The one thing your spouse does that drives you nuts?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I love my fiance very, very much, obviously or I wouldn’t be marrying the guy next month. LOL. But there is one thing that drives me insane: he doesn’t do the “Jeep Wave” when he is driving my Jeep.

Those of you with Jeeps know that when you see another Jeep you wave. It can be as simple as two fingers off the steering wheel, or a full-out “how’s it goin’!!”, but you still acknowledge the other Jeep driver. I have had my Jeep since December 2009 and I explained this to him from the very beginning. He didn’t believe me at first, until he dropped me off one day just after I bought her and called 20 minutes later, laughing, saying “Some guy in a Jeep just waved at me!” He KNOWS about the Jeep Wave. I have gently reminded him. I have yelled at him when he’s driving and another Jeep goes by: “Wave, honey. WAVE!!!” I have threatened to revoke his Jeep-driving privileges. He’ll do a half-assed wave kind of condescendingly just to shut me up. If someone waves first he’ll wave back if he notices, but he doesn’t think to watch for it like a true Jeep driver and I just think it’s rude when someone acknowledges you and you don’t acknowledge them back. I know this sounds like the most trivial thing ever, but it infuriates me that he won’t respect the culture of the awesome vehicle that I’m so generously letting him drive.

But I guess if that’s the worst thing that annoys me about my future husband I have it pretty good. :slight_smile:

**What seemingly trivial thing does your spouse do that drives you bat-shit crazy? **
Better still, how can I stop wanting to strangle the guy every time he drives my vehicle? :wink:

2

Come back and read this OP on your fifth anniversary. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have found several dozen things that drive you far crazier than this does. I know my wife has.

To answer your question - When my wife makes coffee in the morning, she adds milk & sugar, stirs, takes the spoon out, then leaves it on the counter next to the sink, invariably leading to a sticky spot. 3 inches to the right, and it would be in the sink and all would be well.

I’ve brought this to her attention many times. She claims that she’s “saving” the spoon in case she has a second cup. I’ve pointed out (a) she almost never has a second cup, (b) she leaves the spoon there even when she’s emptied the coffee pot, and we never make a second pot, and © we own approximately 50 spoons, and have never run out of clean spoons between dishwashing cycles, so using a clean spoon for this mythical second cup would be an easier plan. Doesn’t matter - spoon goes on the counter.

3

Always late. Always, always, always. No matter how important or trivial the thing is, she is late for it. She was a half hour late to meet my parents for the first time. She managed to be late for our wedding by about 15 minutes, we had to send someone in to see what she and the maid-of-honor were up to. When we go out to dinner she just happens to be in the middle of something else at the time we agree upon, so I have to cool my heels. Over the years she has decided that I have some sort of anal compulsion to be early so it is my “fault” that I think she is late. The fact that we never, ever appear anywhere at the time we say we will doesn’t make any difference. The jokes from our friends about our lateness, the friends who have just stopped asking us out and the friends who tell us the wrong time so we will be on time - they are all mistaken too. I can’t decide if I want to out live her or not. I am very curious to see how she will manage to be late for her own funeral.

Without this flaw my wife might just be the perfect woman so I try not to complain. It would be interesting to see the first part of a movie one day though.

4

This except of course my husband. It’s not just that he’s always late, he never wants to be the one waiting. If we’re lying in bed reading before bed I always have to shut my iPad and turn it off before he’ll stop starting new games or new chapters in a book. I could have half a page to read but he would need to do something until I finished.

Some days when I’m feeling contrary (and don’t have to get up in the morning) I’ll do the same and we’ll go for hours back and forth until I get bored and go to sleep.

I think that his lateness stems from the same compulsion.

5

My wife has a habit of telling me where to park. I hate it. I don’t know why. I know she has the best of intentions in pointing out a parking space to me (not that I have trouble seeing parking spaces). But I hate it. It makes my blood boil.

6

When he empties the dishwasher, he never remembers to empty the dish rack first, so he piles wet stuff (tupperware, usually) on top of the dry dishes on the rack. RAEG :mad:

7

I’ve been married for over 34 years now. It’s not just one thing.

He’s butchered small animals in the living room. I do not appreciate this. He’s brought home airplane parts. I’m not going to even try to explain this in a single post. And he insists on putting his dishes in the sink, which is only mildly annoying, except that he WON’T PITCH OUT THE TRASH that’s on them first. That is, he’ll gather up his paper napkin, his soda can, the bones, and whatever else, and he’ll dump it all in the sink. The trash can is less than five feet away. I’ve told him that he NEEDS TO DUMP THE TRASH IN THE TRASH CAN. When he smoked, he’d pull off the top bit of cellophane and drop it wherever he was, even if he was near an ashtray or trash can.

No, he isn’t housebroken. On the other hand, he WILL make sure that I have a working computer and working internet connection at all times.

8

My wife does the “always late” thing as well, though I dunno if I’d classify that as seemingly trivial. :wink:

A trivial thing she does that drives me nuts is to store stuff in inappropriate places, particularly stuff she’s “saving” that she then forgets about. Just today, I put milk into a cup pulled off the shelf (without examining it) to find a crusty old teabag floating in it - my wife had put her used teabag into a clean cup on the shelf to “save” it for a second cup, then forgotten about it. GAHHH! :mad:

9

One? One single thing???

I guess I could stick with the theme of the OP just to narrow it down. My husband has a chronic case of road rage which begins pretty much as soon as he sees another car. He just wants to get from point A to point B as fast as possible and all these other people are in his way! I can practically hear his blood boiling as he sits at a red light. I try to distract him with conversation sometimes, and we’ve discussed ways he could ease up, but I think he kind of enjoys storming all over the place.

10

We’ve lived here for five years and he still puts things into the recycling bin that the recycling here does not take, but that the recycling in Seattle did take. We moved away from Seattle in 2004. I have told him countless times that they don’t take milk cartons or empty food cans in the recycling here. Doesn’t matter. Every week I have to go through and pick out all the inappropriate stuff he threw in.

11

He’s always moving. He can’t sit still. Tapping his foot, bouncing his knee, etc. I try to ignore it as much as I can, but sometimes he’s making the whole sofa or bad move…and not in a good way.

12

Oh he will talk a good game about loving nature and trees and stuff, but try and actually haul his ass out into nature and it’s too hot or it’s too cold or too sunny or too humid or in some way not nearly as good as staying inside .

The recent attack of the chiggers is NOT HELPING. I am convinced that he has somehow managed to have a much worse physical reaction to them than most people on purpose. (Poor guy has weirdly swollen nodes in his groin. Yes, he went to the doctor who was all “yeah, you’re having a much worse reaction than most people, carry on soldier”).

13

As far as my wife is concerned, there are only two categories for sorting objects of any description: “Out,” and “Away.”

If something is not “Out,” it is put “Away,” and “Away” is just that; there are no specific places that objects should be at all, and no consistency in where they go. (I would be thrilled to adapt to a slightly different scheme, if it stayed the same from day to day.)

There is the usual molded tray for keeping utensils in, but if my wife puts the utensils away, any of those slots will take whatever she has in her hand.

If she puts the dishes away, they will be put in several precarious stacks, each of which contains a random assortment of dinner plates, saucers, soup bowls, with only resolve into individually sorted stacks the next time I open the cupboard.

Food? It goes in one of the five “food” cupboards. Cans, spreads, dry goods, spices, oils, baking things - there is no distinction, they might be anywhere. (Since I prepare all the meals this drives me especially batty - I have to make sure that everything I need is out and accessible before I start, or there will be a disaster as I spend 15 minutes looking for an ingredient while things are already on the stove and I need it right then.)

My half of the closet is organized left to right into dress pants, casual pants, casual shirts, and dress shirts (and further within those categories according to colour. It might not bother me too much if were some small details of this organization were overlooked - but as I said, the only sorting categories she recognizes are “out” and “away.” I have to regularly go the entire wall-length of the closet, handling every piece - because as far as she is concerned even the difference between “her side” and “my side” is an irrelevant and picky distinction.

Same with the drawers - putting laundry away is a matter of opening a drawer and placing things in it as they come out of the basket until that drawer is full, and then opening the next drawer and continuing (except for our socks and underwear, for some reason.) Any clothes that are folded before being put away might be in any of the six drawers in the highboy.

This is the one thing that continues to drive me up the wall. (Now that I’ve simply forbidden her from washing dishes - though I suppose what drove me nuts about that as also the emphasis on simply putting things away as quickly as possible, without much concern about whether or not they were still repulsively, chunkily, grease-smearlingly dirty.)

Apart from that, it’s golden! (And I don’t complain, as she tolerates some crap from me that might reasonably put anyone over the edge.)

14

The socks. Why are there dirty socks everywhere?

15

Not only are the socks everywhere, but they are all balled up.

16

The most trivial thing that really bothers me about my husband is his horrid, bad timing, especially when it comes to food. For example, around 10 o’clock, I’m getting really sleepy and want to go to bed. He decides that it’s time to play video games, but it’d be awesome to have dessert first. Dammit, it’s 10 p.m.! Dessert would’ve been nice, but not now!

Or, I’ll be ready to work out, after which I have plans to make dinner. Because I just went to the grocery and got all kinds of fresh fruits & veggies I’m looking forward to eating something that’ll make me feel both virtuous and satisfied. And just before I get on the treadmill or walk out the door, he’ll say, “You know, I really feel like some crab rangoon. How about we get Chinese?” I hate always being the person to burst his bubble and say, “Well, we’ve got plenty of food and you said you had a burger and onion rings for lunch. Why don’t we eat in tonight?”

He’s got some terrible impulse control sometimes, though I have my bad moments, too.

17

Posting this one again.

He’ll be in a completely different room, pick something up, and call out “What’s this?”, without identifying what the hell he’s talking about. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll say “I can’t tell what it is you’re looking at.” If I’m feeling snarky, it’s “Is it bigger than a breadbox? Is it a penguin on the telly?” until he gets a clue and fills me in. I’m not going to come a-running to see what it is when all he has to do is add five words to his question.

It has been going on for twenty-two years now.

18

Well, these don’t exactly drive me nuts, but I do bristle internally–greatly–and they both occur in restaurants.

a) Asking a waitstaffer what he/she likes on the menu [Why do I care what the waitstaff like. For all I know they won’t eat anything with tomatoes, garlic, onions, etc. and I might not like cauliflower, steak, fish, etc.]

b) Upon noticing that something might be missing from the table (forks, napkins, ketchup, pepper, whatever), and requesting some from the waitstaffer, following it up with “Is that all right?”[Don’t ask “Is that all right” if you’re asking them to do their job. That’s the kind of question to ask if you’re trying to get something from them that may not exactly be in line with their job, like a little more cheese on the salad.]

Anyway, I mentioned these things once, privately, and said I would never bring them up again–and I haven’t. But they still irritate me.

19

I have a recycling challenged SO as well.

I tell him constantly…
Used paper plates and/or paper towels are NOT recyclable even though they are “made of paper”.
Cigarette butts are NOT recyclable.
If you clean out the fridge and throw out old jars of whatever, you should rinse them first.

He calls me the garbage nazi. lol

20

My wife will say something (a complete sentence). Sometimes I don’t hear her, and so I’ll say “what?” And then she’ll repeat a single word (typically the subject) from the sentence she’s just spoken, as if she believes I actually heard every word except that particular one. Sometimes I’ll say “what” again, and maybe get a second word, at which point I have to explicitly request her to repeat her entire sentence for me.