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A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#51

Post by ceejayoz »

The-Bus wrote: post #40
didgeoridoo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am on the other side of this in my marriage — my wife leaves her water glass out (sometimes for days) because she “might want to use it again”. It bothered me, so I put it in the dishwasher. She didn’t like that, so I stopped doing it. And I got over the fact that there are sometimes six or seven half-full glasses around the house at any time, because I am not a petty psychotic who would take something so…

Plus, they protect you in the eventuality of an alien attack. Make sure you keep a bat around too.

I still want an explanation as to how the aliens in that movie managed to miss that 70% of the planet is covered by a deadly poison, and that it literally falls from the sky in most places.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#52

Post by bena »

I get the point of the article and I agree with the overall conclusion, but I don't agree that it applies in the example he provided.

If you are going to go to war over something, make sure it is worthy of doing so.

In his example: what is the harm in the drinking glass being there? Is it occupying space of others? Is it preventing others from doing something? Is it a burden on anyone? Or is it an aesthetic choice?

If it's an aesthetic choice, you need to get over it.

We have a fairly open house plan. There aren't many choke points. Except one. There's a corner of a wall that is about 5 to 7 feet from the corner of a kitchen island. If you are coming in from the side door, it is the one place you have to cross to get to the rest of the house. Almost every day, my wife will park her rolling bookcase right there.

Conversely, she's pretty lax on where she leaves her dirty laundry. But it's confined to the area beside her side of the bed and it doesn't encroach beyond that. I can't really stand having all that about. My clothes go straight into a hamper. But we both mostly do our own laundry, her getting her clothes off the floor is mostly an aesthetic choice. I let her live her life in that regard.

"Leaving the glass on the counter is disrespectful to me" is kind of a toxic mindset. It kind of says "You must conform to my ideas of acceptable behavior". It's a bit controlling.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#53

Post by erik_landerholm »

Been married for 20 years almost…we never fight. We both do things that aren’t optimal, but we give each other the benefit of the doubt, we talk about everything, we don’t step on each other’s areas of responsibility, we don’t speak harshly to each other and we are best friends. I can’t ever imagine being in a the situation described above. I mean all the individual things happen to us leaving dishes, muddy whatever (we have 5 kids…so the noise alone), but so what? It’s all in how you both handle everything. We’ve never found it hard to exist together.

I think the biggest thing is we never speak harshly to each other. If we aren’t exactly kind we apologize, but we never speak to each other or our children in ways I hear others do all the time. That is the love killer.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#54

Post by photochemsyn »

DanHulton wrote: post #22

There is a whole other potential article out there that could be written from the ex-wife's side - "My marriage died because I couldn't make this one simple sacrifice". And I suspect both would just as incorrect, at least by omission. The glass thing is a useful article hook, but it's unlikely that it encompasses the sole reason their marriage fell apart. There is a deeper issue here, about neither side being willing…

Ideally a partnership is a 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' situation. It should be a win-win for both partners. If both partners have to 'make sacrifices' then you have a 'the whole is less than the sum of the parts' and in that case, the only reasonable thing to do is to chuck it all out the window and start over.

The 'trial period' in a relationship should be a time frame in which both partners try to figure out if they're in a win-win situation or not.

Incidentally, this is why economic collapse at the societal level leads to so many divorces. Yes, that sounds transactional, but that's the reality of marriage, it's as much an economic partnership as it is an emotional one. Not necessarily a great idea for everyone, too.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#55

Post by MisterBastahrd »

"My wife left me because she's either ridiculous and unwilling to compromise on trivial shit, or incomprehensibly dense" is a much shorter and more succinct than an entire book, but I guess they don't pay people for that. His articles all read as pathetic blame-porn aimed at satisfying the egos of women, while pretending to be advice aimed at men, and even though his only skills are apparently being someone who got divorced and wrote a book about what he believes to be his failings, somehow that qualifies him for paid counseling sessions?

"I blew my hand off with a firecracker and that makes me an explosives expert, buy my book" is a suitable parallel here.

Yes, I know, it wasn't "just" the dishes. Neither of them actually wanted to be married to each other, they just wanted a live-in sex partner.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#56

Post by mason55 »

chacham15 wrote: post #37

> I now understand that when I left that glass there, it hurt my wife—literally causing pain—because it felt to her as if I had just said, “Hey. I don’t respect you or value your thoughts and opinions. Not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher is more important to me than you are.” I think that here lies the issue. Is this the only way that you show that you value their thoughts / opinions? If so, the…

Yeah I think the cup is just a symptom of neither of them being able to step into the other's shoes, but it's hard to diagnose without a larger picture.

The husband could have said "I understand that this is a small thing that really bothers you and even though I don't understand, it's clearly an asymmetrical thing in terms of my effort vs. your being bothered, so I will put the cup away."

The wife could have just as easily said "I understand that this cup bothers me more than you think it should, if you're really that deadset on not putting it away can we find some other way to compromise?"

But who knows, maybe she tried to explain that to him a bunch of different times and even when she was saying "it's not about the cup it's about not feeling listened to" he still just heard "it's about the cup"

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#57

Post by amznbyebyebye »

There’s always going to be a glass issue. Communicating the issue, being open to listening, knowing what to let go and what matters is what makes or breaks things. There’s no algorithm to this, relationships are founded on love, which is an emotion that has little to do with intellect or logic. So for these things ultimately love is the answer.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#58

Post by em500 »

Dobbs wrote: post #33
DanHulton wrote: post #22

There is a whole other potential article out there that could be written from the ex-wife's side - "My marriage died because I couldn't make this one simple sacrifice". And I suspect both would just as incorrect, at least by omission. The glass thing is a useful article hook, but it's unlikely that it encompasses the sole reason their marriage fell apart. There is a deeper issue here, about neither side being willing…

This isn't about the dishes. The dishes are just a symptom of the unequal divide of emotional labour in most relationships. Even in relationships where both parents work full time more often than not the majority of the mental and physical burden of running the house tends to fall onto the woman. Of course this isn't an absolute, but it does tend to hold true. You can see this at the outbreak of COVID where many wome…

The marriage lesson that I learned, not too late, is to hire domestic help pretty much as soon as we could afford it.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#59

Post by daveslash »

jayski wrote: post #24

Im 99% sure the wife in this story used the glass as an excuse to get out. If youre happy with the life youve built together and love your partner theres no way you leave it over something like this. I dont buy the "it shows disrespect" argument. Shes going to be with somebody else in a years time. But when youre in a bad situation and the other person isn't giving you a good reason to leave sometimes you have to get…

And sometimes when you're in a bad situation, it's not because of any _one_ thing, or even a myriad of things ~ sometimes it's because it's the whole kit and caboodle. When I was younger, I found myself on the side of a breakup asking "What did I do? Tell me and I'll fix it", and I've also been asked that by someone I was breaking up with.

Breaking up is hard, for both sides. Sometimes it can be something singular (e.g. an affair) that can make it easy to digest, but sometimes it's so vague, it's such an overwhelming collection of things that span such a great amount of time, that even trying to enumerate them is a slide backwards. It's like death by a thousand pinpricks, but there's no clear indication that things are dead until you're already waaayyy past the point - like a frog being slowly boiled.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#60

Post by xtracto »

axilmar wrote: post #15

The problem in the case mentioned in the article was not with the writer that left the glass by the sink, it's with the other person that was bothered with something so minor...usually these minor things are excuses that cover deeper problems. Above all, marriage is a series of compromises: you give up something for something else. You can't have it all. Personally, I put up with my wife's problematic-for-me but not-…

I am not so sure. In my case, my wife is the "messy" one: Opens a can and leaves the lid in the kitchen table, leaves used clothes all around the bedroom and bathroom, etc. We've been married for 14 years, and the first years it was a constant struggle for me to try to change her behaviour. We even have gotten to the point of raising the divorce card in discussions related to this.

But, fast forward to today, I learned not to care. I learned that the decision is easy: Either I accept that she is like that, or I get out of the door. I am free to go whenever I want (as we don't have kids), and after meditating over that choice I've realized that those "bad" things don't really matter. After accepting that, I became happier and less "confrontative" with her.

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