Internet Slams ‘Lazy’ Husband Not Helping Pregnant Wife With Chores

The internet has slammed a husband for not helping his pregnant wife with household chores and cooking after she shared her story online.

Posting on popular discussion site Mumsnet on Friday, user UsernameA1B2 explained: “I’m 15 weeks pregnant with my second child. I still have bad sickness that is all day. I can’t stand a lot of food smells, especially cooking smells and it can make me instantly need to run to the bathroom to be sick.”

A stay-at-home mom with an autistic 4-year-old, she explains that before her recent pregnancy she did all the cooking and cleaning in the house.

“My husband can’t cook anything other than frozen ready meals,” she said: “And the house is a tip at the moment. The living room gets covered with toys and books and gets worse until I tidy up.

“Am I being unreasonable to think it’s not that hard to cook and make something like a bolognese while I am pregnant and exhausted?”

She continued explaining that her 36-year-old husband cannot cook or clean: “I had to scrub the bathtub at 8 and a half months pregnant. Once I asked him to clean the sink and he wiped it down with toilet paper,” she explained.

Internet users were shocked by the story, overwhelmingly slamming the husband for not pulling his weight around the house.

“Of course he can cook and clean. Any functioning adult is capable of managing these two things. He just won’t because that’s your job in his mind,” wrote one Mumsnet user.

“He’s a grownup, not a child,” wrote another commenter: “He should be cooking his fair share of family meals whether you are ill or not.”

Other commenters were shocked that the woman was putting up with it at all: “The more relevant question is why you are putting up with this lazy entitled man child?” asked one Mumsnet user. While another user wrote: “Doesn’t take much skill to chop some vegetables unto a salad. I think it’s less he can’t and more that he won’t.”

A nationwide study by the Institute for Family Studies found that married couples are most likely to argue about chores and responsibilities around the house. Nearly half of couples with kindergarten-aged children said that they argued about chores “often” or “sometimes.”

Couples who argued about chores were less likely to be happy in their relationship. Among those who said they “often” had arguments about the housework, only 47 percent said that their relationship was “very happy,” while among couples who said they rarely or never argued about chores 83 percent reported they were very happy in their relationship.

“Your husband really needs to step up here,” wrote one Mumsnet user: “He’s certainly going to need to take the reins with the 4-year-old when your baby arrives.”

But one user suggested that the woman give her husband a bit of a break and wrote: “I think your husband could be being kinder and doing more of the domestic load, however, there is nothing wrong with having easy ready meals or frozen food during this time.”

In March, the internet backed a mom-to-be who refused to have her husband in the delivery room after he was “mean and distant” during her pregnancy.