Usually, I cook, and he does the dishes. For which I am very grateful and for which I thank him routinely.
Often, he finishes up and says, “Your kitchen is repaired,” which has always ever so slightly annoyed me.
Tonight he mentioned it usually takes him 15 minutes or so to clean up, “depending on how destructive you’ve been.”
And finally, this bugged me enough to say so. Because these comments strike me as implying that I’m not producing anything of value by preparing food for him and our kids all day most days, I’m just “destroying” things and making work for him.
He apologized, and even though he did it in that way that has an underlying, “I don’t understand what I did wrong,” he is forgiven.
“I’ll repair your ass with my boot” is pretty much how it would go around here.
I don’t think he means anything by it, and I imagine he was surprised by you taking it seriously, but on the other hand, it is slightly critical (that you’ve made too much of a mess in your cooking adventures).
To answer the question in the thread title, I would say: Neither. He wasn’t really being a jerk, he was just making a joke that presumably he thought was amusing. You didn’t think it was amusing, but that doesn’t make you oversensitive. You told him it wasn’t funny, he accepted this, and hopefully he won’t do it anymore. Sounds like a pretty good resolution of the problem to me.
I think he meant it to be funny, and it became a running joke, in his mind. The fact that this has apparently been going on for some time without you saying anything about it has probably reinforced that impression in his mind. He had no idea that you weren’t ‘in on the joke’.
Now that you have told him it bothers you, it should cease. Period. If he says it again, you maybe give him one pass as it being a ‘force of habit’; anything more than that and you are entitled to let him have it.
Do you guys have an otherwise playful relationship? If so, then “oversensitive”. He probably means nothing by it.
I got in trouble for this sort of thing recently. My wife looked out our picture window and said “We need to mow the grass this weekend.”
Meaning absolutely nothing by it other than an attempt at Dadaist humor, I said “We need to mow your FACE this weekend!”
Now, we have a very playful relationship. She razzes me all the time. I tease her. It should have been No Big Deal. She knows I don’t have a mean bone in my body. But for some reason, it hit her just exactly wrong, and she spent the next hour convinced that I was being an utter, utter asshole to her.
I don’t think it makes a difference, really. Your feelings were hurt (whether or not it was justified or reasonable), you communicated about it, he apologized for offending you (even though he doesn’t understand what the big deal was), and that’s that.
My BF is always saying silly things like that. Usually I take them in the spirit they are intended (playful, if jerky on paper), sometimes they piss me off and I tell him to stop. His intentions are good, but that doesn’t mean I should pretend something doesn’t bother me when it does, even if it’s more to do with me than him.
Trust me, after 16 years of cohabitation, I am aware. In fact, we have an explicit agreement that we limit the stuff we complain about. I’m sure if he chided me every time I left dirty clothes on the bathroom floor* we would both become miserable quickly.
Your various reiterations of what happened have made me feel proud of our relationship skills. When we were younger, I had a terrible temper and he tended to get passive-aggressive. We’re much better, but given my history of flying off the handle (not to mention being mentally ill), I still have trouble gauging “normal and healthy” sometimes.
*“and you have to walk past the laundry baskets to get into bed!”
Poor husband has to do something hard, dirty, and nasty. Like work in the crawl space or attic or sumptin.
You go to clean the clothes that are dirty and damaged. You comment “geez, what did you do to these clothes?”, knowing full well what he was doing in them and why.
What should his mental reaction be?
fuck you bitch, that was hard work.
yeah, they probably are a mess, ha ha
hi Opal
Don’t look to be offended if it wasnt meant that way IMO.
Do you nag him (or make any comments) at any time about it being your kitchen?
If you did so to me, I’d probably resent the idea that you got to mess up YOUR kitchen and then expect ME to clean it up on a regular basis.
But then, since in my marriage I did about 70% of the cooking, about the same amount of dishes and 100% of the grocery shopping, I’d pretty much tell you where to shove it if you tried to tell me that it was YOUR kitchen.
I think of it like accidentally stepping on someone’s foot. You never meant to hurt the person, but the ouch is real and you are genuinely sorry it happened. Being sorry doesn’t mean admitting to some fault.
So, his comment twinged you, you told him, he was sorry. Sounds delightfully healthy to me.
While I agree that he’s simply joking, I can’t imagine being married to someone whose sense of humor doesn’t mesh well enough with mine to figure out what I do and don’t find funny.
I kept reading that as your leaving dirty DISHES on the bathroom floor; even the hamper bit didn’t enlighten me! Took me 4 times; hopefully it won’t take that many times for your sweetie to get that it bugs you.
Even the best of relationships have their moments. Never underestimate the power of stress, lack of sleep, etc. And even the most bonded couple sometimes want some independant time, to NOT feel like they’re attached at the hip. It’s not an awful thing to be at odds with your mate; sometimes life happens and you deal with it and, if you have a good relationship, you learn and move on.
I don’t think he was a jerk, and you weren’t oversensitive, but if there’s any mistake here maybe you should have said something earlier if it bothered you for so long. There used to be something I always said to my wife that I thought was funny, and she always laughed. It was a running joke that went on for a few years, until one time I said it and my wife absolutely exploded. It was stupid, offensive, she hated it, and always hated it, and so on. I seriously had no idea, she always laughed and never complained before that moment.
You can’t joke about their faces or their bodies in any way, especially if there’s any possibility for an interpretation that you’re saying there’s something imperfect about them.
Also, fart jokes. They never think farts are funny, no matter how great of one you just ripped.
As to the OP, it does sound like the husband is coming off as ungrateful, mildly condescending and critical. It’s probably completely clueless and unintentional, but I can see where it would get old to perpetually be told that a chore that you’re doing for the other person is nothing but “damage” that the other pesron needs to “clean up.”
Now that you’ve told him it bothers you, give him a chance to stop. If he’s not habitually mean-spiritited or critical in other ways, it’s probably just one of those dumb, repeating, cornball joke patterns that guys get stuck in sometimes.
If he keeps doing it after you’ve told him it bothers you, then you should tell him you want to switch jobs, and see how he likes it.
You’re being oversensitive. He was teasing you, which means he appreciates you.
Now sure, you have a right to your feelings, and he shouldn’t say it again, but you really have to read into his statement to make it seems like he doesn’t think you “produce anything of value”. He didn’t even say that you should avoid wrecking the kitchen when you cook. It’s expected that when a person cooks, they make a mess. Pointing this out is not a criticism or an ungrateful statement at all.
If you had flipped out on me like that, I would have apologized, and then though “Sheesh, what’s the next innocent thing she’ll flip out about? I could mention how much I like puppies and she might yell at me for that!”
