Boyfriend is a habitual contrarian and it’s getting tiring.

My boyfriend (40M) argues the toss about everything and it’s causing me (36F) an incredible amount of stress. Small easily settled disagreements easily spiral out into big arguments.

For example he doesn’t know how to cook a lot of things so I taught him how to prepare a steak. He disagrees about the pan to use, what temperature, how much oil... I’m a qualified chef and find it immensely condescending that he somehow knows better than me. It then falls in me to do all the cooking because he refuses to learn to do it properly.

He does this over little things: wiring a ceiling light. I tell him be careful and turn off the power before you start (argues about this), be careful with that red wire it’s live (argues). In this scenario it’s extra stressful because it’s dangerous (he took out a screwdriver and used it to touch the bare wire to prove it wasn’t live, thankfully I’d turned the power off). In this case I’m not an expert either so I request he looks up the safety information with me so we can be sure (it can be confusing as sometimes with old fittings the wires are different colour etc) but again HE KNOWS BETTER and refuses.

This happens with much bigger things too like deciding where to live. I’m finding the level of ignorance pathological. Sometimes he can be in such denial of reality that I feel like he’s trying to gaslight me. He does this even when it’ll directly harm himself just because he doesn’t want to be wrong.

He’ll say he’s going to do a chore or something in a text. Later when I ask him if it’s done he’ll deny ever saying he’d do it. I show him the text he yet instead of admitting he was wrong or say something understandable like “oh sorry my mistake” “I forgot” etc he’ll carry on denying it. This is really weird because it’s absolute denial of reality and I’ve no idea what to do about something like that it’s so weird and frustrating.

Another example is asking him how much a bill is going to be. He’ll say “it’s probably this” I’ll ask him check please because we need to know for sure or the consequences of not being able to pay will cause trouble. He’ll pretend he’s looked it up then not do it. A month later we find out we’re broke because he pretended to know for sure when he didn’t.

I find it really distressing. It’s causing big problems as I feel like we won’t be able to do things that are actually stressful like getting married, changing jobs, having kids etc because I can’t rely on him to not piss about. His parents are the only people he seems to listen to. I find this incredibly frustrating but I don’t think he realises how insulting it is that nothing I say counts unless it’s parroted by someone else.

Not only is it causing actual real world problems I’m feeling more and more belittled and exhausted every time something important needs to be done. I feel like all the labour falls to me because I can’t trust him to make informed decisions about anything I know he finds this emasculating. What can I do about it?

TL;DR Boyfriend is argumentative, wilfully ignorant in the face of facts. I’m finding it stressful, what can be done?