quote:

Dear Can’t Get Any Greener:

For the entirety of your marriage you have cooked and cleaned and financially supported and cajoled and begged and emotionally labored and thrown your life into upheaval so that your husband could get to the bottom of his depression and “find his passion.”

And now you can’t even do the loving dishes or make a kettle of tea without him criticizing how you do it. Strange how he has made his concern for the environment line up 100% with monitoring and controlling you to the point that he begrudges you every drop of water you use in your house.

You have already said everything, and tried everything and ended up here. You already know what you need to know about your husband. Whatever his good qualities, he is kind of a passive dude, bad at taking care of himself, and he exerts himself only under extreme pressure from you or when he can offload the effort and costs onto you. If love and loyalty and trying hard were enough to fix this, it would have been fixed already. You can care about people but you can’t do their caring for them.

If I knew a way to make him a) stop his selfish behaviors at home and b) engage more proactively in his own life, I would tell you. There is nothing to say. What could we say? Not everyone gets to follow their passions in life 100% of the time? Sometimes you just have to go to work and do your best by your family even when you’re not feeling it? Depression sucks and requires long-term boring maintenance and treatment and sometimes it will be bad and sometimes it will be better?Depression isn’t excuse to treat the people in your life like crap? There is more environmental activism on heaven and earth than the kind that maximally inconveniences and annoys your spouse?

If I knew the words that would help you leave him forever – to bathe or not bathe, as it pleases him, to work or not work, as it pleases him, to follow his passions as it pleases him, to put only the exact true one correct amount of water in the kettle – I would say them to you now. If this were a fairy tale, I would write the secret inside an enchanted mushroom and wrap it in a magic handkerchief that you could carry with you through the tasks and trials ahead.

We have 900+ posts on the site and probably half of them contain some variation this question (Praise Sheelzebub!):

If nothing changed about your relationship, and you knew it would stay just like it is now, how long would you stay?

1 more year?

5 more years?

10 more years?

How many more years can you pour into this man who pours so little back into you, who thinks even the water you consume would be better saved for “The Earth?” (as if you are not of the Earth and on the Earth, as if you are undeserving of water, as if he gets to decide that.)

You’re worried that he won’t make it without you, but he will. If you leave him, he will suffer for a while and try to get you to come save him and then he will loving figure it out. He will get some kind of job, or make some friends, or “live off the land.” He will find a shelter or a food bank or move back in with his parents. He found you, didn’t he? He will find someone else, somewhere else, and he will survive.

If you’re not there yet, or ever, that’s okay. You are the boss of you!

In the meantime, it’s time for a therapist…for you. Unpack the ways your parents groomed you to put up with this man. Unpack ways to separate his choices and behaviors from his illness. Treat your own anxiety with the seriousness and care that it deserves. (If he wants to get therapy, great, but put the energy you’d spend cajoling him there into going yourself.)

In the meantime, it’s also time to push back hard at his policing behaviors. “When you do the dishes, you can decide how to do them. When I’m washing them, back off.” “You are not the boss of the kettle.” “I don’t want to hear it.” “Your constant harping on me makes me feel bad. Stop it.”

He’ll be like “BUT DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT THE EARTH?” and you can say “I do care about The Earth and hey, that’s not a stick to beat me with. It’s not a competition and nobody designated you Chief Earth Carer in our house. Back off.”

Interrupt him. Shut it the gently caress down. You do not have to just take this.

And don’t try to dig into to his depression when you push back at him. As you point out, you’re not his psychiatrist, you’re his wife. And you’re not just his wife, you’re a loving human being who gets to exist in her own house without being constantly monitored and picked at. Address the behaviors. If he has sad feelings because you are standing up for yourself, those are his job to deal with. He cannot save the planet by controlling you. That’s not how any of this works!

When you’re ready, if you’re ready, the time for threatening to leave will be over. You tried that already, he rallied just enough to get you to stay, and then reverted to form. If you decide to leave, skip to the part where you say “I’m leaving you” and then do it.

To my eye, you have done everything you can humanly do to make your marriage work, and it’s actually working perfectly…for him…as long as you are willing to comply with his ridiculous requests and subject yourself to his control the next time he wants to find a new “passion” and make you pay and pay and pay and pay for it. It must have worked for you sometimes on some level or you wouldn’t have stayed so long. That’s okay! That doesn’t make his bad behavior your fault! Just, there’s a reason you included the entire history of his behaviors in your letter. You sound exhausted. The costs are adding up, and you are not a selfish person if you want to get as much from your marriage as you give.

Or, to put it another way, your selflessness will never fill up his empty places, but his selfishness can drain you dry. You deserve a happy life that isn’t dominated by this guy’s needs. You deserve a garden of your own, and enough water to nourish it.