Men do this because we know that women possess IUR - Inter-Uterine Radar. IUR allows a women to scan the contents of the house for lost & misplaced objects.
Unfortunately, IUR also imparts the ability to detect when the man knocked off work an hour early & got beers with the guys.
haha good one Belrix!
My husband likes to do the dishes.
He doesn’t mind cleaning the bathroom.
He has to do the laundry now, because when I tried to do it, he wound up giving me such a long list of details on every single article of clothing he owns that I got mad and told him to do it. My instructions were, “don’t mix white and dark.”
He can whip meals up in under an hour. I can do it in over an hour.
He has the ability to turn me loose at Powell’s books, and lose me there.
And he has the ultra amazing ability of being so damn sexy in his maroon turtle neck and black jeans. He’s not lanky…he’s perfect…
Seriously, I can’t speak for all husbands or wives, but I do this, and I have a good reason. First let me explain the background here: when we were first married, I voluntarily stepped into Traditional Wife Role - cooking, cleaning, laundry, all that stuff became my territory. The WryGuy agreed with my somewhat traditional approach to marriage. While I was working, he continued to carry on his officially sanctioned Man Of The House duties - paying the bills, fixing broken stuff and killing spiders.
I routinely did his laundry, and put it neatly folded on his dresser. Where it would stay. For months. Sometimes being knocked to the floor, rolled in cat hair and placed in the laundry basket again without ever having been worn. So I started simply asking him to put his laundry away. It didn’t take. So I mentioned it again, sporadically but repeatedly, over the next fifteen years. Whenever I took the time to put his laundry away, he never noticed (see above post for delete-o-vision probems) but he was pretty good at noticing when I DIDN’T.
Ultimately, I went on strike over the issue. He agreed to put his damn laundry away. He never does. Thus, I nag. AND I now leave his clean, folded laundry on his pillow, where he HAS to move it or he can’t go to sleep.
My sweet baboo is the primary laundry doer in our house. He doesn’t read the labels so sometimes a cold water thing gets washed in hot but hey…he did the laundry!
He also does the dishes frequently. Picks my son up from daycare most days because he leaves work earlier and starts dinner at least 4 times a week.
He’s excellent about general tidying and also pays all the bills (meaning he makes sure everyone who needs one gets a check on time. We pool the money).
The only things that are exclusively my pervue are scrubbing the bathroom, bug wrangling and cleaning up cat yack, and cleaning the cat box.
Mr. Winnie is a talented chef – he cookes Monday through Friday and I cook on the weekends.
Like ** Velma’s** husband, he can pick up new friends anywhere. The grocery store, the mall, ball games, funerals, you get the picture. He’s forever coming home with plans for “Bob from Safeway” to come over and watch the Eagles game. “Who’s Bob?” “He was shopping for top sirloin at the same time as me.”
He’s also quite the laundry man… 99% of our household laundry is done by Mr. Winnie and I can report a large improvement over the number of shrunken and discolored clothing in our wardrobes since he started doing this.
Mr. Winnie is very good at balancing our checkbook, keeping track of the bills, and generally managing our finances. God knows if I did it we’d be living in a shanty.
Mr. Winnie can figure out how to fix or install just about anything: light fixtures, water heater, dryer, etc. I admire his scientific and mechanical mind.
He also can completely tune me out when the tv is on. I could sit 6 inches from him and say to him “Mr. Winnie, I would like hot monkey lovin’ from you RIGHT NOW!” and he would turn and say “Huh?”
Mr. Winnie is an insane perfectionist and can turn cleaning the bathroom into a 6-hour project. That’s why he doesn’t do it anymore. Go fix the light switch or something.
featherlou forgot to mention that I also maintain the litter box, water the plants and take out the garbage. Also, I apparently am the only one around here with the magic ability to install a roll of toilet paper on the holder thingy.
My wife also has some special powers. She has the ability to fart audibly and blame one of the cats, whether they’re in the room or not. She can watch a movie two or three times without remembering having seen it. She can see even the slightest amount of dirt… unless it’s on the floor. She can remember scads of trivia without even realizing she knows the stuff. And she can turn just about anything in the 'fridge into a tasty meal, with seemingly no effort.
Whoa!!! What channel?
My husband points out that this ability is not unique, as I, too, have this amazing superpower.
For some reason, he doesn’t appreciate it.
Mr. norinew has the ability to conduct an entire conversation without ever paying attention to anything either of us is saying! A typical conversation will go like this:
Him: “What’s this letter from Virginia?”
Me: “It’s an invitation to my neice’s wedding”
Him: “Which neice?”
Me: “Donna”
Him: “Oh. Well, I’ll put it over here in the vertical file”.
Two hours later, I’m ready to enter the info into my Outlook Calendar, and I say to him: “Where did you put that invitation to Donna’s wedding?”
Him: “Donna’s getting married?”
I swear I don’t know how he does it!
Um, I believe that would be more correctly called the “mistaken” ability to install a roll of toilet paper, since he puts them on backwards. And of course it’s the cats farting; everyone knows women don’t fart. 
swimmingwithchickens, I’m not at all passive-aggressive about stuff left on the stairs. I don’t get mad at Jim for not taking stuff upstairs. If I really want him to take something upstairs, I use the clever ruse of asking him to take it upstairs.
norinew, I’m guilty of that too. There’s been times when Jim has asked me to repeat what I just said, and I couldn’t, because I wasn’t paying attention either. How sad is that?!?
Ah, fair enough. Then you are justified in your response. My comments were not aimed at those who have become fed up with hubby’s delete-o-vision.
It seems that you have taken the appropriate action. When you ask him to take some stuff upstairs does he do it? Is that when the delete-o-vision kick in?
All in all, the minor irritations of marriage are just that, minor. I hope no one here is bogged down by the little things that there’s been a noticible effect in the marriage. Or is it affect? Effect is a noun…right?
No, far from it, swimming. I was noting some of the idiosyncrasies that make up the man I love in a tongue-in-cheek way, not listing all the ways he’s a bad husband. Cause he isn’t. And yes, he takes the stuff upstairs when I ask. It’s his ability to just not see it until asked that I find funny.
I adore my husband, in spite of and sometimes because of his weirdnesses. And in the interest of complete fairness, here are some of what he would probably say are my amazing skills:
*the ability to stack objects of any shape and size on any horizontal surface into small feats of architectural genius.
*the ability to drink several beverages at one time, in several different rooms.
*a complete inability to sense when my ashtray has reached maximum capacity.
*the ability to remember any argument, word for word, combined with the mysterious power of instantaneous deletion of any request involving money.
You know what a good follow up thread to this would be?:
Weird things my spouse does…
Hubby has the amazing ability to foresee my need for cups of tea. Always right on the mark, even ahead of me at times 
He knows when to give me a hug and when to just let me be. He gives fantastic hugs BTW!
He spoils me. What more can I say? He’s loverly :
:
Marcie often asks me to pick up things for her and neglects to tell me that payment will be required. What is most remarkable is that she can cloud my mind and cause me to fall for the scam time after time. She also causes me to make coffee first thing in the morning and to bring her a cup while she lounges in bed. Her power over me is so great that I am compelled to buy her a dozen roses at least twice monthly. I do the laundry and most of the cooking, yet I am eternally grateful to her for merely saving my life. I gaze at her in awe and whisper, “Your magic is great, mighty mistress: command me, I beseech you.” Xena, the warrior princess, cannot compete with my Marcie.