I am 29 F and work fee-for-service at $20/hr. This means my hours worked does not equal my hours paid, and that my income also fluctuates as I am needed. However, I typically work all day Mon-Thurs, and do light paperwork Friday mornings. I work from home a good amount, too. 

I also do vast majority of care-taking for our son, cook all of our meals, most of the cleaning, plus I help my husband with his business, and run my own little side hustles to make extra income.

My husband is self employed so his income fluctuates as well. He often works long, strange hours but is pursuing a career he loves after years of us barely scraping by to support his dream. This, trash, and occasionally picking up our son from after-school are his core responsibilities. 

He pays all our rent/utilities, a little under $2k per month. That is the extent of his bills. His family pays his phone/car bills for him and also paid off all his student loans a couple years ago. I pay our groceries, supplies for the house, and whatever our son needs. On top of that I have my phone, auto insurance, student loan bills. $800-1200 per month depending on what I can afford. 

Every. Single. Time that we argue, he throws in my face that he pays for my living expenses and says I “contribute nothing”. I am far from lazy and work hard, but no I don’t earn as much as him, and Its fair to say he is a harder worker than me. He really never stops even at night, whereas after the day is over I like to wind down. I am pretty much in the highest paid position for my field/education/experience, and I don’t want to change fields because I am eligible for licensing soon if I stick with it. I also want to note that our rent is really expensive because he insisted we move here, even though I warned him I didn’t think I could afford it while also paying off my student debt and contributing to a savings account, which was important to me. We both really live “paycheck to paycheck” now, though.

He keeps insisting that I’m the jerk and I basically should always do whatever he says because he supports me. Where I think he is being unreasonable that we should split all the household bills evenly if 1) I have higher personal bills which are necessary, non-luxuries 2) I do more for our home/child 3) I earn less than him per hour. 

Tl;dr self-employed husband works long hours, makes more money than me, and has less personal bills due to family help, but is mad that we don’t split our household bills evenly for a home I warned him I couldn’t afford. I want to keep my current job because I like it and it’s good for my long term career goals, and honestly don’t think I could make more anyway. I try to make up for it in non-monetary ways like doing almost all cooking, cleaning, and child raising. AITA?



