So let’s say you have an SO/spouse who is very compatible with you in many ways and most of the time you’re very happy together.
One problem though: as the relationship has progressed this person has become “comfortable” enough with you to start displaying a gross personal habit in front of you. I’m thinking of something along the lines of loudly farting all the time, nose-picking while you’re in the room, digging in their ear in front of you, etc. It’s something that is fairly common behavior but that you find very gross and unappealing.
The person knows enough not to do this in public situations, and didn’t do it that much around you early on, but as the relationship has progressed you start to realize they are doing it pretty regularly and the more you notice it the more you’re bothered by it. It’s starting to affect how you see the person and making them seem less attractive.
What do you do? Do you break up with the person over such a thing even though everything else is going well and a breakup would be quite painful at this point?
Do you just tolerate it even though it makes you uncomfortable and makes you feel less attracted to the person? Do you just come right out and ask the person to stop it? If so, how the heck do you word such an awkward conversation?
You say, Hey, stop doing that. Then they can say hell no, fuck off. Then you decide to put up with it, when they point out the 3 things you do that goss them out.
When my SO uses hot sauce he has to touch the lip of the bottle to his burrito. I explained that he was getting food on the lip of the bottle that would grow bacteria. But he keeps doing it and he also leaves the cap loose. So I’m getting him his own bottle of hot sauce and I’m hiding mine.
So when he starts up with these little dental floss things he buys, and we’re watching TV, I tend to leave the area, unless whatever’s on the TV is really gripping, then I ignore it.
I’ve apparently lost the “dental floss is for the bathroom” argument.
He didn’t do this before we were married. Or even for years after. This is the kind of thing people say, “Well, it’s sure not worth divorcing him,” and then one day it all boils over and…
My SO cracks his toes and rubs his ew ew papery dry feet together and they make this dry swishswish sound and it drives me up the wallllllll. He’s a bike messenger, year round, part time, and manages a bike shop full time. Does cyclocross, all that. He lives on a bike. He’s going to crack and creak–hell, I do too, from years of sports as a kid. But he’ll sit in bed at night when we’re reading or watching something, and it’s CRRRRRK. CRK. CRRK. POP CRRRRK POP. SWISHSWISHSWISHSWISH.
I just give him A Look. I’ve told him the sound bothers me, and he knows it, it’s just a matter of breaking the habit. Or, of me getting over it. I will also say that when everything is hunky dory I don’t notice it as much, but if I"m already annoyed with him I’ll hear it 4 rooms away. It’s one of those things where if I didn’t say something, I would run screaming from the bedroom one day when it got to be just too much.
I’d never dump him because of it, I’d just talk to him about it! That’s always the best policy.
It also works, to a certain point and age, with people who develop those new and unacceptable behavior. The Bros and I have been able to curtail some new gross habits of Mom’s before they got out of hand, but Grandma is at an age where the only way to avoid watching her eat with her hands is… not to be in the room
I have a thing about belching - I can’t STAND it. And I’m not EVER going to find it funny, no matter how often you try to get me to change my mind.
Every partner I have ever had knows this and knows not to do it in front of me. I’m not sure how I have achieved this, I don’t rant and rave about it, I just look disgusted, I think. No one wants to be thought of as disgusting.
Sometimes friends of friends hear of this quirk and think it might be funny to belch in front of me as a result. My partner (and previous partners) always has a look of horror and panic when this happens.
My GF (if she finds out I’m telling this I’m dead meat) ruminates. One day we come back from having dinner, I sit on the sofa and watch some TV and she sits in front of the desk using the computer, after some minutes of this I see she is chewing on something and since I didn’t see her getting up to get a bite I’m quite puzzled and ask her what is she eating. “Dinner, I didn’t chew it well the first time”
:eek:
I mean
:eek::eek::eek::eek:
After my stomach stopped cartwheeling around the feeling was replaced with, and paraphrasing Austin Powers here, “how can she do that!. I mean, really, how? I don’t get the mechanics of it.”
She doesn’t do it often, but when I see her doing it I take it as one of the things that make her unique rather than a revolting habit.
In Howard Stern’s autobiography, he talks about his nervous stomach, which apparently cuased him to be unusually flatulant. When he first began dating Alison, the woman he would eventually marry, he didn’t want her to know this, so he’d constantly excuse himself to the bathroom and let it rip. Apparently Alison noticed this habit and, after three or four dates, became concerned she was dating a closet drug addict or something who needed to constantly sneak off and get a fix, so she confronted him.
When he explained what was going on, she was very accepting. “Oh, Howard, don’t worry about it! It’s a natural body function. We’re dating, we like each other, it’s no big deal. If you need to pass gas, go ahead and do it.”
Well, said Stern, that was like opening the floodgates. He was very relieved. For the next couple of days he was very free with his… emissions… around her, and couldn’t have been happier.
And then Alison said, “Listen, I think we need to go back to the original arrangement.”
My dad used to hawk up loogies. He really did do it in public, and it was wonderfully humuliating when you’re, say, 15. He also did it in the shower, and at random - not always into a handkerchief, sometimes just onto the floor.
I always used to say, I’ll never date someone like that. HA!
My SO hawks up loogies. In his defense, he NEVER does it in public. He does it in the shower. He does always do it into the garbage or into tissues.
BUT THE SOUND GROSSES ME OUT. I have learned it is better for him - he had his nose broken as a teen, so if he blows too hard, he gets bloody noses. But when he’s sick with a cold, it’s just nasty. I just go “Eeeeeeeeeeeew!” and don’t watch and look away. I just ask him to try and warn me.
I’m sure someone cleaned it up before it hardened to the consistancy of caulk or gum. I mean, its not like she stepped on it and lifted her foot to find
long rubbery mucus strands trying to keep the shoe stuck to the tile. :eek:
