Dear Abby: I do it all while my wife doesn’t even have a driver’s license and its driving me to drink
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
A guy writes in because his wife can't drive, won't drive, and he's carrying the entire household on his back while she coasts. He's drinking more because of it. That's not a policy story, it's a marriage story, but it tells you something about where things have drifted when a grown adult in this country can simply opt out of basic self-sufficiency and expect someone else to absorb the cost indefinitely.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Dear Abby advises a partner who does everything in their house and doesn't know how to motivate their wife to do more to help, a parent who doesn't know how to get their daughter's girlfriend out of the family group chat, and someone whose family didn't show up to their husband's funeral.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
A guy writes in because his wife can't drive, won't drive, and he's carrying the entire household on his back while she coasts. He's drinking more because of it. That's not a policy story, it's a marriage story, but it tells you something about where things have drifted when a grown adult in this country can simply opt out of basic self-sufficiency and expect someone else to absorb the cost indefinitely. Not having a license by choice, not disability, not circumstance, choice, is its own kind of statement about what people think they're entitled to skip.
We keep hearing that personal responsibility is an old-fashioned idea, something for a bygone era. Then you read a letter like this and realize it's not old-fashioned at all. It's the thing missing from a lot of modern relationships and modern life generally. One partner drives everywhere, pays the bills, handles the errands, while the other simply doesn't bother to acquire a basic adult skill because someone else always will. That arrangement doesn't stay contained to a marriage. It's the same instinct that shows up anywhere people expect provision without participation.
The other letters in the column, the daughter's girlfriend camped out in the family group chat, relatives skipping a husband's funeral, sound smaller, but they rhyme. Boundaries nobody wants to enforce. Obligations nobody wants to honor. Small failures of nerve that pile up into resentment, which is exactly what's eating the man with the drinking problem.
Dear Abby can only tell him to have an honest conversation. Fine advice, as far as it goes. But the letter is a reminder that a lot of what people call "mental health struggles" or "burnout" these days is really just the accumulated weight of doing your part while somebody else doesn't do theirs. Nobody legislates that away. You just have to expect better, from spouses and from everyone else who's stopped bothering to pull their own weight.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.