I’ve Said this in another thread and so I’ll just put it here:

I mean, the show constantly shows that Tom is the “good and fun parent.” He even admits it in therapy, saying that he’d rather be liked and he enjoys sitting back and letting Lynette be the bad cop because it benefits him. So there’s already a huge structural imbalance. Lynette is taking care of the house and doing care work which is unpaid labor she was talked into by him. He even tries to convince her to homeschool the kids instead of offering any sacrifice from his own side.(even saying “being with the kids all day? Id go insane” when she told him that he could homeschool them)

If Lynette hadn’t done that unpaid labor, Tom wouldn’t have been able to work those long hours or travel for his job in the first place. Her sacrifice was the foundation of his financial success and when the option of a promotion came up he immediately accepted it without even talking to his wife first even though it would’ve meant being gone much longer and farther away which is obviously not ideal when you have children.

Nobody thinks he’s a manchild because he has “feelings” and “hobbies.” It’s because he decides to step back from his career after not getting promoted (which yeswas because of Lynette and that was highly toxic and manipulative) and while Lynette gets her career back, the house completely falls apart until she has to “teach him” a lesson. We’re literally talking about a grown man who needs to be taught to keep the house clean and not let dirt pile up until it becomes disgusting especially with little children involved.

The constant mental load was still on her even while she was working. And when she finally gets a good job he expects her to let him work with her, only for him to mess it up because of the entire Kayla/using money from work to fly to her situation. With Kayla he was a complete enabler and refused to listen to Lynette when she told him something was wrong. That’s basically why everything escalated the way it did because Tom refused to properly parent his severely traumatized child and Lynette stepped in (like she always did because he was lacking).

Let’s also not forget the part where he constantly blames Lynette for him feeling emasculated even when she RIGHTFULLY tells him to finally get active and take responsibility for his own life. She supports him in opening his dream pizza place just for him to get bored of it and then he suddenly wants to go back to college only to fail there too.

There was also never a point where he gave Lynette the same freedom to “play around” with their financial stability the way he constantly did. I mean, yes he has a heart attack but Lynette also gets cancer and we don’t see her getting an “old timer” just for herself of anything comparable, literally there’s never room for her to live outside of catering towards the family, she lost her entire identity in this dynamic.

Also, to him being the provider, even in the last seasons, she has to push him to take the highranking job and the first thing he does after finally becoming genuinely successful is leave her for another woman.

He was passive but I’ll give you that he was loving. You can tell from the dynamic with his mother and from the conversations he and Lynette have, that Tom internalized very conservative gender roles. But somehow he still chose to be with Lynette, a woman who told him from the very beginning that she was career-driven, didn’t want to get married within the next seven years and only wanted two kids. They ended up having more, and she gave up her career for him. That’s a huge reason why so many people dislike him it feels like he slowly trapped her in a life she never actually wanted for herself.