He Forgot the Bills, the Dentist and My Birthday. Every Time. | Weaponized Incompetence

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The first time I asked Dominic to do the laundry, he turned all my sweaters into doll clothes. I remember it perfectly. It was a Sunday afternoon in our second month of living together. I had a deadline, a presentation on Monday morning, and I had a stack of work spread across the dining room table. I said, Would you mind throwing a load of laundry in? Just the whites and the sweaters, it would really help. He said, Of course, absolutely, happy to.

An hour later, I walked to the dryer and found a pile of fabric so small, I thought for a moment someone had swapped my clothes for a child's. My two good wool sweaters, one gray, one the deep green my mother had given me, had shrunk to the size of dish towels. I stood there holding one up. He came to the doorway, a mug in his hand, with an expression of such genuine boyish dismay that I felt my anger fall apart in my hands. He said, Oh no. I did not read the labels. I am so sorry. I am just terrible at this.

I said, it's okay. He said, I am hopeless. You should probably just do it. I would hate to ruin anything else. I said, it's okay. I'll do it. And there it was. The first brick. I want to be careful here because I do not know what was in his heart. I have thought about it a thousand times. Maybe he really did not know how to do laundry. Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe in some way I will never fully understand. It was an accident. What I know is what happened next. I will give you a list.

Over the following two years, here is what Dominic could not manage. Cooking. He burned the rice the first time and the second. He said, you are so much better at this than me.

He started saying that you are so much better, with a warm smile, every time I took over a task, and I took it as a compliment. Cleaning.

He cleaned the bathroom once, with a cleaner that left a streak on the mirror. He said, I clearly do it wrong. Please do not let me.

Bills. He was responsible for the electric and the internet, and by the fourth month, the electricity was cut off for a day because he had misread the due date. He said, I am the worst with numbers. He gave me the password to the account. I paid it from then on for the rest of the relationship, the dentist. He missed three appointments in a row, and I made the fourth one for him and drove him and sat in the waiting room.

Gifts. For my birthday that year, he did not remember until nine in the evening. He came home with a grocery store bouquet, still wet, and a card that said, Happy birthday, with nothing written inside. He said, I am so sorry. I am a disaster at this stuff. You know that about me. I did know that about him. That was the thing. By then, I knew everything he was bad at, and it was a very long list. And I had become the person who did everything. I did not notice it happening the way you do not notice a tide. But one evening in November, I made a list on the back of an envelope, just for myself, in a quiet moment on the train. Everything I did in a week. The meals, the groceries, the appointments, the bills, the birthdays, his and mine and his mother's, the gifts, the laundry, the dry cleaning, the travel plans, the vet appointments for our cat, the reminder about the car insurance, the call to the plumber.

It filled the envelope, front and back. I looked at it, and something in me went very quiet. I said it to him that night in the kitchen.

I said, I feel like I am doing everything. I said, I need you to take over some things.

He put his hand on his chest. He said, I really want to help. He said, tell me what to do. I said, take the cat to the vet on Thursday. He said, absolutely.

On Thursday afternoon, I got a call at work. It was the vet's receptionist who said, we have not seen your husband. I said, he is not my husband. She said, whoever. The cat's appointment was at 2 I called Dominic. He said, oh no, I forgot. I put it in my calendar and forgot to look at my calendar. I am so sorry. I am just hopeless. Could you reschedule it? I stood in the corridor outside my office with my phone in my hand. I thought, he did not forget. He did exactly what he had done every time. He had made the task so costly, so full of apology and mess, that it was easier to do it myself than to ask again. I did not say that. I said, yes, I will reschedule it. That was the night I understood the shape of it. I want to tell you one more thing from those months, because I think it explains why I stayed as long as I did. Dominic was, in many ways, easy to love. He was funny and generous with praise. He remembered the names of my co-workers' kids. He sat with me when I cried, and he could make me laugh in the middle of a bad day.