Never understanding or making allowances for sickness, it has caused fights and everything. I think I had an epiphany when vomiting in a grocery store parking lot because I had to get some groceries and the first thing she said when I talked to her on the cell while cleaning up in a Subway toilet was “so did you get the groceries or what?”:eek::mad:
She might be thoughtful and sweet in all other ways but she doesn’t understand someone not feeling well at all, and I’ve seen this in others she deals with to.
To avoid blowups and fights at this point we agree if I say “sick” she can bitch and moan but I’m ignoring it.
My husband is very impatient and is always trying to find the fastest way to do things. For instance, he wants to find the shortest route to drive somewhere, then put the pedal to the metal. Or when shopping, I want to slow down and read labels, he wants to just toss something in the cart and go. He gets really stressed waiting in lines. Everything is a race.
He says it’s his nature to always find “the most efficient” way to get things done. The other day he says to me, “You know, I think I have some Type A traits.” I busted out laughing. If I’d had a dictionary at hand, I could have showed him his picture next to the entry.
On the flip side, my husband is S-L-O-W. He’s very detail-oriented and he has to triple check everything. If I ask him a question, it takes so long for a response that I begin to assume he didn’t hear me. It takes him days or weeks to make a big financial decision. It takes him an hour to shower, a half hour to load the dishwasher and wash a couple of pans.
I think he’s like an octopus. Incredibly intelligent but man, it takes time for all those neurons to fire.
Lateness. In every other way she is perfect, except she wasn’t there to BE perfect because she was late. And nobody can mention that she is always late because she insists that she has changed. We were early once and had to wait for my sister who was on time. That is the example that comes out if anyone mentions lateness. Never again will we suffer the agony of endless waiting.
We are always the last people to arrive. We always have to sit in the front row at movies because there are no other seats. Fortunately they show lots of previews these days, so I do get to see the start of the movie. We always get the worst seats when we go out with others because they’re already sitting down when we arrive. Lots of people just don’t bother anymore I believe.
My husband and I trade nights, so that each night, one of us does the after-dinner cleanup and one of us reads stories to the kids and tucks them in.
It does not matter how elaborate dinner was or how much cleanup there is. On my dinner clean-up nights, I am done before he is finished reading stories/tucking in. On my reading stories nights, I am done before he is finished with dinner cleanup. He is just so slow. And yes, if we are having any sort of serious discussion, there will be pauses before he speaks that are so long I have honestly considered just having a magazine with me so I can read it while I’m waiting for him to think of what he’s going to say next.
It used to annoy me more, but I’ve learned some coping techniques. Basically, I stopped feeling guilty about kicking back in the evening when he’s still beavering away at dinner cleanup or storytime. I used to feel obligated to go and help out, but now I’m like, okay, this is basically a choice you are making, to drag this out and be slow. So I respect that choice, but I also do not feel obligated to protect you from the consequences of that choice, so I will be over here on the computer surfing the Internet while you finish up.
And for the conversation pause thing, if I’m feeling patient enough I just wait it out. If it’s starting to really make me mental, I’ll say, “Look, why don’t we discuss this after you’ve had some time to think about what you want to say? This is making me mental.” And usually he respects this and we just reconvene later.
I guess these are the tricks you learn when you live with someone for a decade without killing them. (Ha, no, seriously, he’s great. Just slow.)
My dear husband always – and I mean ALWAYS – underestimates how long it will take to do anything. “We can get to XXX in a half hour.” Um, no. 45 minutes unless you’ve got a helicopter all warmed up in the back yard. “I’ll be ready to go in 5 minutes.” Guess I’ll sit down and read a chapter or two. I’ve learned that nothing anyone does will make him change so we cope by lying for anything important. Or I’ll just admit I want to get to the airport super early because I’d rather wait by the gate for 2 hours than have to worry about missing the check-in.
Or, “I can fix the XXX in about 2 days.” I know it will take at least a week, because he is counting only the actual number of hours he’s working on the project, not the time lost because he has to go back to the store to get more of something, etc.
Sure, absolutely, mindful anything can be a great psychological boon. But he’s not meditating while he does this. He doesn’t even really know what he’s doing. And when you only have an hour to spend with someone, it kind of sucks when they spend a half hour of that time putting away dishes.
Yeah, mine tends to complain because he doesn’t have enough free time to do the things he wants to do. Well, if you didn’t spend an hour cleaning up the kitchen after dinner or two hours putting the kids to bed, you’d have more free time!
Talking when we’re watching a film (in fact, I’m outnumbered three to one on this behaviour in my family); taking two forms:
Asking me details about the plot, characters, action etc which haven’t been revealed yet; “is he a ghost? Is he an alien? Are they all dreaming?”. I don’t know.
Telling me what just happened on the screen; “He fell in the water! The car hit the tree! The dog can talk!”. I KNOW. I’m watching the same damn film you are!
When we were first dating, I noticed it initially while he was eating pasta. Gross, but I guess some people slurp pasta. Except the next time we went to breakfast, he slurped is eggs. Fluffy scrambled eggs! Who the hell slurps eggs?
It’s enough to make me want to get all stabby, but I also accept that this is a rather superficial thing and I need to get over it.
My wife is perfect (for me) but the one quality she has that drives me to distraction is a complete lack of comprehension about the rationale for packaging food. As near as I can make out, she believes that it is intended to keep the product together until you get it home, at which point it serves no purpose whatsoever. She needs immediate and easy access to everything. and packages get in the way.
This manifests in ways that go on a scale from merely annoying (eg; bread bag closures are discarded the first time the bag is opened) to WHATTHEHELLISWRONGWITHYOU? type offenses, such as taking scissors to bags of flour, sugar, or starch when they become about 1/4 emptied, trimming the “excess” bag off about two centimeters above the surface of the product, so they just sit there in cupboard completely open to the elements. (If I don’t find another container to transfer to, she’ll keep trimming the bag as it empties,) She’ll cut what she needs off a pound of butter without unwrapping it, and put the unused portion back in the fridge with one or more sides completely open to the air.
Same with cheese - which is a terrible habit combined with the insistence that cheese must be discarded in its entirety at the first blush of mould in a country where the price of cheese is artificially kept infamously high.
I know what drives my fiance (and everybody else in the world) mildly insane - I can’t seem to help talking through movies. Well, the talking isn’t bad, it’s about the movie, but when it reminds me of something I really want to tell him I pause the movie and sometimes it takes… a while to watch things. I try really hard to be good, but especially if I’ve had a couple glasses of wine I get very chatty. I’m sorry.
My husband is a noisy eater. one of my pet peeves that I’ve had since I was a child is noisy eaters. It’s a good thing he’s perfectly lovely in every other respect. Otherwise I’d be writing this from death row.
My wife can’t relax… it’s difficult being in the house with her at times. Then she complains about not having any time to relax, and I’m like “Well, you do have the time, you just choose to spend it not relaxing.”
I also think she’s too involved with Sophia’s homework… there was this one project where Sophie had to write a simple report about Spanish Missions, and build a model. $100, three visits, 2 interviews, and 6 read books later, Sophia was finally able to turn the thing in. I think she was the only fourth-grader who turned in a report with a bibliography and a table of contents.
You’re keeding, but you’ve reminded me about something my husband does that drives me nuts - the nose-blowing. We have cats, and he’s allergic to cats - I understand that he will be stuffed up and have to blow his nose a billion times a day until we don’t have cats any more, but the noise he makes - it’s like a trumpet blast!
I bump into things. No, that’s not quite right - I bump into EVERYTHING. I’m surprised my husband doesn’t call me Shiva the Destroyer.
My wife is somehow unable to understand that other people can look at the same set of facts, and come to a different conclusion than she will. This does NOT mean that she can’t stand that people disagree with her.
What it means is she assumes that, because I have all the same information that she does, I will come to the exact same conclusions that she does. Therefore there is no reason to tell me what she thinks, wants, or needs, because I already know it. When I tell her that I don’t in fact know any of this, she is incredulous.
We’ve been married 26 years, and I still have to tell her that I am not telepathic, damn it!
