I’ve been married over thirty years and at some point we both learned not to sweat the small stuff. If he puts a dish away in the ‘wrong’ cabinet, I’m just thankful he did the dishes. If I dn’t water the lawn in the same rotation that he does, he is thankful I took the time to water it in the first place.
I don’t care about toilet paper brands or what the toothpaste tastes like. We were always so busy with our lives we didn’t have time to worry about that stuff.
I cannot thank you enough for posting this! I remember reading it way back and loving it, but could never remember enough about it to Google. Thanks!
My SO and I are extremely lucky in that we have very similar tastes and are too lazy to argue about the little stuff. Anything we do that does get on the other’s nerves has already been discussed and is more of a running joke than a chip in our relationship.
What’s that quote? Something about, when you like someone, they can pour soup in your lap and you’ll be happy, but if you hate them, the way they hold their spoon can make your skin crawl. Yes, some things are personal preferences and can get on your nerves, but I can’t help but feel, at least some of the time, minor irritations are indicative of larger relationship problems.
My wife does this, I’m beginning to think it may be grounds for divorce.
On-topic - Visitors/ Guests. My wife loves having people over, I can’t stand it. My house is supposed to be my sanctum. I don’t want people touching my stuff, asking questions about what I’m working on or breathing my air.
This is the biggest point of contention in our house, since we only have one TV and plan on leaving it that way.
The Boy’s tolerance for crap TV is much lower than mine, and he doesn’t share my guilty obsession with dance competition shows. Thankfully, he puts up with it as long as I let him comandeer the TV to play Call of Duty once in a while (something I have zero interest in).
It’s funny how many silly little things don’t really come up as a problem until you have to share a space. It’s almost always possible to find a compromise, but sometimes I start to understand why some couples decide to live separately even after marriage.
This.
Thankfully, Netflix allows you to split your account into two separate queues which saved my fiancee and I a lot of grief.
Mr. brown does the “stash the item in a different spot every time” thing. He’s always looking for a place that the item fits into even more neatly than the last place. Tetris-ing stuff into perfect hidey-holes is an obsession of his. However, neither of us can find the freaking thing when we need it.
Here’s a point to consider when moving in: the first person to arise and get dressed in the morning should have their clothes in a more distant place, if that’s an option. You want to avoid the “get dressed in the dark while trying not to wake up the SO who’s still sleeping” scenario. My dresser is in our bedroom, and I hog up the whole master bedroom closet, too. However, I get up much earlier than Mr. brown and must wait until he gets up later before I try to get dressed. All his stuff is in another bedroom; it would have been smarter to switch this setup.
It doesn’t ultimately matter what brand of toilet paper you use, so long as it’s dispensed in the correct over-the-top fashion the way the universe intended.
He doesn’t put it on the holder. It either sits on top of the toilet tank or on the counter. Sometimes I put it on the holder when I’m there. He’s much more easygoing in general than I am, so the things that bug me tend not to bother him at all.
My boyfriend and I are (we’re pretty sure) going to move in this summer; I’m anticipating a couple of (admittedly minor) issues:
The Food Issue: He is…how shall I put it? He knows what he likes, and that ain’t much. Part of it is that he has minor IBS & part of it is that he was always a picky eater. What can I say? He’s his mother’s son.
Anyway, I’ve told him I don’t want to eat burgers/pizza every night, which is what he does. Nor do I want to cook (I’ll generally get home before him) two separate meals most of the time. If he’d like to eat something other than what I’m cooking, he’s welcome to. I’ve promised that I won’t get insulted - I know he’s particular. In return, he’s promised to try to expand his eating horizons. It’ll be a bit more tricky when we start spending some holidays with my family (we do Italian food, mostly), but we’ll work it out.
Something that irritates me is that when he drinks out of a paper cup & finishes said drink, he rarely remembers to throw out the cup. But he’s trying to remember as often as possible, which is good.
Whenever these little things irritate me, I try to remember that 99% of the time he’s good as gold & that I’m incredibly lucky that we found each other. And that I can be quite irritating, so I’d better shut my mouth about his quirks. 
True love is all about finding a fault set you can live with, Cosmopolitan.
The only thing that I really object to is that my husband holds onto every piece of paper that comes into the house with a deathgrip. It was a big surprise because I know that in his worklife he has to be really organized and he was always very tidy for many years after we were married. Something snapped when the kids came, I think.
Two things I would not have expected that we disagree about (seemingly inconsequential, but they make a HUGE difference in your everyday comfort levels!) are light levels and temperature. I like it bright at night, with the lights blazing. He likes it unbearably dim, with “mood lighting” and/or buzzing fluorescent bulbs. I like it to be very warm. He likes it cool and somehow the “saving energy” card always gets pulled when we’re talking about heating but not about the A/C. (I usually end up just putting on a sweater… but still.)
Pets. Some like 'em, some don’t. Figure that out before.
Here’s a good one. The, “Don’t waste that food!” debate.
ME: If the loaf of bread hasn’t been finished in a week or so, it gets tossed and replaced with a new one. Guess we didn’t have as many sandwiches that week. If the mild has been there for over a week, the rest of it gets tossed. If we don’t eat the leftovers after 2 days, they go. If I bring home the rest of a dinner we ate out on Friday night and I haven’t eaten it by Monday, it goes in the trash.
Of course, this will clash with people who grew up in a family where you never wasted food.
And that right there is about 70% of living together in peace. Making an effort to minimize the stuff that aggravates your partner, even the things you think are silly. It’s not even really important whether or not you’re successful, just that you’re both making a good-faith effort.
You cannot foresee all the piddling stuff you’ll disagree about, precisely because most of it is so piddling. Things like the toilet paper being over or under, letting the dogs on the furniture, leaving the sink running or not while you brush your teeth…there’s no limit to how trifling these issues can be.
chickens, natures garbage disposal =)
It all becomes easier when the man realizes the days of him being right are over. Just accept it.
I’d use sandpaper if it made my girl happy, and she’d do the same for me.
Reciprocity: Find it. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Smells - certain smells drive me nuts - other ones drive him nuts. Fortunately we have overlap - neither one of us is making Yankee Candle rich or wants the place to smell like a hippie love in. But he doesn’t fry eggs when I have an empty stomach and I try not to paint when he is going to be home. And he doesn’t eat nacho cheese Doritos and expect me to get within 20 yards…
Religion - we became Unitarian. This is one of those that can sneak up on you as you age - when I was 24 I was a vaguely practicing Catholic with a live and let live philosophy. Kids, age - I wanted more structure and was married to a not terribly supportive atheist. Its now funny to listen to him say “we are Unitarians.”
This is a little off-topic and doesn’t address the issue of actively trying to find better places for things, but one trick I’ve learned over the years is that if I have trouble finding something (tape, etc.), when I finally do find it and am done with it I put it in the first place that I looked for it. So if I looked in the desk drawer first but it wound up being in the kitchen, it goes in the desk drawer. Works 99% of the time.
This is one of the things that my SO and I got right when I moved in last year. His clothes had been in the “office” closet, and I was using the bedroom closet for my weekend stays, but when I realized that I’d be getting up earlier than him on a regular basis I proposed switching closets. At first he resisted, insisting that he’s a heavy sleeper and that I could turn on the bedroom light and a radio and it wouldn’t bother him (which may well be true), but I told him I’d never feel comfortable doing that and that I needed a space with light and sound to wake up in and get ready for work. He agreed to switch without much pressure – after we measured both closets and determined that he wouldn’t be losing any space. 
It wound up having an unforseen benefit when we added a puppy to our household: in the mornings I can leave both dogs in the bedroom with him with the door closed while I go about my business.