I read somewhere that many if not most marriages always have some sort of core never-resolvable disagreement or “same old quarrel” in it - such as one spouse feeling unloved but the other not feeling capable of giving the love to meet it, or disagreement on finances (one is a spender and one is a saver,) etc.
In your marriage, what is your never-fully-resolvable “permanent quarrel,” if you’ve got one?
My wife is a micromanager who can’t help but provide me with constant input on how I should do even the most basic of tasks. A few years back I was making dinner, jambalaya from a Zatarain’s boxed meal, and Mrs. Odesio kept providing me with instructions from the living room by telling me where the sausage was, where the pans were, where the oil was, etc., etc. Even when I perform the most basic of tasks, like taking the garbage out, she feels the need to provide me with instructions.
When it came to big decisions it got worse. Part of it was I didn’t agonize over my decisions when we had a crummy situation without an optimal choice. In the early years when we weren’t financially secure, we sometimes had to decide which bill was going to be late. She’d ask my opinion and get mad when I gave it because she didn’t like how quickly I came to my decision. I eventually stopped making decisions or giving my opinion. Of course she’s unhappy with that, feeling as though she’s forced to make all the decisions.
We first had a serious discussion about this just a few years into our marriage. I explained I didn’t have difficulty making decisions at school or work, but I can’t make any decisions at home because I feel henpecked. Whenever there’s a problem we’re not facing it together, instead I’m facing the problem and you and the same time. Things improved a little, but even now, she makes most of the decisions.
She’s genuinely trying to be helpful and it’s a behavior she picked up from her mother. A few Thanksgivings ago, Mrs. Odesio was in the kitchen making something and her mother was constantly in there giving her “helpful” tips on where things were an how to do things. When Mrs. Odesio confided to me how exasperating this behavior was I replied, “I know exactly how you feel.” I probably should have chosen my words more carefully.
My wife is a magpie. She has wardrobes full of clothes that she will never wear but refuses to send to charity. Whenever she orders something new, I try to encourage her to clear some space, but it doesn’t happen.
Married 46 years, and there are a few differences that we’ve accepted as unsolvable.
She wants the housework split 50/50, while retaining 100% authority on how much needs done. My standard is a level of basic cleanliness, sufficient to avoid vermin and un-workable clutter (clean kitchen, clear paths, and a fundamental level of “order”). Her standard is “clean enough to perform eye-surgery on the living room floor at any time”.
As you might expect, the house rarely drops to a level where I will begin cleaning.
The other difference is that, as far as I know, I have never correctly loaded a dishwasher. She routinely comes behind me and re-arranges whenever I try. So it’s mostly wasted effort for me, and I just leave everything in the sink for her.
I expect you chose the words perfectly. I also expect that was not what your fine spouse wanted to hear.
With my late wife we really didn’t have a standing disagreement or ongoing friction about much of anything. Certainly nothing like the teeth grinding I’ve read so far in the thread.
OTOH wife #2 from whom I split after 2 years that should have been 6 months, or better yet never have even got past a few dates? Pretty much @pullin’s experience. And I was triggered reading his tale of unhappy.
With a side order of @Odesios
It didn’t matter what the topic was, she found a way to misunderstand what I said and take offense at the motives she imputed into it.
As with Odesio, calm rational discussions of this dynamic resulted in both of us acknowledging it, and both being unable to change it.
After months of me walking on eggshells and wracking my brain over every word of every sentence, we both drifted into a place where it was easier to almost never to speak to each other. That’s when I knew I had to go. And did. By then, ref @pullin, I mostly felt like an unwelcome interloper in her world.
My wife is a hoarder, luckily not as bad as the ones on TV. She has every scrap of paper she has ever written on, personal bric-a-brac she hasn’t seen in our 29 years of wedded bliss, school supplies ad infinitum — all packed into file boxes and shoved into various closets around the house. Oh, and clothes she will never again wear (her size 8 days are long behind her) stuffed into Rubbermaid containers and wardrobe boxes. At last count there were about 150 boxes/containers. When we got married, I took a good long look at my possessions/belongings and jettisoned quite a bit (didn’t have much to begin with) which — SURPRISE — was the clarion call for her to OK all her junk (there’s more room now, so her stuff is copacetic). I’m an idiot.
I hope I expire first, but a part of me would really enjoy pitching all that shit into a dumpster (one of the flatbed types) if she preceded me in death.
Oh, and guess who has to load all this into the U-haul when we move?
Da end.
Mrs. H is the slow-movingest person you’ll ever meet. It takes her 20 minutes to pick out and put on her shoes. Have to be somewhere at noon? We might leave the house by 1:30. But when she wants something, she wants results right fucking now, and not a second later. If she asks me for something, I better damn well be doing it before she’s even done asking.
That’s a common refrain I’ve heard from many men, myself included. A lot of women want to share the actual work, but somehow retain a degree of control/ability to dictate how/when something is done instead of actually delegating, and that doesn’t dovetail very well with the typical male “If it’s my responsibility, it’s MY responsibility, and I’ll do it as and how I see fit.” attitude.
Plus, it feeds into the idea that “he’s a child and wants me to be his mom” even though he’s not, and just isn’t doing it to her standards. Both sides need to learn to give on this one- the men need to learn that getting upset and telling her that she can do it herself if she wants it done that way isn’t going to get him anywhere, and women need to learn that sharing responsibilities means giving up some degree of editorial control over how/when things are done.
I mean, I get into that on occasion with my wife; she’ll say she doesn’t have time to do something, isn’t comfortable doing it, or whatever, and I’ll agree to do it. Then she’ll come back later and tell me I did it wrong, didn’t do it at the right time, or otherwise tell me I did it wrong in some fashion.
My response for the longest time was to basically say “Well, if it’s my responsibility, I’m going to do it how and when I choose, and if you want it done some other way, you can do it yourself.”
Now after a fair bit of counseling, I usually gently remind her that it’s my job, and she gave that up, and she’ll remember that it’s part of the deal that if you give up that responsibilty, you give up the oversight as well- you’re partners, not supervisor/employee.
Bump, that was a spot-on post. (All the posts in this thread are helpful to me — so familiar!).
I’ll add another: I sometimes need to have some thing (a piece of paper, or some household object, say) VISIBLE so I’ll remember to deal with it or do some action related to it.
My spouse is always trying to make things INVISIBLE. If she can see anything other than bare surfaces everywhere, she gets agitated — to her, this is “disorder.”
Our priorities on this are utterly incompatible. There is no shared goal.
Sure, I have my to-do lists and smartphone reminders, but sometimes my way really is better.
We’ve learned to accommodate each other somewhat on this, but it will never be fully resolved.
I long ago made a conscious decision that nothing that we disagree about is worth fighting over, because we only disagree about things that don’t matter all that much. I remind myself frequently of how lucky I am in this regard.
For example, dishes in the sink. My husband once complained a few years ago that I leave my used glass in the sink “for him to wash” instead of washing it myself. So I no longer leave any dirty dishes of any kind in the sink, they are washed and in the dish drainer. And whenever I come across any dishes he has left in the sink, I wash them and stack them in the drainer, without saying anything. This feels a little passive-aggressive to me, but I do it anyway. After a few months of this, I find he is leaving far fewer dirty dishes in the sink. This is such a trivial thing, and not arguing about it has been a fruitful path for both of us.
All excellent points. These types of issues need to be resolved between partners if you have any hope of coexisting long term. That being said, the popularly discussed concept of “weaponized incompetence” does exist (albeit in far fewer cases than a perusal of indignant posts on reddit would suggest). There is certainly some subset of spouses who don’t want to do a chore in the first place, and then intentionally do it so badly, that the other spouse eventually stops asking for them to do it correctly and just assumes doing it themselves, thereby accomplishing the first spouse’s goal of not having to do that chore.
My wife has a certain tendence to think her definitions of words and concepts are the universal standard and asking for clarification of what she says is tantamount to purposefully taunting her.
On the other hand I am a programmer and thus almost genetically inclined to ask for precise definitions even when taking some time to think about the context of the sentence would probably make them clear.
We’ve learned to somewhat tolerate each other tendences, but problems still happen from time to time:
Her: “Can you bring me the strainer?”
Me: “Where is it?”
Her: “Over there in the fourth drawer”
Me: (Doesn’t know where “over there” is because she made no gesture to help, and would have a hard a time finding “over there” even if she had because I’m spatially challenged ) doesn’t ask where “over there” is to avoid a discussion, after some detective work decides that being only one piece of furniture with more than 3 drawers in the room, it must be that one “The fourth drawer from top to bottom or from bottom to top?”
Her: 
My wife and I both have many flaws (some of which have been listed above), and when my wife is angry she is not reluctant to point out mine. It took me a while to realise that my flaws are almost never what is triggering my wife’s anger in the first place; it’s usually something with her work or her family that is upsetting her. So I generally end up just keeping my mouth shut (actively trying to calm her down tends to make her more upset).
I think there’s a certain propensity among people to assume that they’re right, and anything they’re perceiving that doesn’t line up with that is wrong.
My wife and I had a long conversation once about how me disagreeing with her and explaining why I disagree is NOT the same as gaslighting her.
Part of it is that latter-day social media uses gaslighting wrongly; it’s not someone holding a different viewpoint and arguing it, it’s someone trying to convince you that what you saw wasn’t true or that you can’t trust your own perceptions.
We’ve had the “You need child level detail” / “you expect me to read your mind” argument. I think it comes down to that same delegation of responsibility thing I mentioned before- if you want something done a certain way, you either need to do it yourself, let the other person do it how they see fit and not complain, or you need to be tolerant of that person asking you exactly how to do it.
Simply asking for them to do something without communicating and reserving the right to bitch about it when they don’t do it how you expected isn’t a good way to run a relationship.
She posts under several names here on the Dope, doesn’t she?
I think that that is a fairly universal trait, and completely understandable. If I didn’t think that I was right about something, I would change my view about it. It’s pretty much nonsensical to hold a belief that you also believe is incorrect.
Isn’t there a middle ground, represented by being open-minded? “I believe this is correct, but there is always a possibility that I’m wrong, so I’m open to persuasion and evidence.”
I thought that was kind of what we strive for around here, as long as it’s not one of the dreaded, banned topics.
The main problem is that she tends to believe there is an universal agreement about how to word a concept and it happens to be hers.
So if she believes the “fourth drawer” is the fourth counting down, and I ask if she means the fourth counting up or the fourth counting down I must be playing the fool to make fun of her or something, it’s hard for her to accept that yes I genuinely don’t know.
Is she one of those people who give directions by saying something like, “Go about a mile, and our house is the first one on the right,” oblivious to the fact that “right” and “left” depend on what direction you’re going.
I’m challenged in the right-left department but I always know my ordinal directions, so it’s best if you tell me, “Head south on Fairview, and after you cross Main Street, mine is the third house on the west side of Fairview.”