Things that remind you that you and your SO live in very different worlds

A couple of weeks ago my wife’s going shopping so I ask her to get me a package of wife-beaters.

Her “What the heck is a wife-beater?”
Me “An A-shirt”
Her “What?”
Me “A sleeveless undershirt”
Her (groans) “Do I want to know?”
Me “When you’re watching COPS you ever notice the uniform of the day?”
This morning I’m shaving before I shower. There’s water splashed around the sink (which she’s always complaining about)
I’m using a T-shirt to dry up, she notices and starts tearing me a new one. I try to explain it’s only water and it’s going into the laundry anyway.

She was still complaining we I got out of the shower.

I’m weird. In my house, it’s usually that we’re watching some nature show and I recognize some animal she’s never seen before and can tell her what it’s called and a great deal of trivia about it off the top of my head.

I grew up on David Attenborough and Nature.

Watching any trivia show ( Cash Cab is my latest crack) my husband will not even try to get any answers as I call out mine. ( I’m rarely wrong) and he just doesn’t know how I know this stuff.

But he will watch a home improvement show/ Tim Tayloresque/ Norm Abramsonand he will tell me what these guys are going to do, what tool they will use and why before they do. It’s like having a Tool Commentator of my very own. ( He also makes football/hockey/soccer and a few other sports calls before the yellow flag/card/whistle is blown. Every freakin’ time.)

My BIL, is the exact same way with sports and I’ve always felt that the two of them could do pre game/ game/post game commentaries on Cable Access Show that I call, " From the Couch" or " Guy Talk".

These above two subject matters interest me about zero percent unless there is some kind of trivia involved as in the Flugel Hammer was invented by Jose Flugel who also invented the world’s smallest tuba. Or Raphael Simmons played for the same University that his grandfather went on to invent the Fu Manchu.

That is how my brain stores info.

My fiancee and I have differences like that. He’s a creative genius in the kitchen, but still confuses “there” “their” and “they’re.” He couldn’t write a unique love letter to save his life, but can make a recipe that’ll taste delicious with three random ingredients.

On the other hand, I’m a writer. I’m creative sort with words, but can’t make up things on my own in the kitchen. But I can write a sonnet from three key words.

That and I’m crazy about trivia. Love, love, love trivia. But my fiancee can’t remember any of that stuff. He knows the different mother sauces and everything about Skynard and Zeppelin. He’s much more specialized. I am a broad font of unimportant knowledge.

My SO loves motorbikes and old action/thiller movies. He’ll stop in the mid-stride at the sound of a particular engine, and when I told him I’d never seen Godfather I thought he was going to have a stroke. I can barely tell a Ducati from a Yamaha (although I have to say I’ve learned a lot since we’ve dated - a year ago if you asked me what a Ducati was, I would have guessed some kind of ancient currency) and my taste in movies runs more towards Stardust and Ever After.

On the flip side, he calls every flower a chrysanthemum and doesn’t know the difference between an orc and a goblin. (Not that I’m a fount of botanical knowledge myself but I do know the difference between a chrysanthemum and a daisy at least.)

My guy works for a very small company, smack in the middle of a very liberal town. All his friends, coworkers and family share the same (liberal/progressive) opinions he does, so it’s like he’s living in this thought bubble where everyone agrees with everyone else.

I have a much larger family, more friends, and work in a building with about two thousand other people. So even though he and I agree on most stuff politically, I’m exposed to lots of other viewpoints and experiences. I might be casually telling him about a conversation at work and he’s giving me the WeLiveInVeryDifferentWorlds look, because he truly doesn’t know anyone that thinks differently than him.

I give him the same look when I come across a sheet of scrap paper he’s worked out some very complicated algebraic solution to some arcane random question. He’s the only person I know who does math for fun.

What is the difference between an orc and a goblin?

It’s been a few years since I played, but orcs have at least one full hit die, are approximately human sized, and in some settings, orcs, or subspecies of orcs, or orc crossbreeds can be player characters. Goblins are smaller than humans, have less than a full hit die (I believe .5 or .25 hit die), and are just generally not as powerful as orcs. Goblins are frequently the first humanoid monster that players encounter, along with kobolds.

As for the OP, I was watching the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children when my husband entered the room. He was fascinated by the action, the motorbikes, the Really Big Swords, and all the rest, but he could not understand why I was watching this movie. I finally told him that it’s just a gamer thing. He also doesn’t understand my ability to read all day long.

While I mark time by what job I had, or where I lived, my husband marks time by where he was in prison, or which time he got shot.

Yeah, it’s not an easy relationship!

What Lynn said. :slight_smile: On the most basic level, orcs are bigger and can crossbreed with humans. Goblins are small and only give you trouble when you’re a low-level character. After a while they fall over if you so much as tap them on the shoulder.

Fortunately my boyfriend finds my fantasy-related geekiness attractive, but only if I’m wearing my glasses.

I bet, I’m not sure I know anyone who’s even been shot AT more than once.
Another one. My wife won’t read a manual to save her life. Her latest ‘hobby’ is Dreamweaver. Refuses to learn anything about IIS or Apache, or even html. Then expects me to troubleshoot why her video displays on one page but not another. :mad:

As do we all :smiley:

Since my partner is 20 years younger than I am, there are always age-related things going on. I’m always seeing “celebrities” who I’ve never heard of, and he doesn’t always get references to things that happened in the 50s and 60s.

And now that we have Tivo and TCM, I’m showing him all the old black-and-white movies he never saw.

I’ll pick up the crossword puzzle that she’s barely made a dent in and knock the thing right out. It’s another trivia dichotomy.

The biggest difference though is the embrace of practicality. I loathe things around the house that sacrifice function for form. She’s the opposite. While I like for things to look nice, it’s got to contribute something too or at least not have an impact on the workings of anything else.

We had really different upbringings and therefore have very different ideas about raising children. In fact, if we’d had children with each other I’m sure we wouldn’t be married anymore!

I was thinking about this last night when he was telling me how his son plans to beat the drug test today. I’m not a prude, but that shit’s just weird.

Before we were married my wife and I had this huge fight over our wedding invitations. After 45 minutes of looking at various designs I just had my fill and said I really didn’t care. I said that because well, I really didn’t care.

Wifey took that to mean I most definitely didn’t love her, didn’t want to marry her, and loathed the very thought of being with her.

I had to explain to her that I had received three invitations to various weddings in the last two months and that, fifteen minutes after receiving them, I couldn’t describe what they looked like.

To me and invitation is just information. I guess I just missed the part about the fact that some people study them like an art form.

We still do our laundry separately… why, you ask? Because I’m so neurotic that I do four different loads - lights, darks, blues and reds. He, on the other hand, just shoves everything into the washer and lets 'er rip.

Of course, if he was to sort his wardrobe using my four-load method, he’d be washing five items per load. Until I bought him a few more pairs of socks and underwear, he’d run through his entire wardrobe in the space of a week. :stuck_out_tongue:

His underwear doesn’t even perform the basic functions of underwear anymore. If he’s wearing the wrong pair, he yells at you not to look when he flashes scrotum at you. (By the way? No drapes. On the other hand, the neighbors probably avoid looking in the windows, so I could prance around in my drawers all day and nobody would notice.)

I think he envies me my ability to sit down and focus on something - unless he’s really excited about something he just doesn’t have any patience. I think he would like to read more fiction, but can’t sit still long enough. Of course, he calls half of my hobbies “boring” but I think that’s a code word for “stuff he doesn’t have the patience for”.

Cars.

Especially those gorgeous old classic cars. Ye gods.

If such a car were to drive down the street, he immediately can rattle off the make, model, year, and some trivia about how that was the last year they did the fins like that.

All I can come up with is, “Oooooh, pretty!” (Or, at my most detailed, “Ooooh, pretty! And red!”)

Conversely, if he were to see a car by himself and then want to tell me about it, he would say, “I saw a '54 Chevy Somethingorother when I was pulling up to the bank.”

If I were to see the car and want to tell him, the conversation goes like this:

Me: I saw the coolest-looking car in the grocery parking lot today.
Him: What kind was it?
Me: It was … umm …
Him: :rolleyes:
Me: It had those big fins in the back…?
Him: (getting more excited) Was it a ‘54 Chevy Somethingorother?!?
Me: I dunno.
Him: :rolleyes:
Me: But it was real neat-lookin’.

Are the goblins also the ones who own that bank in Harry Potter or is that something else?