Oh this is actually kind of similar to my stuff and I dealt with similar stuff when my husband was drinking but the squabbles over the finances were last year when the drinking was REALLY heavily. It was also accompanied by talk of me stealing his "man card" which to be fair, I wasn't treating him like man of the house/husband/father, which of course was hard to do when I was doing all of the work of a husband and wife and mom and dad, victim crap on both sides…I digress.
My experience with this was that my husband never seriously wanted to take anything over, he was feeling hurt, out of control and emasculated. How better to hurt me than to take away some of "MY" things, finances would be one of them, he could have taken over the laundry instead or the dishes or grocery shopping but noooooo finances are much more easy to burn me with and hell, it sure does seem easy until you actually have to do it and well. I started telling him that he could take over a bill or two AFTER we sat down and talked about budgets and how we would start to hold one another accountable and stay within our allotted budgeted amounts. In fact, I thought it would be best that we get together and cut up all of our debit and credit cards and we'd both just stick to a modest cash budget from now on. It really would be the easiest way for both of us to be involved and stay on top of things and then we'd get together once a week to talk about how he was doing with the bills and where we were at with our budget.
He never asked again after that. He also doesn't say jack to me about our finances anymore.
Post Script note: Since he's been sober he has again told me that he would like to contribute more around the house because it makes him feel like a member of our family, rather than a guest. He's in charge of trash and cleaning the bathrooms now when he's here…and I don't critique how he does either of those tasks.
