half the fun of marriage is these silly disagreements

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The Bit

It must have started a year or two ago.

My husband asked if I could get him a glass plastic cup of water, and I did. I handed it to him and he looked at it, and then up at me, and then back at the cup, and said, “Seriously?”

To him, I hadn’t filled it enough. At the time, I was exasperated. Seriously, him. I had gotten him water, and so what if I hadn’t filled it exactly to his specifications? 

But I do try to listen and improve, even if I think he is being ridiculous overly specific. So the next time I got him a cup of water I filled it more. I remember being conscious of filling it more, because I wanted to be a good listener. I swear on cheesy nachos that I only meant to please him, I wasn’t trying to be snarky or passive aggressive. And yet, when I handed him the cup, he said, “Seriously?” and the issue this time was that I had filled it too full!

Again: exasperation.

This is not about my apparent ineptitude when it comes to filling cups, nor is it about my husband’s apparently very narrow definition of a full cup. It is about the bit that has resulted from it. 

Now, if my husband gets ME water (in a glass), he fills it to the absolute tippety top. 

The other night right before I went to bed, he got out the Brita to fill his coffee maker. I had a glass on the counter that was maybe a quarter full and I asked if he could fill it (otherwise, I would have to wait until he filled his coffee maker, refilled the Brita, and the Brita did its slow water filtering job before I could fill my glass). He poured a little bit into the glass, making it – to my eyes – about three-quarters full. 

“Could you please put a little bit more in than that?” I asked him, and then turned away to finish filling the dishwasher. (This is why I was asking him to get me water; I was otherwise occupied.) 

When I was done with the dishes, I went over to the end of the counter to grab my glass and go up to bed. And I noticed that he had filled it all the way up to the top – so full that the glass looked empty. 

It just cracked me up. I could not stop laughing. I don’t know if I am properly conveying just how full the glass was, but I clearly could not move it without spilling it all over the counter or anything. It was the kind of full your middle school science teacher used to demonstrate the power of surface tension. I had to sip carefully from the edge like I was a dog or a nine-year-old proving that all your years of careful etiquette teaching have been for naught. The whole thing made me howl with laughter until tears were leaking out of my eyes. 

“I could have probably filled it even fuller,” he said. “Next time.”

I don’t know why it tickles me so much, this stupid little bit that he does now. It’s just one of those completely ordinary things that you do almost every day, usually without thinking, and now it will always be funny. The glass will either be too empty or too full and it completely cracks me up. 

Do you have any stupid bits with friends/family? 

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Realization

I know I have written about this before, but at some point in the past few years, I asked my husband if he would please unload the dishwasher on the weekend. It’s not that unloading the dishes is difficult, or time-consuming – in fact, it takes about five minutes, tops, which is exactly the amount of time it takes to steep my favorite black tea. So unloading the dishwasher allows me to feel efficient while also making that five minutes pass by more quickly than it would if I were just staring at the tea bags suffusing the water with their sweet, sweet caffeinated elixir. It’s just that it feels like such drudgery when I do it every single day without stop. 

He agreed and for the most part he unloads the dishwasher on weekends without me having to ask. He usually waits until far, far later in the day to unload it than I would choose to – I hate the sight of used dishes piling up beside the sink – but that’s a preference on my part, so I keep my lips zipped. 

On weekends that he is on call, I unload the dishwasher. And sometimes I will unload it just because it’s easier to do so than not: This morning, I needed butter for my breakfast, but the butter dish was in the dishwasher. To get it out, I needed to move a bowl and a wine glass – which I wasn’t going to lift out of the rack to free the butter dish and then replace in the dishwasher – and the blade of the blender. And if I was removing the blade of the blender, I might as well put it IN the blender and put the blender away, and by then I had some momentum going so I just did the whole thing.

When my husband unloads the dishwasher on weekends, I always make a point to thank him. But when I unload the dishwasher on weekends, he never seems to notice. (Once, I unloaded half of the dishwasher – my rationale being that I was unloading dishes that he never seems to know where to put; I end up putting them away anyway – and rather than saying, oh hey, awesome, I have less to unload now, he complained that I did the easy part. Sigh.)

It’s not that I necessarily want or need to be thanked. I do it on weekdays and don’t think anything of it. But on the weekends, it’s HIS job, and I feel like I’m doing him a favor. And it would be nice if he at least made note of the favor. 

But maybe he thinks it’s odd that I thank him for unloading the dishes at all. Maybe he thinks that there is no need to express gratitude for the completion of routine chores. In general, I guess I agree? It can be highly irritating when someone goes around pointing out all the tasks they have completed, seemingly expecting praise, without acknowledging that others are also going around completing household tasks without naming every single one. We should not have to thank each other every time someone refills the water pitcher or empties the trash or pays the bills or feeds the child. 

Then again, I find it bolstering when my husband does express gratitude for something I’ve done. He says “thank you for making dinner” most nights when I cook, which conveys “even if I don’t like this meal, I understand that it required planning and energy and I appreciate those things.” That’s a welcome message. When I put out the trash cans and he thanks me for doing so, I feel better about doing it than all the times I put them out and he says nothing. 

Then today I had a realization: He probably feels that “unloading the dishwasher” is MY job, and he’s doing ME a favor… not that it’s a joint job that belongs to me on weekdays and to him on weekends.

I will note that when I initially typed out the first sentence of this post, I wrote “if he would please unload the dishwasher for me on the weekend,” so one can understand how he could arrive at this conclusion.

It’s not a huge deal. It doesn’t make me mad or want to rend my garments or anything. But I do wonder if there is any way to change that perception of task ownership. 

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Weigh-In Wednesday: Sleeping + Waking Incompatibility

Why are the “-able” and “-ible” words so difficult to remember how to spell?

My husband and I have a significant Bedtime Incompatibility. Periodically, it drives me nuts as it is today. It takes the obvious form: each of us has a Preferred Bedtime, and they are different from one another.

I guess you would style me as a Morning Person. I like to wake up early-ish and start my day. To make rising early enjoyable, I like to go to bed at a reasonable time around ten o’clock. Probably, if I didn’t have a child or husband, I would go to bed around nine or nine-thirty. But I DO have a child, whose bedtime (around seven-thirty) combined with my husband’s arrival home from work (around seven) means that I often don’t eat dinner until eight-thirty or nine let alone get into bed at that time. But if left to my own devices, I would go to sleep around ten. And often – yawning and feeling all twitchy in the leg region, which happens when I’m tired – I do part from my husband around ten or ten-thirty, even though he would rather watch another episode of whatever show we’re watching.

My husband is a Night Owl, and would stay up until two or three in the morning if he didn’t have to get up for work. On the weekends, he sometimes DOES stay up that late. Part of it is that he is at work from sixish to sevenish most days, and so he feels that going to bed early means he gets no time to do the things he enjoys (make music, play video games, exercise, watch TV, do puzzles, read). So he has to carve that him-time out of the dark of night. Part of it is that he seems naturally inclined toward night-owlishness. I do think that most people are one or the other, and cannot change without great effort and even discomfort. 

For a long time, I hated this difference in our go-to-sleep habits. I felt like it was important for our marriage to be able to fall asleep together. I missed having his warm body in bed with me. I missed the quiet chats that occur when two people are in the dark, trying to fall asleep. 

But over the years, I’ve come to accept it, if not outright enjoy it. I often have trouble falling asleep, and even more trouble getting back to sleep if I wake up in the night. And on the nights when we do go to bed together, I find that I am more irritated by him than anything. He keeps MOVING the SHEETS and TICKLING my LEGS. Or he will keep his light on even if he is just looking at his phone (which itself is LIT) and the light bothers me. Or he will turn off his light, out of (grudging) deference to me, but then his phone light will bother me. Or he will fall asleep first and then he will BREATHE and it will keep me awake. Do you see how it is better for me to be deeply asleep before he enters the bedroom?

It is a delight to be my spouse. 

All this is to say that I have come around to the fact that we have separate bedtimes. It’s fine.

My husband and I have lived together for nearly twenty years at this point, and we have always had this significant incompatibility. But it’s become more pronounced now that we have child.  

What’s bugging me currently is the mornings. My natural wake-up time – if it’s not 4:00 am – tends to be 7:00 am. That’s when I wake up without an alarm. On the weekends, I usually lie in bed until a) I’m hungry or b) I can hear Carla downstairs, and realize I need to go feed her (i.e. prevent her from eating junk instead of a Healthful Breakfast; I fail most days as she is quite stealthy). My husband has more teenagery sleep habits, and would probably languish in bed until noon if he could. 

But it makes me so irritated!!! See those three exclamation points? I wanted to add ten or twenty, just to illustrate my level of irritation. 

Part of it is that my husband unloads the dishwasher on the weekends; even though it takes literally five minutes out of my day, I do it Every. Other. Day. plus on weekends when he is on call, and having to unload the dishwasher on the weekends as well makes me want to scream. He unloads the dishwasher, and, unsurprisingly, he does so when he feels like doing it, which is NOT on my schedule. I want the dishwasher unloaded FIRST THING so that I can fill it with breakfast dishes and glasses from the night before etc. I try to recognize that this is a Me Thing, and I have never gone so far as to demand that he do this task on my schedule… but it still bugs me. 

Part of it is that I get a break from unloading the dishwasher on weekends, but I don’t get a break from feeding Carla. It would be so nice to just NOT have to make her breakfast. (I suppose I could extend a little autonomy in her direction, but so far it hasn’t worked out that way. I think she just wouldn’t eat, if it were her responsibility.) And “making breakfast” is not as simple as it sounds. It requires in-depth questioning and listing of options and cajoling and reminding about things like “eating meals is important” and “it’s good to eat things that have nutritional value in addition to things that have none.” It is A Process, is what I’m saying.

Part of it is that I feel like my husband gets this long, luxurious rest – and all its associated freedom from breakfast-making and tidying and chiding the child about picking up toys/turning off the TV/cleaning up her dishes. Not that I would choose to sleep longer, if I could! I guess I’m just envious. It does, in some ways, feel like he gets the weekends off from his job while I do not. But… my housewife “job” is so minimal! And fairly easy! While his work is neither of those things! So why do I begrudge him a little extra break?

The other part of it, though, is that we can never DO anything as a family until late. This past Sunday, we planned on a family bike ride. I wanted to leave early, before the heat descended. But we settled on 9:30. And then… my husband slept in until nearly 9:00 and it was ELEVEN O’CLOCK before we got out the door, and I hadn’t eaten any breakfast (because I am a Late Breakfaster, and I figured we would be home from our 9:30 bike ride before I got hungry) and it was hot and I was cranky. Why should I have to wait around doing NOTHING just because I have the audacity to wake up early?! And now half the day has been eaten up by Nothing. Not just Nothing, but resentful, pouty Nothing.

Oh! Here’s a point on my husband’s side of things: We will watch a TV show or two after dinner (or, more likely, while he and I scarf down dinner after we put Carla to bed). I am usually struggling to keep my eyes open by the end of the show, and I feel like I express Very Clearly that I am ready for bed. When the show is over, I will say something along the lines of, “Okay, I’m ready for bed! I’m going to head up now!” and then I go into the kitchen and wash the dishes and clean the counters while my husband flips around the channels, checking on sports scores and catching up on news and weather. 

Then he will finally come into the kitchen – usually right as I am finished – and express surprise that I have done all the dishwashing/cleaning up. He still needs to prep his coffee and get his lunch together for the next day, and sometimes if I am feeling charitable, I will stay in the kitchen with him and chat. But often I am Done with a capital D and I say, “Good night!” At which point he is miffed! Why am I in such a hurry to go to bed? What did he say to me last night – something like, “Well, you didn’t waste any time.” Excuse me? I just did all the dishes! 

Hmm. I am clearly casting this in a Me light rather than a Him light. Try to see it his way. 

I am very curious as to YOUR bedtime/wake-up habits. And if you live with someone, what THEIR habits are, and whether they are compatible with yours (and whether it matters).