Does your marriage have its own version of the "same old argument that never resolves," and if so, what is it?

In My Humble Opinion
161

Well at least you have that I guess.

I have come to the conclusion that my wife sees the world very differently from me and I wouldn’t be surprised if that extended to men and women in general.

Women seem to be like “oh he has all these little things that drive me crazy but I love him anyway” while men…don’t. Things like not cleaning up (and actively preventing me from cleaning anything), lateness, agonizing over stupid decisions, these things wear on me (and presumably other men as well). And I think that is a reason women often get blindsided by breakups. She’s thinking “oh he must love me for me, wackiness and all!”. Meanwhile he probably does make a good faith effort to ignore some of those quirks until he can’t anymore then says “I’ve had enough”.

162

I think that’s a pretty broad generalization. I think my husband would take a similar view to me. He hasn’t gotten rid of me yet.

Just based on what you’ve shared here, there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility with your wife that is probably making those annoying traits seem like a much bigger deal. I’m sorry you are in that situation. It seems to really color your view about what it’s like for other couples.

My husband and I, we don’t get along perfectly, but over the last twenty-five years we’ve walked through fire together, alone, more than once. Having a child did change our relationship. I feel like it takes more work whereas before that it was damned near effortless. It’s only hard because I’ve never really had to work at it before. I mean we had one bad year prior to this, 2014, where things almost fell apart. Then things were effortless again. It’s not effortless anymore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

We are fundamentally compatible. Our interests are similar but different enough to keep things interesting. We can talk for hours. We love making fun of each other. We love talking about our kid and planning life together. We share the same financial priorities give or take some margin of error. We find the same things funny, and I can use dark humor with him that I wouldn’t use in front of anyone else. Those are the kinds of things that keep a relationship going, and me leaving a little water on the floor isn’t going to make a dent in that. When I met him I was a fucking mess, and he still wanted me then. I’ve only improved with time.

By the way, we picked out the furniture today. It was pretty easy. We have similar taste. So I didn’t have to wait six months anyway.

163

Maybe. Except from what you described there literally does not seem to be anything different about our relationships. You just assume my annoyances (which are mostly superficial but somewhat amplified by my writing style) are “fundamental incompatibilities” while yours are “a little more work”.

We’re actually really good at picking out furniture for example.

164

In truth, I’d consider the not letting you clean up thing a really big deal. I can’t live with mess. I have a hard time staying on top of it myself, I don’t need the help. My husband’s cleaning standards are higher than mine though.

I think if you polled both men and women you’d find plenty who can both list their partners’ annoying traits and who consider their relationship generally a good one. But it really matters what those traits are and how important the faults are to the other partner. I don’t like it when my husband makes me late, but it seems to bother you more when your wife is late. My husband tolerated my disorganization for a long time, until I found my way through it (the secret was getting rid of half my stuff.) This stuff can add up to a strained or failed relationship depending on the couple, but I don’t agree that it’s gendered.

The point of the furniture thing was that my prediction failed and sometimes I assume things about my partner that don’t pan out. I probably have some confirmation bias going on. Sometimes I blow small things out of proportion. Something I can work on.

165

My wife doesn’t make me late. I think that was another poster.

All the things you describe - messiness, hoarding, compulsive cleaning, compulsions of any kind, chronic lateness, blowing things out of proportion - these are all behaviors that can wear on a partner over time.

166

I agree. Marriage is hard sometimes.

I do think, though, if two people are committed to trying to make the thing work, then they will try to mitigate the impact of their most obnoxious qualities.

My husband and I had a fight tonight followed by a long conversation in which my key takeaway was “try not to be so neurotic about household stuff.”

That’s something I can work on. For him.

When someone refuses to even try to change their ways, knowing it really bothers their partner, I don’t understand that.

We’re going through a rough time because he’s behind on work, I’m completely overwhelmed in every domain of my life because of the sheer number of tasks on my plate, and our kid is exhausting. We’re lucky if we get an hour to ourselves to relax. Tonight it didn’t happen because we had this long-ass talk and got my son to dinner late, at which point he had a screaming meltdown for about 40 minutes. It’s now bedtime. And not a second today of decompression for either of us.

And then we wonder why we’re not getting along.

I said we can relitigate the recent past or we can figure out what’s going to help moving forward. So I promised not to be so neurotic about household stuff and to find better ways to manage my stress. I asked him to communicate what he needs more frequently and effectively. We agreed to meet every Thursday night to review the week and discuss what we each wanted out of the upcoming weekend.

And that’s really all you can do I guess. It won’t magically make our lives less stressful but hopefully we’ll not be lashing out at each other as life happens.

167

Agreeing on communications can be hard.

I ask, “what is the starting time of the event you scheduled?” Sometimes the time she quotes will be the published start time, sometimes it will be when she’d like to arrive at the venue, sometimes it’s what time she’d like to leave the house, based on traffic.

All these things are important, but I wish she’d agree to be clear that “what time does it start” means just that. Once we’re on the same page about start time, then we can get into your thoughts about parking and seating and traffic, but I can’t make sense of any of that until I know what time the thing starts.

Which leads to the next argument “I very clearly said X”. Okay, maybe you did, maybe not, but must we hash out who’s to blame for the misunderstanding, or can we please just fix it up and move on to making the decision.

168

Slow in the kitchen, I’ve said it before.

Tomatoes are cut, eggs are done, sausage and bacon too waiting on toast. Butter is soft ready to spread. Time to assemble your plate. What plate? You mean you have no plate. Why are you waiting for toast before assembling your plate. Butter the toast on the clean side of the cutting board load your toast and get to the table ffs what’s taking so long. Taking up all the room on the galley space waiting on toast to pop before assembling your plate and arranging it like a Picasso painting. Standing back to admire it gtfo of my way I’m coming in watch this whoosh done. See you at the dining room.

169

I do this myself. And have to tell myself to stop admiring your work and keep going, you’re not done yet.

170

The way he builds a salad bowl, egads I just slap the greens on half my plate toss on any toppings and the main course is on the same plate. While he arranges feta cubes and olives and pauses to consider spices, all that time and extra dishes, a ramekin to dip, a plate for garlic bread. So he does wash dishes, he has taken up to washing them right away rather than rinsing and stacking. Oh uses way too much dish soap and the sink is always about to overflow. But have at it. My lips are sealed.

171

May I just say, I had this idea many years ago, so clearly Apple owes me about a billion dollars.

In seriousness, this is the ONE thing I’ve heard to date that made me want to get an Apple watch. I might just. Thank you.

My spouse and I disagree about how to correctly load the dishwasher, but that one is low-passion. We both grit our teeth slightly, and say nothing. I invoke the curtain of charity around those matters where the teeth are gritted a bit harder. We live, we bicker, we learn, we remember life is short, then we bicker some more. :smiley:

172

So basically you run your marriage like an Agile project with weekly sprint planning sessions and daily standups.

As for someone refusing to change their ways knowing it really bothers their partner, that’s easy to understand. It’s because their freakin brain works in a completely different way and they perceive the world completely differently.

Many of your marriage challenges sound very similar to my own. So let me ask you this. What makes you assume that at some point your husband isn’t thinking “I could actually get up and leave and not have to live a life where I don’t get along with a wife who lashes out at me and subjects me to long talks because she is completely overwhelmed obsessing about tasks while my kid has screaming meltdowns,”

Not like I want to get divorced or anything. But I also don’t want to spend the rest of my life constantly frustrated by “same old arguments” that never resolve or even be in a marriage where my wife is perpetually unhappy but refuses to leave out of some misguided sense of obligation.

173

Because when you first posted that earlier last week, I read it to him verbatim, and he reacted… negatively.

I don’t know your marriage and you don’t know mine, but I do know my husband, and the two of you are about polar opposites in terms of your views on gender and relationships.

(Also, I’m not singling you out. I often share posts from the Straight Dope because it’s good fodder for conversation.)

I don’t subject him to long talks, we have mutually desirable conversations when necessary to get our relationship back on track. This time I was the asshole. I did a bad thing and I’ve been doing it for years. I didn’t know it at the time because I was making too many unwarranted assumptions, but the damage it caused was real, and I have to change moving forward.

So that’s an example of an ongoing conflict that was, in retrospect, completely avoidable.

174

That sounds…normal.

I’m not sure what you think my views on gender and relationships are.

But I do generally question if someone is in a relationship where they are constantly at odds with something they do, at what point do you start questioning the viability of that relationship? Because quite frankly I see a lot of people from various genders get into relations where I’m like “what the fuck are you thinking?”.

I suppose the answer is a couple is more likely to stay together if they feel like they are both working on the relationship.

175

I didn’t say he was normal. :joy:

Yes, me too. Some people end up in some really bad relationships and I don’t know why they got together in the first place. One thing my husband and I have always shared in common is that we don’t enjoy the game-playing some couples do where they won’t come out and say what they want, or whatever the thing is. It has to be spoken in order for it to be addressed. No passive aggressive shit.

So, no, I don’t understand why someone would not at least try to change something they do that affects their partner’s quality of life. I don’t understand how couples can lie to each other about money. I don’t understand a lot of things people do in their relationships. I often think “How did you think that would make things better?”

I think that is very true. Throughout the years as we’ve faced various challenges we’ve sometimes had to reframe it as us vs. the world or the circumstance so that we could approach things from the perspective of: we are working together to address this external challenge. It’s too easy otherwise to get into the blame game. So in this case, we haven’t had a chance to breathe in six years, time is hard to come by, parenting is hard, we’re both overwhelmed at work, so we’ve been talking in part to reframe this conflict as the result of external pressures and we now have to work together to surmount the obstacle. That’s been effective for us in the past and it also gives us more compassion for the other person and makes us willing to give more grace to each other, since we’re seeing everything through the lens of a natural response to extraordinary pressure.

For my part, it’s become clear that due to work stress, I’ve been overgeneralizing every task in my life as important and urgent, when in fact there are things I can let go of and just sort of calm down. Today my son is home with me while I work. I had a productive morning and then had a good lunch with him and we played a game of chess, and I very intentionally slowed… down… for a bit. I had this epiphany yesterday like, my time on earth is finite. A lot of this shit is secondary in importance to spending time with my family, and enjoying my life. So I’m working on restoring a little balance to my life, which can only benefit my family.

176

“Really bad” relationships (cheating, domestic abuse, drugs and alcohol abuse, insanity, etc) are easy. You get out.

What’s harder is the “Beinaheleidenschaftsgegenstand” relationship (made-up German word from How I Met Your Mother than loosely translates to “close to passion thing”). That is to say, someone who at least on paper and maybe in reality seems to check off all the boxes…but yet for some reason isn’t quite right.

Honestly I think most people more or less settle on whoever they happen to be dating in their mid to late 20s instead of marrying their “true soulmate” (Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz). THen they mostly spend the rest of their life talking themselves out of noticing each other’s flaws and hope they aren’t too bad or don’t get worse over time.

Like the relationship isn’t “bad”. You just get sick of someone’s habits or having the “same old argument” all the time.

Aren’t you and your husband some sort of social worker and/or therapist or something? I would think your training and education should cover that sort of stuff?

Why does anyone do anything that doesn’t seem to make sense. Because they can’t regulate their emotions or think logically about a problem. They do what they do because whatever drives them to do it is more powerful than any care or consideration they have for their partner.

178

I’m not a clinical social worker, I’m a macro social worker. I write grants, and I was raised by a mother who was married five times (four by the time I was ten) with umpteen other terrible relationships in between. It was a crash course in what not to do. My husband’s parents were married for 17 years but it was a god awful relationship and a highly contentious drawn-out divorce.

My husband isn’t a couple’s counselor; he treats OCD and Tourette’s, primarily adolescents and young adults.

What we know of relationships is what we’ve learned by observation (and trial and error.)

This may be coupled with unrealistic expectations about what a relationship entails. You can have the dream partner but there’s always going to be something that bugs you, it’s kind of endemic to the experience of living in close quarters with someone for years on end. For me, my husband is and always has been the dream - but marrying your soulmate is not a guarantee of eternal stress-free wedded bliss.

But we were unusually practical for our age when we first started dating (age 19.) We had all the conversations. What standard of living do you want? Do you want kids and how many? Are you cool with adoption? How will child-rearing duties be distributed? Our general interest in planning our lives together has endured to this day. We navigate a lot of stuff that happens through talking and planning. So I knew going in, this guy is 1) kind to everyone 2) dependable 3) emotionally stable 4) highly intelligent and ambitious 5) has interests that overlap with mine to a significant degree. That was my dream man and I didn’t expect to find him at all much less at that young of an age. I got lucky.

But it’s just kind of weird because the things I was looking for were not “tall, dark and handsome” or “sweeps me off my feet” or “owns a super yacht” it was literally like, are you ride or die when shit goes down? And he is. In 25 years, I’ve never seen him miss a single beat. I have never seen anything like it in my life.

I still wish he got out the door on time.

Having the ideal partner and being irritated by some of their habits are not mutually exclusive concepts.

But I think a lot of people assume they are always going to be in this trippy euphoria that is romantic love (where you minimize all your partner’s faults) and act on that impulse and then when reality sets in they feel cheated and resentful. And if they are building a relationship on euphoric feelings rather than a practical foundation, it can fall apart pretty easily. Especially if they don’t have the skills to navigate conflict.

And that’s why we had those conversations and waited four years to marry. For me, I don’t think I could have fallen in love at all if it weren’t for that practical compatibility aspect. I intentionally married a predictable, conscientious nerd. I needed that and still need it.

Not that this would guarantee our success, but it certainly helped. It worked so easily for so long I got kind of full of myself about it, but no, sometimes things are just hard and you need to put in some effort. Sometimes you fuck things up or you are both strained to a breaking point. Sometimes things you thought weren’t a big deal turn out to be a seed of resentment you didn’t even know you had until ten years later. And sometimes, there but for the grace of Og go we, you can have the perfect partner and do everything right and it all falls apart anyway.

179

Ms. P is frequently late, but not to the point that we’ve ever missed a flight. We’ve missed the first half inning of a few baseball games, checked out of our hotel later than we were supposed to, ect. Our big thing lately is that I respond to something she says, but not loudly enough for her to hear. We’re working on that one; if it’s the worst thing that happens after thirty years together I think we’re fortunate. I’ve never heard either of our kids say that their SO is chronically late, so I assume neither is. Both were vexed by Mom’s lateness. All in all she’s done an amazing job considering the toxicity of her family of origin.

180

Well there’s a lot to unpack there.

I guess it’s great that you found each other but as you even said, being that “practical” in terms of planning your futures at at 19 is very unusual. My wife and I met around that age and I can’t say that we would even have been in a position to have any of those discussions beyond a vague sense of “graduate college and pursue relatively ambitious careers” like more or less literally everyone else we went to college with.

You don’t have to have a background in psychology to guess that both of you clearly seek stability, most likely from being raised in unstable environments. My wife is like that. My mother was as well (which makes sense because men tend to marry their “mother”. Probably also why my mom liked my wife so much).

I OTOH, find people who crave “stability” can become very controlling. They have a plan and can’t tolerate any deviation from that plan.

Using project management terms from my own profession, my wife is more “Waterfall” while I am more “Agile”. She needs detailed long-term plans but has trouble making simple decisions of there is a deviation from that plan. Also explains why she chose a career in structured finance and has been at the same company for 20 years. I prefer thinking in long-term goals while constantly adjusting our plans as necessary. I don’t like chaos, but I am comfortable with ambiguity and don’t believe in making stupid rigid plans trying to account for a million unknowable variables. Explains why I work in consulting firms or jobs like “program manager” or “change manager” which are all really just some variation of “go into a big company and help them solve some problem they can’t figure out”.

I would say those behaviors often complement each other but they also cause conflict at times. Like if her plan runs awry my wife can “go stupid” and suffer analysis paralysis. Or she gets too fixated on people following her plan. OTOH I tend to get very frustrated if I see people continuing behaviors that are not very obviously not producing the desired results.

181

Yeah, I’m not really like that, with the exception that I hate last-minute social engagements, but that is more a function of my introversion than anything else.

This whole task-driven thing emerged out of our recent move and is not really characteristic of me most of the time. I think I got caught up in feeling like everything was urgent because of my current work situation. I am already feeling a lot more chill.

My husband can be very mentally rigid but I think that’s just how his brain is wired. It’s not with plans though, it’s more with how he thinks things should be done.

When we plan, though, we expect the unexpected, I mean that’s life. We don’t have to plan out every contingency, though depending on the importance of the thing we might plan for the most likely ones.

I can get paralysis myself but it’s usually from overloaded working memory not rigid plans. I feel overwhelmed a lot. I’ve mostly learned to manage it (Trello helps.) The most helpful thing I’ve found is just doing something. I had to learn that there’s no perfect next task, just doing something is better than paralysis.

My husband has superior executive function but very slow processing. I’m kind of an intuitive decision-maker and don’t like to dither. He dithers. Boy can he dither. When we encountered conflict while buying a house, he told me that even after he makes a decision he has unclosed loops and he can’t feel right about it without closing the loops. Whereas for me, the unclosed loop is the decision unmade. Everything else is contingencies that can be dealt with later. So I guess I’m not very comfortable with ambiguity but I’m extremely adaptable.

That’s part of like his risk-aversion. My take is that most things in the future can be dealt with, whatever it is, when it happens. I don’t have zero anxiety about the future but it’s so hard to predict, you can only prepare so much.

ETA: I guess one exception is my job. I have a lot of work anxiety.