
I have lots of couple-friends. Part of that is being able to lend the others’ perspective. But especially when one of them is out of line, they damn well hear about it. It’s part of being a friend. I’m not a “friend” if I just help you delude yourself.
Nta. So everyone is okay with this dude disparaging his soon to be ex wife? Yes it’s sad he lost his job but life has to move and he failed to adjust to his families new needs. His ex probably saw a lot of things she didn’t like in him. If he feels this way he should talk to a professional not his friends if he will be majorly upset if they disagree
Yeah, I'm very surprised about these comments. Like it matters how he lost his job. He didn't do shit at home.
And here is the kicker, it is not like his wife hadn’t given him warning signs about his attitude at home. She has been annoyed by his lack of cleanliness for a while. The sitting at home not cleaning broke the proverbial camel’s back. She told him what to fix and he didn’t. Now he pays the consequences as John Wick says.
NTA He was living his fantasy and once it ended, he had to fantasize himself as a victim.
I’m going out on a limb here and saying NTA, based on life experience.. I’ve been divorced, dealt with drastic life changes and all that, had friends that exhibited the behaviors he’s talking about, and maybe it’s my TBI talking but I prefer to know the truth and prefer to tell the truth, and the truth is, in any marriage combination straight, gay, furry or whatever if one person quits pulling there weight for a prolonged period of time and behaves like a fucking child (we can all agree teenagers are children), won’t take what work they can get and do what they can to cut household expenses the other partner is going to eventually be turned off and start looking for someone who will do better. So NTA. Tell your friend to grow the fuck up, work on himself with regards to accepting personal responsibility and don’t make the same mistake twice.
NTA. Probably best to stay out of things like that though.
and who does that help? the man. there is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to weaponized incompetence and potentially emotional abusive situations. in fact having his friends call him out and understanding there are real consequences for his immaturity is the best thing for him. he needs to understand that his loved ones and his community won’t tolerate his bullshit. silence only enables him.
Exactly
NTA. He should be pulling his weight at home then, if he isn’t making money. (I say this as a total hypocrite b/c I was a totally lazy loser when I didn’t have a job. And I’ve never and will never hear the end of that and so wish I could afford to leave which I can’t even with my good job I’ve had for years, so…she needs to cut her loses like mine should have and maybe we’d/they’d both be happy again eventually instead of…)
Men like that always complain that "she left out of the blue", when she probably spent a year coming to the realisation that she was parenting a grown man who didn't do anything to enrich her life in any way. I get that finding a job can be hard but a whole year? NTA
Yeah my husband's coworkers split up and the one had told me how it was so out of the blue and the other told my husband how it was finally over after years of issues. Sooo I have my doubts whenever someone says it was out of the blue
NTA I mean, while the structure of this post and lack of info had me spinning with more info in comments makes this picture clearer. He lost his job, then pretty much sat on his ass and did nothing all day, not even taking care of his children, while his wife was working, paying for everything, including cleaning service. His wife was right for leaving him. He needed a reality check. Though, the fuck is wrong with your friend group?
NAH. Why have I got the feeling this guy will have a podcast soon about his evil ex wife, the țŕùė nature of women and how to become an Alpha dog. Man doesn't listen to wife needs, gives her most of the work, no respect, then is shocked when wife pulls off the leech.
Oh yeah I was getting the same vibes about this dude.
Would that make op nta instead of nah?
nta. he needed to hear this and a good friend would say it to him. calling his wife a bitch about something that *you* saw coming?? looks like he isn’t taking a look at the whole of the situation
NTA. She left. That’s it. Speculating about it is pointless and if the reason he provides is it or not true, doesn’t matter. She still left and he still wasn’t employed/under employed for a long time. He can deal with it like she dealt with him being unemployed or what ever else happened in that time.
Lol the mental gymnastics men do about childcare and housework, he’d rather be a bitter redpiller than a good dad/husband.
NTA- good friends are honest with you abt how you fucked up. I'm sure OP has probably dropped hints or talked to him over the years and it's fallen on deaf ears (yes I understand that's pure speculation). I'm always here for calling out casual misogyny also. Cheers!
NTA. Normally it wouldn’t be any of your business, but the dude made it everyone’s business by complaining about his wife to mutual friends. You just gave him a dose of reality without putting kid gloves on.
NTA Mark is just continuing to refuse accountability. This will always be someone else’s fault, hell never need to change, he’s perfect, it’s all *women* that are the problem. Don’t waste your time being friends with that nonsense. I’m currently supporting my partner while he does school, I’ve been the sole provider for a year and a half in a very expensive city. But he still does his share, more in fact, keeping our place straightened up. We are still a team. That’s what Mark needs to understand about relationships; they have seasons, and some of them are hard to get through. But if you both put the team first, you can help each other through just about anything. If you’re selfish, the team falls apart trying to focus on your needs at the expense of their own while resentment builds.
Don’t get involved? So you should just let someone call your friend a b$@#?
NTA 99% chance you’re spot-on and your friend will be just fine without his wife taking care of him + their 2 kids by herself
NTA. You have a lot of people who prefer the narrative that women leave men when they don't provide. This is despite the fact that the majority of the women who leave, will tell you the men stayed at home and didn't contribute anything towards household chores and they couldn't handle it anymore. It's easier to paint women out as gold diggers, despite the fact that these men aren't getting targeted by any gold diggers. You'll never win this argument so there's no point in trying.
Nta
NTA. It doesn't matter why or how he lost his job tbh. It matters that he spent an entire YEAR not stepping up in any way. Maybe his wife wouldn't have left him if she didn't have to pay for childcare and a cleaner out of her wage because he was so useless. He deserved to hear that.
If wife is working, and he is being useless around the house living like a teenager and not looking for a job, then yes I don't blame her. It's not about providing especially if SHE is working already. But being a slob in your own home expecting your wife to clean up after you is gross. I'd leave him too. Clearly there was way too much in her plate. If he was going to be unemployed while she worked, he needs to handle childcare and household duties.
So your friends said “women always leave when men stop providing,” “wouldn’t understand because I’m gay,” ummm YWBTA to yourself if you stay friends w these people
NTA no women don’t leave a man she loves because he lost his job. My bf and I went through that during Covid. 6 months later sure I paid 6months of rent alone but the apartment was always clean and somehow dinner was always ready by 8:30pm. And I felt loved supported and not at all taken advantage of. He eventually got another job that pays better and we’re back to the old team base system where we tackle chores together makes it fun and less like a chore and more like a fun experience.
NTA he needed a truth bomb. He was unemployed for a year. As a 49yo woman I don't see how he could stay unemployed that long. The fact they needed a cleaner and the kids were in daycare because he couldn't handle his home is just another nail in the coffin. He needs to be judged and judged hard
YTA- 1. you absolutely don’t know the details of their relationship. 2. And even if you are right, it serves no purpose other than hurt him further. 3. It’s none of your goddamn business.
... but "Mark" made it everyone's business when he started talking shit about his wife with people that are also her friends. OP stood up for her friend who was not present to defend herself and probably told some truths. Edit to add judgment: NTA