My (41f) husband (45m) is demanding and critical. Or am I just overly sensitive? I should help since I don't work.

Married 5 years. For various reasons (which my husband and I agreed upon) I have not worked outside the house for 3 years. I keep our home running and we have 2 high-school aged children between us (we are a blended family).

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Therefore, I do feel obligated to help him a lot as he works outside of the home. I have never minded helping him at all. However, I am starting to feel taken for granted and like I'm living with a dictator.

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It seems that I'm always doing something wrong. Even if I think I'm doing something right. I'm not exaggerating -- I now feel very uneasy when he asks me to do something because there is ALWAYS something wrong with how I do things. Quick examples:

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- He asks me to take his suit to "Shakers" (our usual dry cleaner). I drive there and they have closed early. Knowing he'll need his suit in the next couple of days, I take it to another dry cleaner (who I've gone to before). When I mention it in passing, he is annoyed with me because he prefers how Shakers' dry cleans (?? news to me) and says he specifically asked me to take it to Shakers.

- He asks me to call Jack at X Company and request more parts for his business. I call and Leo answers the phone, so I order more parts. When I tell my husband, he's very irritated because he told me specifically to speak to Jack. (Apparently Jack had been trying to get in touch with him and he wanted me to find out why....but neglected to tell me this). He tells me I need to do exactly as he says.

- He's always giving me multiple "honey do" lists, and then asking me to do something else that's more important instead. When I run out of time, he acts very annoyed that I wasn't able to get everything done (even though he knows very well I was busy for hours doing something else that he requested). Sometimes I feel like he thinks I have magical powers to just snap my fingers and make things so (or he has no concept of time).

- He will ask me to research things for him (ex: price out the cost of a certain part if buying from China, figure out vague medical symptoms, etc etc). When I do my best, he often becomes exasperated and tells me "well, duh!! Everyone knows that. What about ______?". I ALWAYS feel stupid when I do things for him, and so I'd rather not, but if I don't he accuses me of being lazy or a princess.

- If I pick up take-away food, I've gotten it wrong somehow (not enough sauce, forgot to get extra pickles, etc). If he asks me to get something, he says I take too long. If he asks me something and I hesitate (because I'm trying to figure it out), he accuses me of thinking too slow. If I make an honest mistake (ex, forgot tickets to a show and had to go back to grab them -- added about 10 minutes onto our trip but we we had plenty of time) he gets very annoyed with me. He always has a bad temper over relatively minor things.

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I can spend 2 hours doing something and he will not notice. OR he will notice the one thing that hasn't been completed yet. Stuff like that....all the time. He's always complaining about how I organize everything from our kitchen to the bathroom. "This should not be here! Why do we live like this??" <-- for the record, I'm fairly organized. And heaven help me if I accidentally run out of something (paper towels, ketchup, staples). He is so annoyed. He often will not provide clear instructions for his expectations, and then when I don't do the thing he was expecting me to do (without telling me clearly he wanted me to do it), he will say "you had one job!". He also likes to tell me he needs me to anticipate his needs.

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I just don't know. I realize all the stress is on him because he's so busy at work, and he thinks my life must be so easy. I truly try to keep life at home good for him. What am I doing wrong? (if anything)

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tldr: I can never make my husband happy.

Submitted July 27, 2019 at 06:23PM by LeftSeaworthiness1 https://ift.tt/2MnnPl1