Tasmyne asks: I just recently got married to someone I’ve been dating for 10 years. We were living together. I also just had a baby who is 4 months old. My husband has this thing that every weekend he is out with his buddies. I am still on maternity leave and am home all day. I have a nanny who also helps me. I hardly see my husband during the week, and when I do he is constantly tired (as he owns his own business) or he is on the phone conducting business. If he is not doing that, then he is at the gym and when he is done gyming he tends to go chill with his friends. My problem is that he sees his buddies every day during the week, and then on the weekend he is with them. He doesn’t seem to realize that he never spends time with his family. So I thought I would suggest a date night. Since my daughter is a little older now. I suggested we have date night once every 4 months at least just so we can have some time together. The response I got from him was “Who are we going to leave the kids with (we also have a 7 yr old son),” because he can’t leave the kids with his mom all the time. My issue is that it will be once every 4 months and I was also going to ask my mom. Or if I really needed a baby sitter I would pay my nanny overtime to stay the night as she only works days. As I write to you now it’s 2 am and he is still out with his friends. Tomorrow morning he will be too tired to eat breakfast with us. He will probably wake up after lunch and be gone again. I have no idea what to do. I feel so alone and fat and unattractive because all I see is a husband who doesn’t want to spend time with me or his kids. A few weeks ago he stayed out all night. I woke up at 7 am and he still was not home. After telling me he will be home at 2 pm. I tried calling him but his phone was off. I tracked his car to a hotel parking lot. I could not leave my kids to go searching for him as it was my nanny’s day off. I asked his brother to go check it out for me. This was the day he was supposed to take the kids on a safari. He apparently got so drunk he passed out and one of his friends who is the boss of the security guards at this hotel drive his car there so it would be safe. And his other friend was supposed to drive him home, but instead his friend drove him to his place where he passed out on the couch. He only contacted me at 10 am that day. I was so angry I took myself and my kids to my mom’s place. I still can’t get past that day as I seriously think he cheated on me, as the whole story doesn’t add up. I don’t know what to do.
Hi Tasmyne –
I get a lot of letters, as you know, and very often they have mistakes in them. Misspellings, typos, or even flat-out wrong words. That’s fine; I just clean them up to make them more readable before I post them.
So when you said that you offered to have a date night with your new husband once ever four months, I thought, “Oh she was just emotional when she wrote this. She means every four weeks. I’ll suggest she make it every one or two.”
But it wasn’t a mistake; you actually said Four Months, more than once. And he said no?! Three dates a year with his wife?
Something is VERY wrong!
My human friend Handsome can’t stand it if he goes four NIGHTS in a row without spending one with me, and I’m a dog!
Now I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. You think he might be cheating; I’ll admit, my imagination went there too. His friends say he’s drinking to horrible excess – that would be pretty awful even if that’s all that’s wrong.
If you and he were only dating, I’d say this is something to look at very strongly, and work on making it better. If you had been married for twenty years, I’d recommend couples therapy to find what’s wrong underneath all this.
But you two are newlyweds?! This is simply awful.
I do have one thought. Some men get very frightened when they become fathers. They feel like all their freedom and identity is being taken away from them. And they do stupid things. (I saw a statistic once that said that if a husband cheats just once on his wife, it’s most often when she’s in the hospital having their first child; husbands who cheat more often, of course, are a different case.)
So it’s possible that, between your getting married and your having that second child, he got scared, and is trying to be more independent. Maybe?
But this is a drastic case. And it sounds like you, by yourself, aren’t enough to get him to change his behaviors.
So I’m going to suggest something really wild. What if you asked his friends to help you out? Yes, exactly those guys he goes out with when he’s not with you.
Now they might refuse, but there’s also a chance they’ll agree to help you out. To sit him down and remind him that he’s a husband and a father now, and that, while they love going out with him and raising a little hell, he has to devote more time and love to his wife and kids.
Maybe one of them could even babysit when you and your husband have a date night?!
Now I don’t know if this idea will work. But I do, very strongly, feel that something has to change. The way he’s treating you is bad for everyone – it’s destroying your self-esteem, it’s awful for the kids who he’s abandoning, and it’s even disastrous for his health.
So I’d say to talk with his friends and see if they’ll help. And if they won’t, I’d suggest a therapist (if he’ll agree to seeing one), or even a religious leader, or some member of his family he respects.
And if none of these work, you might need to talk to an attorney.
I hate sounding this way. But the way he’s acting is too strange for me to talk with my usual optimism.
Best of luck, my friend,
Shirelle