This. Except in our house, even if I ask him to pack the baby’s bag, I get, “But you know what goes in it!” And if I tell him to go ahead and figure it out, I’m the one who gets bitched at later for “forgetting” the baby wipes.
I’m not only getting myself ready (which, due to bras and “shapewear” (read: girdle) and stockings and shoes with buckles and makeup, just physically take longer to do), I’m also getting a toddler, who has her own tights and shoes with buckles, ready, AND packing her bag AND making sure the teenager wears pants that have been washed at least once this month while mind-reading my husband’s idea of “appropriate” clothing for him AND making sure we have umbrellas/sunscreen/water bottles/gum/a star map with us.
Meanwhile, he’s on Ain’t It Cool Message Boards until I finally have everyone in coats and hats and at the front door, and then he decides to brush his teeth even though he claimed to be “ready” 15 minutes ago. Fucker.
deep breaths
Sorry. You’ve inadvertently stumbled on the single most stressful item in our marriage. Money problems? We handle it. Sex issues? Forget about it. Getting the family out the door in a reasonably stress-free manner? Ouch.
I used to start panicking about being behind to go out in the evening at, oh, about ten am! Since Getting Ready to Go Out meant: cleaning house (if we had a babysitter) shopping for babysitter snacks, washing and ironing whatever was going to be worn, getting the children bathed, picking up a video, getting showered and shampooed, picking up the babysitter, laying out clothes for my husband, getting dressed and doing makeup, and then finally walking out the door…yeah, it can take all day! nowadays, I can shower, makeup, hair and ready in 30 minutes…
I take about 5 minutes to get ready. 10 if I need makeup. I do not wash my hair right before I go somewhere ever because I do not blow-dry my hair and, having extremely thick hair, it takes anywhere from 3-5 hours to dry. I wash my hair twice a week and I do it at night, so that’s already out of the way. I also don’t use styling products in my hair, so brushing it and maybe maybe doing some sort of fancier pony tail or something is about as elaborate as my hair gets. Usually it’s just brush and go. I generally shower before bed, so I don’t need one in the morning, and generally speaking I don’t feel so dirty by evening that I need one (unless it’s been a day of yard work or something) so I don’t typically shower right before going out, either. I put on clothes fast, and I put on makeup fast (eyeliner/mascara is about it for me). My fiancé takes longer than I do to get dressed and ready by far, because he shaves, gels his hair, fusses over what to wear, blah blah blah.
If you need to tell yourself a lie to time things right, then do it. If other people need to time things better, then don’t shelter them from it. What I HATE is being told nonsense timings which automatically assume that I can’t keep to schedule. I do, I always have done, my job requires me to, I hate to do otherwise, I even catch earlier flights because I so hate being late. So when anybody every gives me a fake ‘we need to leave by’ time, I have to restrain myself from a rather nasty incident either involving either physical violence, or damage to my vocal cords.
This, exactly. I don’t even start to get ready until he’s in his closet fretting about what shoes to wear, and I’m still almost always done first. And I consistantly wear makeup going out.
My Darling Marcie has Attention Deficit Disorder and anything can distract her—anything at all; it doesn’t need to be bright and shiny. If she needs to shower before we leave, she might decide to clean the shower before she gets out and dries. Using a towel might inspire her to gather up all the used towels in the house and put them in the washing machine before getting dressed. She is likely to apply her makeup in any room in the house and then not be able to find it when she needs it and that necessitates a room to room search which usually has to be repeated several times because she has a habit of leaving her dirty clothes where ever she happens to be when she takes them off and drops them on the nearest thing large enough to hold them. Meanwhile I am in a frenzy since I have a compulsion to never be late; Marcie denies the importance of time and is perfectly willing to arrive an hour late for almost any engagement. But she is beautiful and a smile from her makes up for all my irritation. I do love me some Darling Marcie, even if we don’t get invited out too often.
I think that some fit into it, but probably just as many do not. Most of the women I know would fall into the “don’t take a long time to get dressed” category. But my social group does not include a lot of girls that are fashion obsessed, who find hours-long discussions about shoes interesting, wear gobs of makeup, etc. I’d guess that among those groups, the stereotype probably fits more individuals.
Well, a stereotype. Some are grounded in some truth, some not. I imagine in older times it was quite common for the man to wait for the woman. Probably expected. Holdover from that, maybe. How often do you see prom date waiting nervously downstairs with dad, until the girl makes her appearance?
It seems about the same at my house, but I take after my father here. My mother can appear ready and still not be ready to go for another half hour. Dad and I were often stuck waiting in the livingroom or by the front door waiting on her. The really aggravating thing for me is that she would often bug me to get dressed/packed/whatever well before I was ready to even start. Even ignoring her I can still be ready to leave well before she is. I just don’t know what she is up to during those last 15 minutes, even after 20-odd years I never figured it out.
This is exactly the way I do things, and even when I’m getting ready for a semi-formal event (my social calendar doesn’t include true formal ballgown type events) it takes me 30 minutes TOPS. And it’s only that long if I decide I don’t like my pantyhose or something and have to change what I already put on. Before some really important events I’ve left myself an hour, but I wind up just hanging around trying not to muss myself up until it’s time to go.
If I were going to an embassy ball or serving as a bridesmaid or something I’d have my hair professionally styled, but for anything else I either wear it down, braid it, or try to gussy up my usual ponytail style. I can understand why some women prefer to spend more time using a flat iron or curling iron or something, but it’s beyond me why anyone would want to waste time on washing and blow drying their hair just before going out. Way to add useless stress to your life, ladies! It’s not going to look any better than it would if you washed it that morning or the night before.
Getting ready for work typically takes me 15-20 minutes, and that includes deciding what to wear.
Actually the thing that take the longest for me is contact lenses. I have to be up for an hour before I can put them on (for optimum comfort and longer wearing time, that is).
I have woken up 18 minutes before I was supposed to be at work, an 8-minute drive, and made it. I was dressed and had lipstick on and hair brushed. My shoes even matched! After a couple of trips to the ladies room I had on mascara and contact lenses.
However, if I’m doing the formal red-carpet thing, it’s 2-2½ hours, which includes hair, makeup, nails, and struggling into a strapless bra.
But in all cases I have earlier decided what I’m going to wear, what shoes go with it, and if I need and have the right color pantyhose. Sometimes this leads to a problem–like, once I was wearing a pair of ultra high heels, which I’d worn before with no problem, but I’d worn them without stockings. Worn with stockings, they were really too slippery to walk in. (I have small feet, so in 4-inch heels I am practically on pointe.) So that necessitated removing the stockings, applying a fake tan to my foot and the part of my leg that showed, and finding some undergarment to substitute for the pantyhose, and not just any pair of underwear would work because the dress was slinky. So yeah, that time I was late. I am now aware of that pitfall and it won’t happen again.
Takes me over an hour, including time to shower. I don’t wear makeup often so when I do wear it, it takes me ages to apply it. Also, I generally decide I hate the outfit I was planning to wear, and spend another 20 minutes frantically auditioning alternatives. Why? No idea. But no matter how suitable I think something will be, on the day I always freak out when I put it and decide that it simply won’t do. Also my usual disorganisation and failure to plan ahead add time, plus I’m easily distracted. Push me in the direction of the bathroom two hours before we need to leave and if the stars align, I may actually be ready early.
Yesterday my neighbour rang me all flustered because she had slept in and was due at a party at 12. It was then 20 to 12, she had just got out of the shower and could I please drop her off. I said sure and she asked would I be ready to go by 10 to. I said OK, got off the phone, showered and dressed and right on 11:50 started waiting.
Although she was the one in a hurry she wasn’t ready to leave until 12:25. She was plainly dressed and didn’t appear to have a lavish makeup job.
I was totally unflustered while waiting because I had simply assumed, from long experience, that she would be late.
Dad: took longer smoking his first cigarrete of the day than breakfasting and dressing. Preparing for an Event took about as long as preparing for any normal day, except for having made sure before hand that either of his two best suits were clean and ironed.
Mom: takes about three hours between horizontal and out the door, usually. When in a hurry, she needs at least one hour and moves at the speed of an overloaded snail, thanks to her arthrosis; part of the delay with her is getting her bones to remember how to move. Getting ready for an Event takes a couple months. If I ever get married, I can tell her about it with at least six months’ warning or I can elope: any intermediate choice would get me in the doghouse for not having given her enough time to buy something appropriate. At my age, I think I’ll just send a postcard saying “hi, I got married!”
Me: jeans and a tee kind’a gal. No makeup and my hair needs washing once or twice a week; I prefer to shower in the afternoon. I can go from “asleep” to “breakfasted, dressed and out the door” in five minutes. Preparing for an Event requires as special preparation washing my hair the day before. Preparing for an Event which also involves Mom requires more time, as she’ll come and start asking “what are you going to wear” and “what jewelry” when I’m still at the happy stage of “I know I have stuff to wear, I’ll choose what when I see how the weather is.”
Middlebro: if he worked in an office he’d try to wear the same clothes every day for a whole workweek; since he works in construction, it’s cargo pants, polos and as many additional layers as weather requires. Takes longer to go from his door to the garage than to go from horizontal to out the door. Preparing for an Event requires a lot of work calming his wife down.
SiL: I swear she’s a closer relation to Mom than I am. Getting ready every day takes her a couple hours (no arthrosis and no makeup). Getting ready for an Event is a matter of months. She’s been known to buy three dresses for the same wedding: only the last one ever got worn.
Littlebro: combines a dash of dandy-ness with being Mr Late. His whole life he’s been the one that we almost had to push into the bathtub and the one who didn’t want to leave it when his fingers were all wrinkled up. He takes longer than me. While he doesn’t take longer than Mom, he’s been known to get on the computer while waiting for her and then need to be pried from the chair…
IME, it’s a function of gender inasmuch as one gender tends to be more worried about clothes than the other. The underoos don’t always match the planet of origin, tho.
My husband always takes longer to get ready than I do, and I always do my hair and makeup. My time is about 20-25 minutes from the moment my feet hit the floor to finishing up; his is 45. This is caused by several things:
If I don’t get ready quickly, I don’t get the precious few minutes of extra sleep I want.
Getting his sorry butt out of bed (my husband’s) is a pain in the ass and takes a good 20 minutes. I need to get started early.
I have a LOT to do before I can get out the door - my lunch to pack, my son to feed and dress, I usually do some last-minute clean up, if I’m lucky get some food myself, get coffee ready, etc.
My husband takes forever to poop. I have no idea why - maybe he’s just reading for a while. I’m sure that some days he’s doing other things. Nonetheless, this is part of his morning ritual and it’s probably the part that takes the longest.
For a special event we might take around the same amount of time, but because special events are usually in the evening and our toddler is running around underfoot at that time, my getting ready is often interspersed with limiting the amount of makeup my son manages to put on his face while I’m getting ready, answering his questions, making sure he’s not playing with something else he shouldn’t, etc.
