That’s how my 33-year first marriage went as well.
Soo much easier when folks don’t put their ego in front of their thinking. Or in front of their spouse.
My marriage is a bit like being married to the woman in The Substance. We met when we were young when she was like Margaret Qualley hot (maybe not like in the movie. But even Margaret Qualley isn’t really that hot as a lot of that was CGI and prosthetics).
She’s still attractive in middle age, but she seems a lot more anxious like Demi Moore’s character.
Then last year she passed out for no obvious reason in a Chili’s parking lot and face-planted into the curb, smashing her face and looking a bit like the “Monstro Elisasue” creature for a few weeks. So that sucked.
Not really an argument or anything, but for some odd reason, my wife passes out for no reason like once a decade. The first time was in a movie theater so fortunately she was sitting down and didn’t injure herself. The second time she smacked her head on the toilet. Then this time.
Might just be she overexerts herself. She seems to lack my ability to selectively not give a fuck. Just today she was obsessing over how to fire the lawn care people. “How does this sound?” “What about this?”
Give it hear…“Dear lawn people. We are going with a different option this year. Your services are no longer required. Thank you!” They’re professionals. No need to obsess for an hour.
That’s the problem with being married to an anxious woman. They tend to put their fears and anxieties in front of everything.
Again, not so much a specific argument. But my concern is that my wife is aging into her parents. I see them as these anxious, fearful, dimwitted, cheap, isolated people who just never took any risks or really ever seemed to have any goals or ambitions beyond maintaining the safe status quo.
I am sorry for your suffering but I hope that it’s some solace that your depictions of it are endlessly entertaining to me.
My ex-wife collapsed like three or four times and my sister did as well a couple of times in our youth. In every case it was low blood sugar. They simply didn’t eat enough that morning and then overexerted a bit.
I don’t mean to give the impression that my wife and kids make me miserable (well…mostly). I think the main difference between my wife and I is that I’ve basically embraced the absurdity of it all and am trying to have as much fun as possible while she sees everything as this endless checklist of things to accomplish in order to stave off disaster.
In all fairness, most of what I post is designed to entertain
That’s probably it.
In our household, I have endless tasks that need to be done. Thankfully she doesn’t nag me about them.
My wife is a saint in that she never nags me about my most glaring character/personality deficiency: I clutter. I just plain have too much “stuff,” and it is not well-organized. I’m not exactly a hoarder, but I’m hoarder-adjacent.
She likes to purge her belongings on a continuous basis, while I’m more likely to say, “Well, you never can tell when I’ll need a second high-voltage insulation tester or a variable output portable low-voltage power supply.”
She is in the right, of course, and I’m blessed that she mentions the problem as infrequently as she does. In fairness, though, she was in the house before I moved in and she has every bit of the storage in the master bedroom to herself, including all the dressers and the walk-in closet. My clothes are all in a spare bedroom, which also holds a lot of my stuff. There’s no garage or basement, either. We split the third bedroom between her crafting table and supplies and my stuff. I try very hard to keep my stuff out of the kitchen, den, and other common areas.
TL;DR: I’m a semi-hoarder and my wife seldom brings it up, much less force me to change. But it’s always on her mind.
When very occasionally something pops up that annoys me a bit (close the peanut butter and put it back in the fridge). I remind myself that there are probably a long list of what I do that annoy her. So, no fights. No arguments. But we can disagree, we just work that out.
Fer instance, she wants to completely relandscape the back yard. Ummm. Not needed as far as I’m concerned, but, it will be less grass to mow and water to use, so OK.
My ex-wife would sometimes get excited with these ridiculous ass ideas. She’d be like, “let’s get jobs in Europe and live there for a year. We’ll just quit our jobs here, rent out our house, move over there, lease a place for a year and get jobs.” The first couple of times I’d say, “there are literally no jobs in my field there, I don’t want someone potentially trashing the house, it would put a huge crimp in our retirement plans, I love where I am and we can (and did) take vacations over there…”. She would be irate that I crushed here dream.
Finally I got to know that she pretty much never followed through on stuff like that. I’d say, “that’s an interesting idea. Do a little research to narrow it down and then we can plan it out” knowing full well that that would be the last I would ever hear about it.
I can see myself in that, a bit. I have a hard time leaving things undone. But the things are never done. I’ve been trying to go the 4,000 Weeks route and just accept that I’ll never be on top of it all.
I think part of it is accepting this is just how my partner is. The things that annoy me about him stem from personality traits that make me want him always. He’s slow as fuck because he’s careful and steadfast. He’s micromanagy because of his attention to detail, which is part and parcel of his general high standards in everything he does, whether he’s delivering therapy or cleaning out the fridge. It’s going to take him an hour to clean out that fridge whereas I could get it done in 15 minutes (not to his specifications) so what can i do? I let him clean the fridge. I let him take twelve hours to make decisions that would take me two minutes.
We’ve been moved into the new place about four weeks and he’s only now feeling like he’s ready to pick out a shower curtain. We don’t even have living room furniture yet. Maybe in a year.
It’s not worth stressing over, I don’t think. The worst part -
(finding a house and making an offer, which was a slow torture) is over. If it takes him six months to decide on furniture for our living room then it takes six months.
We were up late last night having a fevered and passionate conversation about liberal pseudoscience in therapy. A partner who is so interesting he makes me forget what time it is, that’s the way I want it.
Posting now while I wait for my wife to be ready to leave to meet friends for a dinner reservation that we are going to be late for. After over four decades you’d think I’d be used to it but I still hate it with a passion. I think it is rude and it makes me rude by extension. Argh.
I’m like you and my GF is like your wife.
So far she just keeps me waiting. Sigh. But as we coalesce towards being a cohabiting couple meeting w other couples and groups as a pair, I’ll be living your life. It is one of her few features that I’m not looking forward to.
I feel (a small version) of your pain.
A friend of mind is sorta in the same boat.
He and his wife are 62. He works, and she can’t hold a job for more than a couple weeks because of… issues. She’s always had a hippie mindset, and said, “Let’s retire early, sell everything, buy a cheap trailer, and live off the land!”
He reluctantly agreed, even though they have very little in savings and no retirement. They bought a 34 foot trailer and two acres of land in BFE Kentucky. He bought an offgrid solar system for power. But it wasn’t generating enough power for air conditioning, and she got super mad about it. So he ended up paying money to the utility company to get electric ran.
In every FB post of hers, she complains about everything and anything. They should gave stayed-put in their rental in Ohio.
I don’t think we’d have made it the four decades plus so far if that was my wife! This though is our never going to resolve head butting. And woe to me if I complain about it: it is just going to then take longer! FWIW once we got there it was a fine evening!
Do you ever do the thing where you tell her the starting time is earlier than it really is? We had to do that with my father. Often it worked, as long as he didn’t suspect.
You can’t get away with that long term as a couple.
I didn’t play that game with my always late ex girlfriend. It just further enables it and they figure it out pretty quickly.
Same with chronically late people who set their clocks ahead of the correct time as a way to “fool themselves” and give them an extra buffer of time.
That works once, maybe twice. Then they compensate for it and are as late as ever.
All it really accomplishes is to further muddy their entire innate concept of time as something squishy and elastic.
…
What I try to do is to spell out the additional time needed: I don’t lie about the time the symphonic concert starts (19:30), but say: “To be parked in the crowded garage, make our way to the foyer, pick up a program, go to the toilet (remember the queue for the ladies’) and be in our seat before the doors are closed we need to drive into garage by 19:00. There is a construction site for 3 km on the drive there, plus it is 1 May so there may be a riot scheduled east of the city centre. I calculate 30 min extra time. So let’s close the apartment door behind us at 17:40.”.
Then at 16:45 I ask her if she already has put her face on and decided on outfit.
Same.
Work backwards from the “must be exactly [here] exactly [then]” point in both space and time. With a small allowance for friction at each step along the way. Works for me; works for anyone in pretty much any situation.
GF can do the same. What she can’t do is accurately remember how long it takes to do something. The drive from here to there is 45 minutes no traffic. She’ll recall it as a half-hour, max. And we’re leaving at 5pm on a weekday, so traffic is assured. She’s been taking a shower, getting dressed and made up cute for a lot of years now. She says it takes an hour. Nope: 1:30 at best and 1:45 if there’s any indecision about outfit or shoes.
But she’ll keep thinking 1 hour to get ready and 30 minutes to get there. Over and over and over and …
The result is worth waiting for, but the wishful (?) thinking is strong in that one. Sigh.
My wife is chronically late for everything. If she is supposed to be somewhere at 3:30, she shows up at 4:00. If she is supposed to be somewhere at 4:00, she shows up at 4:30. If she is supposed to be somewhere at 4:30, she shows up at 5:00.
I have politely explained to her over and over that being late for a meeting or appointment is considered rude and inconsiderate, but it just doesn’t seem to register. I have finally concluded that she (and others like her) simply don’t care that they’re late, and thus simply don’t care that they’re being rude and inconsiderate in this manner. Perhaps it’s due to some sort of narcissism or a lack of empathy. I don’t know. I just know I’m the opposite; I hate being late and inconveniencing others.