I was raised to be responsible for myself- super, over-responsible for myself, I have huge problems asking for any help. I picked up my rsponsibilities. My brother was raised the same BUT when he didn't pick up his responsibilities in dramatic fashion he was rescued time and again because well I don't know, you'd have to ask my parents, but I guess because he was young, the mistakes were big and they didn't want teenage mistakes to mar his life.
I was also raised to give people the benefit of the doubt, to always try to view things from anothers point of view, to the point that when I was being bullied, I was asked to examine my own behaviour to see what I had done to precipitate this.
I have developed dysfunctional views regarding what love and caring is, my parents stayed in a horrible marriage that didn't fulfil either of their needs and although I saw this, when as a child I tried to express this to family members or other adults, I was told that I didn't understand adult relationships and things weren't as bad as I described, and that all relationships had problems. From this, and popular culture, I beleived that once in a relationship I had to try really hard to make it work, and stay and compromise. I over compromise, if we had opposing views I started negotitions already being at the middle point, he would go further into his extreme.
So all together this led to me enabling, if I wanted the bills paid (and I did) he proved that he wouldn't do it when we started out, sharing things equally. So I worked out the finances, gave him an amount to pay into a joint account and he had no responsibilities in making sure that money stretched or was on time, left the heating on all day when he wasn't there, because I was paying the bills. I wasn't happy about it, and he continually questioned me about money, thinking I was ripping him off when in fact I ended up paying over double that he was on bills.
I would look at a situation and think is someone not being good with bills, or leaving the televisions on when they leave for work a reason to leave them? the answer I was conditioned to make was "no". So with the leaving option effectively removed from my choices, and him unwilling despite all my remonstrations to act as an adult, the choice that was left was to pick up ever more responsibility. Once we had children this increased exponentially, I was never financially dependent on him. I earn nearly 3 times what he does, and was doing everything else to ensure the children had as chaos-free existance as possible.
I didn't like doing any of this, but it was the only option that I was willing to consider whilst I waited around for him to become someone different. I am hugely insecure and that certainly had a lot to do with it.
There was lots I didn't do, get him up for work, lie to his boss etc, but lots that I did do, not in order to help him, but to try and stabilise my own environment, when really I needed to give myself permission to leave. I think our culture is pervaded with a "must try harder" attitude about relationships that was particularly unhelpful to me.