That’s what sealed my deal w my ex.
We could talk dispassionately about our failures to communicate and her default of assuming the worst about my motives. Which she admitted she did despite zero evidence of such in the entirety of our interactions.
But she couldn’t / wouldn’t alter her behavior. And I was done being accused of being evil every time I said “good morning” in a sunny tone of voice. Really; no hyperbole.
I believe that the basis for any successful personal relationship, whether romantic or friendly, is that each person must approach the other with what I call the “Assumption of Good Will.”
In other words, your default state of mind and your belief is that the other person means you no harm and is acting in good faith. If you really believe the other person in this relationship has malice toward you or believes that you have malice toward them, then there is no reason for either of you to stick around. Even if they do something that is hurtful or cruel in a given instance, the entire relationship in the long run has to be built on a foundation of assuming the enduring presence other person’s good will toward you.
As a single person, maybe I should keep out of this, but I’ve heard more than once about people who are very particular on how to load a dishwasher. Can your wife describe what the rules are for proper dishwasher arrangement? Does the dirty surface of each dish face toward the center? Smaller items in the center and larger items along the edges? Something else?
My dishwasher has a door over the soap compartment. If I put something too large in front of that, the door won’t pop open enough and not all the detergent comes out.
If I had to guess, it’s because we enter a building on the ground floor and go up, so the numbers start at the bottom and go up. If there are four drawers in a kitchen cabinet, I perceive the top one as closest to my hands and eyes, so I would number them from top to bottom.
My own perceptual quirk was when I was a kid and my dad asked me to turn off a faucet. I asked which was was off, and he said “to the right”. I looked at the knob on the faucet and noticed that if the top went to the right, the bottom would go to the left.
Yes!
This has always been a problem for me. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey” in a pigs eye, I say.
The real killer is when I have to attach or remove something to/from a faucet when the threaded part is pointing down, and you have to put your hand under it and reach up. Which direction is right and left now, hmmm?
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That one took me a while to get, too.
This may help. Put your right hand about 12 inches in front of your face; palm facing away from you, fingers together, and the thumb pointing to the left. Keep the thumb pointing left, and curl your fingers into a fist. If you turn a bolt in the same direction as your curling fingers, the bolt will move in the direction your thumb is pointing.
Now that you know that trick, it will always work. Suppose you’re trying to attach a hose to a faucet. Put the palm of your right hand on the hose, with your thumb pointed toward the faucet, and curl your fingers into a fist. That’s the direction to turn the coupler on the hose.
(That works for just about every screw or bolt in daily life. Propane is noticeably different, so you don’t accidentally connect it to something you shouldn’t. For propane, use your left hand.)
That makes sense.
Way cool! Of course I’m going to have to have that tattooed on the inside of my left arm so it will be handy when I need to know.
Re propane: now that I’m at The Home my days of dealing with propane tanks are over. I had to leave my Weber gas grill behind at my house when I moved here 3 years ago.
'Zactly. Very well said.
That is/was so obvious to me, and such a part of every prior relationship that I was gobsmacked that anyone would enter a relationship unable (unwilling?) to manage that baseline expectation.
You have be patient with me, I only found a reliable way to tell left from right at the age of 46 (Frodo, think, when you read yo go from left to right, so left is the direction where you’ll start to read a page!) before that I sorta guessed (sometimes wrongly: “your other left Frodo”) or subrepticiously touched a scar in my left hand’s middle finger.
When I started dating the guy that I was involved with 2 years after my husband died, early in our relationship he promised that he would never hit me.
That blew my mind, because I had never been in a relationship where that was ever even remotely a possibility. I guess I should have seen that as a red flag. He did have a temper and he was an alcoholic… I hung around in that for 6.5 years, which is 6.25 years longer than I should have.
After several years of this, it still goes on:
When my husband is in another room, he’ll ask “What’s this?”, apparently looking at or holding something. Since I have no way of knowing what he’s talking about, I’ll tell him (again) that I can’t see what he’s looking at. He will give an exasperated sigh and bring out or describe the item in question. He clearly believes that I’m being purposely obtuse just to annoy him.
I’m (obviously) not your husband. But I unwittingly pull his move occasionally. But the exasperated sigh you’ll hear next is me sighing at my own inability to train myself not to do that dumb shit.
As my late wife and I slowly got older we realized that no conversation worked unless we could each see each other. Nobody was reading lips, but if your back was to them, or they were down the hall around the corner in another room from you, the only thing talking did was signal your intention to have a useful conversation once we were face to face or nearly so. If the other party heard your distant mumble from across the house.
I finally got the left and right thing as an early teenager, when I saw that we lived in the quinto izquierda, that is the flat on the left in the fifth floor. I came out of the elevator, there were two flats there. The left one was ours. That side was left. Fifty years later I still use that image to know what is left: were I used to live. Right is the other side. Still works.
Ours is also lack of communication. Recently it was, “Meet me at the car repair place!”, and we were both thinking of a different place. We’re both annoyed with each other for coming up with the “wrong” answer, and with ourselves for allowing this to happen again, when we should know by now to spell everything out.
It’s a real struggle for some people to recognize that the context in their head is not automatically in the other person’s head.
We see that with posters here who write something that make no sense until they get called on it and then post the other two paragraphs necessary to understand where they’re coming from.
I’ve learned more about communication from posting here than I did in any job or relationship.
With some posts, I’ve spent 40 minutes going over and over the content, the language, trying to clear up any misunderstanding in advance, checking for nuances, land mines, etc., and someone will still be offended by a word or some subtext I didn’t know was there. This hyperscrutiny (is that a word?) was instructive and actually helpful to me back when I was working as a grant proposal writer.
Got married in 1996. Still married.
There’s no permanent quarrel. There’s no temporary quarrel. There’s no quarrel at all. Because I refuse to quarrel about anything.
There are occasional discussions related to disagreements. But absolutely zero quarrelling or arguing. I don’t engage in that stuff.
LOL, sorry for lack of clarity, I was referring specifically to @pullin’s assertion that his wife’s housekeeping standard is “clean enough to perform eye-surgery on the living room floor at any time” (!). Nope, sorry, I do not believe that that is literally true. 
I don’t care how obsessively fussy you think your partner is, actual operating-room hygiene procedures are extremely next-level.
I thought you were referring to
which to me sounds like a level of disorder that even I, a haphazard cleaner, couldn’t live with. “Clear paths” aren’t exactly a height to aspire to.
Maybe @msmith537’s wife and @pullin would be a better fit together, while @msmith537 himself & @pullin’s wife would likewise make a good pairing.