Trust me when I tell you that men are not stupid. Trust yourself when your intuition is screaming at you that something doesn’t make sense. Stop getting mad at your partners for what they fail to do, and start sobering up to the fact that they’re doing it on purpose. I wish I would’ve known about FDS years ago. It took me way too long to leave this guy, S.

During my relationship with S, I became really sick and disabled. This meant that a lot of the burden of taking care of the house and the running of errands fell to him.

Even though we were together for years after my health fell apart, I was still managing all of the household tasks. He could never seem to take ownership over cleaning anything on a regular basis. If I ask, he does it, but if I don’t ask, it doesn’t get done.

We fought constantly about things like:

  • me asking why he couldn’t decide on the chores that he wanted to own and ensure that they got done (e.g. take over the management of it, if not the actual doing);

  • me asking why I always had to be the boss of the house and tell him to do things that needed to be done for the both of us, not just me.

  • me asking why I had to be grateful that my partner pulled not even equal weight, while I was crying in pain and needing to focus on my health.

  • me having to give him very specific instructions to do things that any adult could either figure out by reading a package or a quick Google on the phone that’s always in his hand.

  • me asking “too much” of a young, healthy guy who needed breaks every 2 minutes. A guy who spent hours planning to do a chore and stressing about it instead of just doing the 5 minute chore.

  • me trying to get to the root of an issue, such as, does he really not know that something has been on the floor for an entire week? Does he really not know that some thing needs to be put away after it was taken out? Does he really not know I need help with some thing that I ask for help on hundreds of times?

You get the picture. The story is much more complicated, but I wanted to share some thing that happened recently.

This ex and I continue to live together as roommates/friends for a few years after we split up our relationship. It has given me a unique opportunity to look objectively at the way he treated me during our relationship.

In conjunction with FDS, my eyes have been opened very wide to the number of ways that he manipulated me and didn’t really show up for me during my worst times. I used to feel guilty for not being grateful enough about a guy who had to drive me up to the door, carry my purse for me each day after work, let me lean on him to walk across the ice, etc. He was “such a saint” getting up at five in the morning to clear my car off before I had to drive to work when his day didn’t start until 9. Why was I such a bitch?

Yesterday, I asked him if he could help me put my bedding back on my bed after I washed it, because I still can’t do that task on my own. He helps me with this at least once a month. On top of that, we own the same sheet sets on our beds (and he has no trouble managing “his” chores, he just continues to play dumb about house/shared chores, so yes, he makes his own bed often).

I was standing there waiting to assist him if he needed any help while he did the actual work of putting my sheets on my bed. When it came to the top sheet, which has an obvious pattern at the top, he said that he didn’t know how to put it on and was wondering if there was a specified way that it needed to go. I’ve become ruthless in my responses to him since FDS, so I said, “ they’re the same sheets as yours, how do you make your bed?”

He proceeded to use vague language to try to distract from my question and get out of the situation. I just kept laughing and saying, but you do this on your bed, they’re the same sheets, do you not make your bed correctly? Do you just put the sheets on any old way or do you put them on correctly?

He does put his sheets on correctly, for reference. There is literally no reason for him to not know how to do this. Let’s be honest, children can learn how to place sheets on beds properly at a pretty young age. There is just no excuse.

During our relationship, something like this would have come up, and I would have started escalating until I was screaming at him for acting like a child. I was the abusive one. I was the bitch who treated him like a child. I was the ungrateful one for not being thankful that he’s helping me do some thing. It took me a really long time to recognize how often he was gaslighting me and pressing my buttons like this.

I left the relationship mainly because I thought he was too incompetent. I laugh hysterically at the madness now, realizing he was perfectly capable and chose to torture me. I became way more sick during our relationship with all of the fighting I had to endure simply to get him to act like a bare minimum adult. I begged and pleaded for him to help more so that I could heal. I know I’m not the only woman who’s been exactly here.

Note: The whole situation with him was set up long before FDS. I am moving out and cutting ties with him this year when our lease is up, so please know I’m on my way out! I just really wanted to share some of the insight I’ve gained in this very odd situation.