This was my ex-wife, but she didn’t have a lot of hobbies, so it wasn’t just vacations, but weekends or anytime we had a lot of free time. Also, in her words “I was the fun one with great ideas” so she almost never did the planning. I would also get blamed if I didn’t plan anything as then she got bored.
In situations like these, it’s not limited to the dishwasher. It’s also the way you fold your underwear, how you mow the lawn, how you pay the bills, how you vacuum, what route you take to the store, etc., etc. If it was just the dishwasher I don’t think you’d hear too many complaints. The problem is when the “One Right Way” applies to a significant portion of the mundane tasks you’re perfectly able to handle.
This kind of thing can wear on you after a while. It erodes self-confidence as you come to wonder if your spouse thinks you’re an idiot who requires supervision for even the most mundane of tasks. Mrs. Odesio can make an observation or give me good advice and sometimes I have to bite my tongue because my knee-jerk reaction is that I don’t need help. I didn’t start out like that and I don’t want to be like that.
I first spoke to Mrs. Odesio about this after our 6th or 7th year of marriage. She has improved, she rarely feels the need to tell me how to drive, but after a few more years I just came to accept this is the way it’s going to be. It still gets under my skin sometimes, but it’s just part of the relationship.
Yeah. When we started out together late in life I expected we’d both need to make a bunch of changes. So we’d converge together on a harmonious whole.
In the early days I made a bunch of changes that to me seemed pointless, mere matters of preference, not fundamentals. But that represented me respecting her desires and expecting to earn her reciprocity on changes that mattered to me.
In her mind that just proved I was a primitive work in progress and she had no need of change since she was long since a finished perfected product.
She thought wrong and now gets to live her perfection alone.
Most of our disagreements can be boiled down to a singular failing that is all mine: I can’t read her mind.
My husband also hates the sound of the vacuum cleaner. But he hates it less when he gets to choose which vacuum cleaner we buy and he does the vacuuming, which he does according to his schedule.
The thing we both do is start talking without making sure the other person is ready to pay attention. That includes the other person being at the other end of the hallway. Sometimes we do better, sometimes worse.
We no longer use our in fridge ice maker, so ice trays must be filled if we want ice and we do!
Whenever I use up the last cubes in the ice container I refill it by cracking into it one or both ice cube trays. Do I leave the empty trays on the counter? No. I refill with water and put it in the freezer.
And on occasion what do I hear from the spousal unit? You’re over/ under filling the trays. And what does he do after cracking an ice cube tray, leaves the empty tray on the gdmf counter.
One evening as I entered the kitchen to prep for dinner I saw the empty tray. I tossed the tray away onto the floor just whacked it out of my way.
The SU found it asked how did it get over here? It was in my way mf er! Refill the gd trays!
50/50 but he no longer critiques my ice cube tray filling skills either.
Printing out everything on the internet and keeping piles of paper in what has become “her” room. I’ve tried to tell her that pretty much everything that is on the web is going to always be on the web, and that perhaps she could just bookmark sites that are of interest instead of buying reams and reams of paper. Much of what she prints out is never looked at again.
Also, she has a really bad habit of not putting caps or other closures back securely on bottles, cans, packages, etc. Before I became aware of this quirk, a number of items hit the floor and broke because I grabbed something by its top, which came offa in my hand. And containers in the fridge that aren’t properly closed go moldy. Also, things like potato chips, bread, and other perishables go stale before their time because they’re not properly closed up. She’s gotten better about it, but it still happens after 30 years.
However, her good points far outweigh any of that and it’s not worth having spats over.
Oh, boy, if you saw how many webpages I have bookmarked that I will likely never open again despite a well thought out system of well labeled folders and subfolders you’d be amazed. And I had a good reason to booksmark every single one of those!
When I buy a new computer the folders are copied as they were, but they don’t show the webpage’s icon until you open them the first time again, otherwise there is a placeholder symbol that looks like a world map. Thus I know at a glance how many I did not open since I bought my last computer about five years ago. Way more than half of them.
But it has saved us a lot of toner and paper, that is for sure.
Still one of our classic points of contention is that I want to keep things (with good reason!) and she wants to clean house and throw stuff away (for no reason at all! We have plenty of space!!). She mostly ends up winning in the material world, I keep my stuff in the digital realm.
Not to hijack too much, but it ain’t so. Tons of stuff on the web has simply disappeared. It happens about yearly on a consistent basis that something I used to rely on online is just gone. Maybe some unusable shell-like remains saved at some other site, if that.
Yeah, but I’m not going to tell her that! Besides, most of what she prints out is just glurge.
Did you buy a Samsung fridge/icemaker too? We do what you do now, ice trays. But no battle over that, thank OG.
Our running battle is when I start talking before she’s done talking. But often she pauses for 4 or 5 seconds when talking so often I think she’s done when she’s not. Basically it’s best to just not reply at times.
Kenmore iirc, French doors with pull out freezer drawer.
So today I go to get some cubes, empty container, pull out a tray to refill it and there are two cubes in the tray. Okay the man makes a mean Manhattan but really?
It’s the opposite with us. I’m the one who pauses first a a few seconds while I try to figure out what I want to say. I’ve gotten better but it drives my son batty.
That‘s Möpsin and me. We both are annoyed at being interrupted, only in very different ways:
- I get cut off one to three syllables from the end of my sentence; often on her assumption that the sentence was to end very differently from what I intended. Followed by some back and forth until I get to state what I intended, which would not have been necessary if she‘d waited one bloody second.
- She gets cut off by me inadvertently because what she said was a complete utterance both by content and grammar, and ended on a falling tone appropriate to a completed statement, and was followed by a few seconds of silence, and still, unknown to me she intended to continue (sometimes by retracting or revising her previous statement of seconds ago, which is completely baffling to me).
My tendence to editorialize instead of speaking has caused some conflict in my marriage.
On the other hand her tendence to interrupt me before I can complete a phrase, in fear that I’m starting to editorialize, has also caused some conflict.
Marriage is learning to suffer the insufferable defects of your partner and your partner learning to suffer your minor defects…
When I married my late first wife we had a conversation about that. The upshot was that one must not keep score in a marriage. If you do, after about a year you’ll both agree that the score is 2,387 to 4. The only remaining disagreement is who has the 4. 
Mrs G cooks like a celebrity chef with a full kitchen staff swirling about her (that doesn’t exist). For even minor meals there is a scree of wrappers, utensils, dishes, towels, food splatters, etc everywhere. Annoying stuff like transferring from bowl to bowl to pan to bowl to pan again just to make a sauce or noodle dish. Takes a solid hour for me to cleanup after a simple meal.
By contrast, I’m a ‘clean as you go’ in the kitchen and post-meal cleanup is simply dropping plates in the dishwasher, with all pots, pans, stovetop, counters, already washed and drying.
Yep.
My husband and I will be married 20 years tomorrow (I think I’ll spend it complaining about him!)
We don’t argue that often, but it does happen, and it seems to come down to core differences in our personalities.
Me: ADHD, highly intuitive, emotional, big-picture thinker, very broad strokes, top-down, get to the point, that’s good enough. Incredibly impatient.
Him: Highly analytical, skeptical, bottom-up thinker, frequently absorbed in details, VERY slow processing speed, methodical, mentally rigid. There is only one right way.
In our every day lives, we get along famously, 95% of the time. The kinds of things he does that irritate me are:
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Checks a lot of the things I do to make sure it was done “right.” He can be very micro-managy and sometimes I feel like he doesn’t trust me, but;
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His standards are higher than mine for a lot of things. I’m not going to spend an hour cleaning out the fridge – 20 minutes is good. If he wants to devote that much time to a mundane task, he may.
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Sometimes when I bring up an article or interesting thing I read, he immediately attacks the premise, essentially deflating the conversation and making me feel like he thinks I’m an idiot. From his perspective, he’s engaging with the material like he would any other piece of information - with skepticism. (Another twist on this, is I tell him something I read about and he delivers a long angry tirade about politics during which I don’t get to say anything and he veers way off topic. By the end of it, I’m not even paying attention anymore.)
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He’s much much more risk-averse than me about most things, which is interesting because I’m the one with anxiety. He would lose his absolute shit if he knew how often I leave my car doors unlocked. He seems to think he has to prevent even the most remote of mishaps from occurring. This was most noticeable when we had a child and he became high-strung AF about that kid’s safety - to the point that my son recently asked me why his Dad is so high-strung about his safety. *mumble mumble" “Your Dad and I assess risk differently.”
To his credit, he’s chilled on this considerably.
So yeah, we get on day to day for the most part (and we have a lot in common, which is not described here), but let me tell you, I am in the middle of buying a house with this man, and JFC it is one of the most stressful things I have ever done. He is okay now that we’re smooth sailing to close, but his approach to finding a place to live and deciding on it, and deciding how much to offer, was just exasperating - and we didn’t have the luxury of that time in a hot housing market. It took him hours - hours - to figure out his schedule and whether or not we could get the inspection done on time - and he wouldn’t commit until he was sure he had the time in his schedule. He insisted on vetting each inspector before committing to the inspection. And he refused to let me accompany the inspector by myself. He HAD to be there, this person HAD to fulfill all of his requirements, and yet also it HAD to fit his schedule.
I swear to you, we had less conflict and stress when we had a newborn.
We are in a good place now, but now we have to move, and this also illustrates this core personality difference. He refused to start packing shit up until he had completely cleaned the house and made a video for our son, which took him two days (I would have helped, but I was ill last Saturday.) Then he wanted to pack an entire room so he knows how much time he needs to pack before we schedule the movers.
Whereas I’m like, dude. Why are the movers not scheduled yet? Did you not tell me we had to schedule them way in advance? The amount of time it takes to pack is the amount of time you have 'til moving day. If you schedule your move on August 30th, it’s going to take that long to pack. If you schedule it July 1st, guess what? We’re gonna be packed by July 1st.
Why the hell should I start packing before I know the moving date?
Why have we not done the most important thing yet? (Would he let me schedule movers on my own? Probably not without another hours-long review of his schedule and a comprehensive list of things that satisfy his requirements.)
We haven’t gotten to selling our current place yet. It’s apparent to me already that he’s going to try to squeeze every penny out of it and along with it every ounce of my remaining patience.
So yeah, we’re having a nice time but there are these very specific situations where the differences between us become starkly apparent and difficult to navigate. I look forward to getting through this part. And then, as he said to me, “Let us never move again.”
Ah, and see? He proved me wrong. Not only is he okay with me scheduling the movers, he’s open to just paying someone to pack for us (as long as it’s not too expensive.)
There’s always a danger in generalizing about your partner.
I’m just glad we rarely fight about money, as that’s a very common recurring fight for a lot of couples. We’ve had some differences in what we want to do with money, but it’s always been in the range of save vs. invest vs. pay down debt, so we have the same general goals, and I wouldn’t say we argue so much as disagree.