I made a decision to not get married because I don't want these kind of problems and drama in my life. Also, depending on your country of residence, marriage is probably the worst deal in your life.
A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
61–70 of 812 posts
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#62This sounds to me more like a symptom, and the underlying pathology is that this person gave insufficient consideration to all the little concessions his partner was making on the things that matter to him, and was certainly not expressing gratitude for them.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#63Im 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…
This is very well said, and true in my experience.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#64> 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…
It isn't just about respect. It is about you leaving work for your partner to do even though you could have done it yourself. This is about emotional labour and the uneven divide of household jobs.
There's a whole spectrum, from misalignment on the proper state of the house, to the feelings of respect, to the increase in household jobs for the other partner.
If the husband puts his cup by the sink at night, then picks it back up again in the morning, and finally after a few days it ends up in the dishwasher, then you'll never convince him that it's mismatched emotional labor, because in his eyes the cup didn't need to be put away.
If you try to tell him that it's not fair for her to put his cup in the dishwasher every night and his response is "I was going to use the cup again tomorrow" then the conversation will never make any progress.
No one is right or wrong in a conversation about whether it's ok to put your cup by the sink at night and then pick it up again the next day. It's just one of those things in marriage that you need to agree on how it will be, based on effort vs. how much one partner is bothered. And then stick to the agreement while giving your partner some occasional leeway.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#65Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#66My wife and I wrote our own marriage vows. The first two were pretty conventional (stay together, share joys and sorrows). The third was the most important IMO and also hardest to keep.
"Treat each other's needs and priorities as equal to our own"
If you don't think it's hard, try it. I don't mean just respecting each other's time and attention in a general sense, which BTW I've come to believe is a good rule for all interactions. I mean treating their habits and preferences and pet peeves, no matter how silly they seem to you, as seriously as your own. Also, no double standards anywhere in your life together. No matter how exhausted or aggravated you are yourself at that moment. Consistently doing that takes a lot more self discipline than most people have. I can't say we've always succeeded, but after 26 years I'd say it has been worth the effort.
N.B. I'm not saying you shouldn't have your own preferences and habits and pet peeves. I'm totally not into that "become one person" thing; my wife and I are in fact pretty notoriously independent and happy to do our own separate things e.g. at social gatherings. There will be conflicts between your priorities and theirs. I'm just saying that those conflicts should be resolved starting from a position of equality.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#67This seems like a one-sided stopgap to a problem that is undoubtedly two-sided and it sets a precedent for [the author's definition of] respect that cannot be maintained indefinitely. For example, what if you were just about to put the glass in the dishwasher but the doorbell rings? The only settings that come to mind where this level of "adherence" is maintained are prisons or abusive households where everyone is in…
> This seems like a one-sided stopgap to a problem that is undoubtedly two-sided and it sets a precedent for [the author's definition of] respect that cannot be maintained indefinitely.
I don't know that it's one-sided. The author may have asked their spouse to similarly adjust behavior in various ways; if they were amenable to that, but didn't get a corresponding response on their own pet peeves, that'd be an imbalance that'd stew over time.
> For example, what if you were just about to put the glass in the dishwasher but the doorbell rings?
Doing it very occasionally and doing it all the time are likely to have substantially different impacts on the spouse.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#68The 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 learn…
Sorry to be solutioning here, and I'd imagine you've already tried this after 14 years, but sometimes changing habits can be solved with things like buying an extra laundry basket. It's seems like a small thing, but these adjustments can provide the accessibility that make it simpler to meet in the middle. In the kitchen, we keep a mini-waste bin on our countertop for used coffee grinds. It works for us.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#69There 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…
Years ago I learned this lesson about marriage while on a trip in South Western China. I joined a tour group to see a mountain for a few days. My party was six and the van sat eight, so the driver got another couple to join us. They were fascinating. We learned over meals together that they were an arraigned marriage. At the time I had extremely negative views around the practice, thanks to growing up in the USA wher…
This is a very important lesson - the chance of finding a "perfect" partner is vanishingly small if considered in the normal view - but the chance of finding someone who is willing to work together is higher.
And most marriages are "arranged" in some way or another, we just like to pretend that random chance plays little part and somehow we've got it down to a science.
Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that what the author is saying? The deeper problem was that the wife felt that the authors' inability to do something so simple for her sake was indicative of disrespect. Not acknowledging that your partner is worth a couple seconds of consideration is a pretty deep problem. The author probably demonstrated this disrespect in multiple ways, but the glass by the sink is a succinct way of summarizing the whole pr…
It seems as though people are focusing on the hook and not the core argument. The author clearly states his marriage failed from "death by a thousand papercuts" and this glass-by-the-sink is an example of not understanding their spouse.
I’m shocked by how many people in this thread have been completely derailed thinking the literal glass is the issue rather than being symbolic of the issue. I always hated how much teachers would drill symbolism and literary device analysis into you in school but then I come across threads like this I wonder whether we aren’t focusing on it enough.