Is my wife being lazy or am I not seeing a bigger problem?

My wife (24F) and I (25M) have been married for 2 years and have known each other for 2.5 years. We are religious and didn’t move in together until after getting married. The first week of living together my wife made a big fuss about keeping things clean and even cooking for us, I think probably because she knew that was important to me and honestly we were still getting to know each other. After about a week of that her efforts to do those things sort of died. I am a full time student and I work 4-5 hours a day. I am also extremely neat, so I compensated for her lack of effort and took on the cleaning and cooking responsibilities. I never really confronted her about this until I started to feel like she didn’t do anything. She hasn’t been in school until a few weeks ago. Most of the time I would come home in the afternoon and she would be in bed but there would be mess everywhere. Then she would stay up all night playing video games or reading. I have talked to her about it a lot now. I am an extremely neat person and it’s important to me that the house at least not be disgusting with rotting food everywhere. When I talk to her about this she gets very upset. Most of the time it seems like she feels a mixture of anger and guilt. She cries, feels really hurt that I bring it up, and basically makes me feel miserable for even saying anything. In casual conversation she tells me now that she honestly doesn’t care about the house being clean and she absolutely hates doing housework. I have kind of resolved myself to having to do a great majority of the chores. Really what I am concerned about is lately I haven’t been able to keep up with everything , and my grades are dipping. I am starting to feel burnt out. What’s worse is my wife has always been super emotionally needy and gets really upset when I do anything else but spend time with her when I get home. I think she struggles with depression because she cannot stand it if I am not paying attention to her or giving her comfort and gets upset if I don’t want to. Recently she has actually been preventing me from cleaning or doing homework, and if I am stern then she feels hurt, and I have to apologize and make her feel better.

I just am wondering what I doing wrong. I am trying really hard and not really feeling like she respects our home or me. Any thoughts on this are welcome, thank you

Submitted May 28, 2019 at 01:05PM

My wife (24F) and I (25M) have been married for 2 years and have known each other for 2.5 years. We are religious and didn’t move in together until after getting married. The first week of living together my wife made a big fuss about keeping things clean and even cooking for us, I think probably because she knew that was important to me and honestly we were still getting to know each other. After about a week of that her efforts to do those things sort of died. I am a full time student and I work 4-5 hours a day. I am also extremely neat, so I compensated for her lack of effort and took on the cleaning and cooking responsibilities. I never really confronted her about this until I started to feel like she didn’t do anything. She hasn’t been in school until a few weeks ago. Most of the time I would come home in the afternoon and she would be in bed but there would be mess everywhere. Then she would stay up all night playing video games or reading. I have talked to her about it a lot now. I am an extremely neat person and it’s important to me that the house at least not be disgusting with rotting food everywhere. When I talk to her about this she gets very upset. Most of the time it seems like she feels a mixture of anger and guilt. She cries, feels really hurt that I bring it up, and basically makes me feel miserable for even saying anything. In casual conversation she tells me now that she honestly doesn’t care about the house being clean and she absolutely hates doing housework. I have kind of resolved myself to having to do a great majority of the chores. Really what I am concerned about is lately I haven’t been able to keep up with everything , and my grades are dipping. I am starting to feel burnt out. What’s worse is my wife has always been super emotionally needy and gets really upset when I do anything else but spend time with her when I get home. I think she struggles with depression because she cannot stand it if I am not paying attention to her or giving her comfort and gets upset if I don’t want to. Recently she has actually been preventing me from cleaning or doing homework, and if I am stern then she feels hurt, and I have to apologize and make her feel better.I just am wondering what I doing wrong. I am trying really hard and not really feeling like she respects our home or me. Any thoughts on this are welcome, thank you