Incapacity to throw things out. I don’t mean hoarding: I mean she has never hated anything enough to throw it away it seems.
I don’t mind sentimental stuff or such, or something that may have intrinsic value, but old small CD discs? We will never use them. A can crusher that doesn’t work? Out it goes.
Right now, it’s chain-smoking in the living room whilst I’m suffering from an URTI. Because I need MORE irritants in my airways.
My son and his gf were discussing ‘old people’ once. They were talking about how different people of different ages have these weird things that bug them.
I asked her what people my age group (now 46) are known for. Without thinking she immediately said “Cannot stand having a light on in an empty room”
I am guilty of this and my wife will “put things away” from time to time but never in the same place twice. She will put away the hammer I left on the table yesterday (because I’m going to use it) and completely ignore the pile of papers she left there two months ago. And she will put the hammer on the top of a shelf in the basement rather than in my tool box. The next time I can’t find my hammer where I left it I’ll look on that shelf. Nope, this time the hammer is under the bathroom sink. This creates the myth that I “can never find anything without her.”
After over 20 years I still haven’t figured out is she is doing it passive-aggressively, to punish me for leaving things in the wrong place, or if she really can’t stand it anymore and is just putting things away in the places she thinks they should go.
I can find my sandals, it’s my glasses that disappear all the time.
What you need is some amusement and excitement in your life. I recommend cigarette loads, which ask you
My husband used to smoke, and I used to load his cigs every now and then. You watch for him to open a pack of cancer sticks and leave them unattended. You then carefully load two or three cigs in the pack. I always cut the loads in half, the long way, because there’s plenty of gunpowder in even half a stick. At any rate, you want to work the load into the cigarette at least a third of the way down. You can use tweezers or any other long, skinny tool to get them down. Make sure that the cigarette doesn’t show any signs of tampering. Now sit back and wait for the fun to happen.
You have changed smoking from a relaxing activity into one of constant worry, because he’ll never know if THIS is the cigarette that will explode, and if it is, when it will do so.
Yeah, if my husband was on the SDMB, he’d probably have listed this as one of the things I do that he can’t stand, back when he was still smoking.
For you people who obsess about turning off lights:
Some of us need light to see where we are going. Turning on the light when we get to the room won’t always cut it, because the light switch isn’t always at the entrance to the room. So we sometimes leave lights on. Paying a few cents more in electric bills is better than falling in the dark and hurting yourself. This is why I leave the kitchen light on when we’re leaving the house and will probably be back after dark. This is why I don’t turn off the lights on the stairs until everybody is upstairs for the night. I don’t want anyone getting hurt stumbling around in the dark.
Some of the new CFL light bulbs don’t come up to full brightness right away. The ones in our dining room do this. I don’t want to start eating in low light and have to wait for the lights to brighten. The obvious solution to this is to turn them on a couple of minutes before you need light, so the full amount of light is there when you do need it.
Divorces me. Man, that shit pisses me off.
But before that…I was the cook, I made dinner probably 5 or 6 of 7 nights a week, not to mention breakfast on the weekends.
Now, some couples have a deal where one cooks and one cleans; sometimes it alternates nights. I got no such help. We were talking to another couple and I joked that we have a deal, the one who cooks is also the one who cleans. She thought I was serious and agreed with me.
Of course, the worth part about it is that if I was tired and didn’t feel ike doing dishes for a day or two, it was WW-fucking-III because the kitchen was a mess.
I take the first line of my post back…it’s all good.
Ay oh, oh ay, she sticks a steering wheel down my pants. Ba da boom!
Mrs G is a stacker, nothing ever goes back to where it came from but instead is placed wherever it happens to be immediately after using it. Books, papers, pens, hats, napkins, dishes all slowly accrue randomly about the house on top of each other in little piles. Why is there nail polish on top of the TV? Why is there a napkin on top of the car? Why is there a hair scrunchie on the stovetop? Only she knows.
I love Missus Coder dearly, but one of these days I will slit my throat with a rusty hacksaw if she doesn’t learn to come to the point. I’ll hear about what her girlfriend at work wore to work, a sign she saw on the way home, and what she’s planning to get Little Ralf for his birthday (in 9 months) before she finally finishes telling me about the noise her car was making.
Is it any wonder that women think men don’t listen? We’re either sifting through all the chaff from the conversation, trying to find that one relevant kernel of information, or we’ve just tuned you out because we’ve come to expect that the kernel won’t make it here for another 30 minutes.
We have this deal…but it really only works one way. If he cooks, I clean. I don’t mind this at all. But if I cook, he will clean some of the dishes, or none of the dishes, or some total of the dishes that is less than the whole. Bwuh?
And I admit he is horribly slow at dishes. He scrubs every dish like 20x and then looks with such pride, saying, “See? Squeaky clean.” Funny how I can get the dishes squeeky clean in half the time. :dubious:
I’ve been married for 18 years and we’ve been living together for 22 years, so there are plenty of things, many of which have already been mentioned: leaving doors/drawers open, leaving stuff laying around for years (literally - there was a piece of an oil filter box that he tore off and saved so he’d know which kind to buy next time and which sat on or around the dining room table for 11 years).
But the real bug in my bonnet right now is that he won’t lock the front door of the house when we’re home. In fact, he gets mad if I lock the door. It inconveniences him to have to turn the deadlock before going out the door, and oh holy shit, it’s just WAY TOO MUCH EFFORT to unlock it with the key when he gets home. This is in spite of the fact that we live in a big city and that the door doesn’t even catch all the time and then blows open.
Yes, he’s been burglarized before. He still complains bitterly about being cleaned out back in 1978, and longs for the great stuff he lost. But, convenience you know. Convenience.
Well, I have an ex who drove me crazy…
I’d come home from work, the doors and windows would be wide open (no screens, mind you, so all the neighborhood flies could enjoy the AC that was blasting), and the music would be so loud you could hear it at the end of the drive. I think the purpose was to impress the neighbors with his eclectic, wacky, out-there musical tastes–I mean, you’d have to be a genius to listen to such music! And then, inside–the tv, some 8 feet away from the stereo, would be blaring as well. Go figure.
And like some other posters have mentioned, that relationship nearly ruined music for me–it was a long time before I even bought a boombox and a few cds again.
Laundry made me crazy too. My philosophy is: Don’t mess with my laundry, I won’t mess with yours. If you MUST do it, just fold my shirts this particular way, and use a little fabric softener. But he refused to do it my way, and he refused to refrain from doing it at all. (I’m picky, I know–that’s why I don’t want anyone to do it for me! It doesn’t decrease my work load! Go vacuum instead, for God’s sake!)
I have an SO now, but he lives an hour away, which works really well for us. 
And we drive each other equally crazy, because he is structured and neat and efficient, and I’m…well, not. I have to remind him frequently…your house, your rules; my house, my rules.
I don’t think I’ll ever live with an adult again.
He refuses to wear certain colors, because wearing pink or purple will somehow threaten his masculinity. If he didn’t want to wear pink or purple because he doesn’t like them, or doesn’t like how they look on him, that would be fine. I’d understand that. But no, somehow wearing them will make him gay, or something.
We also have a difference of opinion over how important something should be to warrant calling the other’s cell phone. I know that, when I call someone on their cell, I’m interrupting whatever it was they were doing, so I keep it to important stuff, like changes of plans. Until I talked to him about it, he was willing to call me to say he was a few feet closer to home now than he was a couple of minutes ago. And then, when he does call, he can’t say what he has to say and get off the phone and let me get back to what I was doing. No. He has to chat, and ask me how my day was.
Mine is afraid of pink and purple too. Apparently wearing these colors will bring out teh ghey in him. :dubious:
Damn, he’s stupid about some things.
He’s got a Ph.D. in astrophysics and a generally progressive world-view. He doesn’t mind doing things that would traditionally have been considered “women’s work”, or when I do the “men’s work” type jobs instead of him. I do all the driving and take out the trash, and he doesn’t mind, quite the contrary. He believes that gays should have all of the same rights that straights do. Yet he still won’t wear pink or purple 
Oh, and he says “gesundheit” EVERY damn time I sneeze. I sneeze in pairs, sometimes threes. If I sneeze once, there’s probably another sneeze coming. A normal person would wait till the end of the series of sneezes, THEN say “gesundheit” or “bless you” or whatever. He doesn’t do this. By the end of three sneezes, I’m ready to bite his head off. I sneeze a lot, too, because of my allergies.
I generally only phone people if I need an answer to something immediately, like if I’m making plans after work that will either impact him (we carpool most days) or that he might want to join. Otherwise, email or text suits me fine.
The guy in the cubicle next to mine gets phoned by his wife at least three times a day, often more. And it doesn’t sound like she’s doing anything except nagging about trivial stuff that could wait until he gets home. (I try not to listen to their conversations but sometimes I am too slow with the headphones)
The way he eats popcorn makes my eye twitch. It’s like a horse working on a feed bag. Face inches away from the bag, shoveling it in. I’ve joked about it before, but he didn’t interpret my jokes as the passive-aggressive bitching that I intended them to be and continues to wolf down popcorn like a wild animal.
He also leaves his crap everywhere, but he’s a good sport about picking it up when I ask because he knows the clutter drives me crazy.
On the other hand, I’m this person:
…so maybe I should let the man enjoy his popcorn in peace and he’ll continue to put up with my yammering.
I wish texts were free. Neither of us texts, because we’d have to pay for them. If they were free, maybe I could make a case to him for texting me instead of calling me when he’s ready to come home. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with his cell phone chitchat, which would be one less annoyance in my day. He’s much more interested in chatting over the phone than he is when we’re at home
I know it bothers my co-workers when I get calls at work. We have not only cubicles, but open cubicles. This is one reason why I try to keep the calls to a minimum, and to keep the ones I do take as short as possible. But I wanted to keep the calls to a minimum even when I was unemployed and at home, with only the cats to be bothered by it. I’ve just lost my taste for chatting on the phone since I was a teenager.
The phone thing got really bad once when I was unemployed, in fact. He called me to let me know he was coming home, and chitchat. I was on the phone with a job recruiter, which obviously takes precedence over his chatting, so I didn’t answer his call. His response to that was to call again on our home phone. I’m trying to talk to the recruiter over the noise of the home phone ringing. I told him after that one not to do that unless there is fire or blood.
My daughter will sneeze two or three times as a general rule. I wait til I hear a pause, and ask her if she’s done. If she is, I say gesundheit. If she sneezes again, I tell her that I thought she said that she was DONE. This always breaks her up into giggles.