The Worst Things Homer Ever Did To Marge On The Simpsons

Homer Simpson is a lot of things to a lot of people. To his boss, he's lazy and dangerously incompetent. To his kids, he's neglectful, occasionally abusive (the whole "choking-his-son" thing), and sometimes affectionate, in his usual muddled way. To Moe the bartender, he's a top customer. To his friends, he's an occasional co-conspirator and more often a co-derelict. To his wife Marge, Homer is as loving as he can be, which at times doesn't seem like much. 

Homer Simpson is a slob and neglectful of his wife on his best days. Of course, in "The Simpsons," he's also a pater familias who delivers quite an amazing life full of excitement and adventure for his wife and kids.

That said, there are times when Homer mistreats Marge not as a side effect of his mush brain, but because he's selfish and thoughtless. Homer's bad acts range from betrayal and abandonment to embarrassment of his loving wife. Let's put it this way: If this were a real-life relationship, everybody would be cheering for Marge to leave the dopey schmuck and possibly press charges on the way out, no matter how much he loves her. Instead, no harm, no foul; we cheer for the Simpsons to continue their dysfunctional marriage for time eternal and for Homer to win her back with his regular grand acts of redemption.

Homer is far from a perfect husband, though most of his offenses within his marriage are crimes of omission, or due to his own shortcomings — basically, he has no malicious intent. But in Season 15, Episode 9's "Co-dependents Day," his actions seem downright villainous. He not only drags Marge down his own drunken path, but also frames her for his own drunk driving.

This is a huge betrayal. Homer has been drinking heavily, as always. This is a rare instance where Marge has also indulged. Homer flips their car while driving home. Fearing the repercussions, he switches seats with Marge. She goes to jail, he bails her out, but then Barney suggests she goes to rehab. Homer has been an alcoholic since the beginning of the series (and probably longer), yet Marge, largely a teetotaler, is the one to go to rehab. Homer of course can't watch the kids by himself, so he lets Flanders take care of them. In rehab, Marge discovers that she doesn't even have a drinking problem, she just wants to spend time with her husband, which she feels she can't do without drinking. That's a truly sad realization. 

Often it seems that the only thing holding Homer and Marge together is their commitment made in the ceremony of marriage, so perhaps few of Homer's misdeeds are more disrespectful of Marge than when he gets married in Las Vegas. In Season 10, Episode 10, "Viva Ned Flanders," Homer and Ned go on a bender in Vegas and marry some trashy waitresses. Homer realizes his mistake, so perhaps it's okay that he simply got blackout drunk and married. He and Ned then run off, hoping that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

All seems well until Homer's Vegas wife, Amber, shows up at their doorstep in Season 13's "Brawl in the Family." Homer never took the time to divorce her, so she shows up, embarrasses his first wife, and tears apart his family. Homer has a dream of what he could do with two wives: basically, they could both do chores for him. 

In the end, Marge helps him clean up the mess. Homer's excuse for this horrible act? Again, surprise, he was drunk.

In "The Cartridge Family," the Simpson family takes on America's gun issue by showing us what it really means when everybody, including one of America's most alcoholic and irascible buffoons, can get a gun. In this episode of Season 9, Homer starts wielding a gun irresponsibly, to the point that Marge realizes the only thing she can do is take the kids and leave.

Following a burglary, Marge asks Homer to get an alarm system. Instead, he buys a gun, which he shows to her by pointing it at her face. Homer then "hides" the gun in a place where Bart is able to find it and he and Milhouse play William Tell. Marge tells Homer to choose between the gun or his family. Homer chooses his gun. Eventually, even the local chapter of the NRA, made up of many of Springfield's madmen (such as Moe showing how to make one gun out of five), decides Homer is too reckless to have a gun. Homer promises Marge he's gotten rid of the gun, but then reveals that he didn't actually get rid of it.

Homer likes to think that he knows things, even when he doesn't. In Season 5, Episode 22, "Secrets of a Successful Marriage," his friends make fun of him for being slow. He resents them when he finds Moe and Lenny teaching at the adult learning center.

When Homer gets a chance to teach a marriage class (despite the fact that his marriage is anything but exemplary), he jumps at it. As noted before, though, Homer is stupid, and his marriage is pretty bad. To keep the attention of his students, he tells his students secrets about his relationship, even airing plenty of Marge's secrets that have nothing to do with their marriage. When she discovers this, she kicks him out.

Why does she take him back in? Because, as Homer explains, he will be forever dependent on her. Homer betrays Marge's secrets and then explains that he's with her because he's unable to live by himself. Which, for some reason, she thinks is love.

Homer goes to Moe's after work, before work (Moe calls it Homer's "eye-opener"), and sometimes during work. He drinks every day. And almost every time he drinks, he continues until he's drunk. One example is when he gets too drunk on Christmas Eve ("I Won't Be Home for Christmas") to come home.

A lot of the mishaps described in this article are perfect examples of how his drinking has hurt Marge. When Barney tries to get sober, Homer resents it. One can only imagine how Marge must feel, taking care of the kids while Homer drinks himself into a stupor and staggers home. It becomes tough to figure out how many of Homer's worst acts are due to his drinking. He even once exclaims, "To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Despite how much harm Homer has inflicted on his family, he's never once tried to really get sober (at least not without a court order).

Marge is constantly having to clean up Homer's alcohol-fueled messes. 

Marge manages the Simpson household. There's nothing wrong with this life, though Homer rarely seems to appreciate how much Marge does to keep the house running. When Lisa discovers in "Lisa Simpson, This Isn't Your Life" that Marge was extremely intelligent and motivated before she married Homer, she gets discouraged, since she feels this is her own destiny. She feels like Marge squandered all her potential for an idiot who disrespects her and hardly even fulfills his part of the old-school "man works, wife stays home" bargain.

"The Way We Was," the 12th episode of Season 2, also touches on this. That episode shows Marge as an extremely intelligent high school student with a passion for female empowerment and all of the academic promise in the world. She could have gone on to higher education and a great career, especially compared to Homer, who was unmotivated to do anything with his life. She falls for Homer in large part out of pity and supports him despite the fact that he has no desire to make life better for himself or his loved ones.

Arguably the worst thing Homer did was curb Marge's dreams and ambitions. It's mitigated only by the fact that this may have partly been her decision, though we never really see Marge getting a choice. 

Homer never really seems to acknowledge how much better her life would have been if Marge had found somebody as intelligent and motivated as she was. But hey, the brilliant homemaker and the lazy slob have had quite a zany ride. And their kids probably won't be too damaged by it.