Two Rules for a Happy Household
A partnership is the perfect place not to sweat the small stuff.
I think my husband, R., puts an obscene amount of dish soap on items he wishes to wash by hand. It probably balances out because I tend to use little dabs of soap (enough to get the job done, for the record), but it’s still just a ton of goddamn soap. And while I think about this every time I watch him soak or scrub the dishes, I have never—not even once—mentioned this to him. He reads this newsletter, so when he gets around to reading this one, it will be quite shocking that I hold this opinion. God knows I love a big reveal.
So, now you might be wondering why, as we plow through bottles of Dawn and Mrs. Meyer’s dish soaps, I’ve never (even casually) spoken about his tendency to be heavy-handed with the suds. I’m glad you asked. Two reasons, actually. In our household, we hold true to a couple of essential principles.
One: If you don’t want to do the task yourself, you don’t get to manage how the task is done. I do not want to wash the dishes every night, especially when I’m the one who cooked, ergo, I do not get to complain about how the dishes get washed. Instead, I get to be grateful that my loving husband pulls his weight in our partnership without complaining.
Two: If this [insert minor complaint here] is the biggest problem I have in my marriage, things are absolutely wonderful. I should feel lucky that I found such a delightful person to share my life with.
I’m not about to die on a hill of dish soap, friends, I’m just not. I am sometimes willing to get infuriated about the fact that I’ve mentioned (ad nauseam) that plastic bags, dog hair and diabetes test strips do not belong in the recycling bin, but I’m getting better at letting that go as well.
On days when I feel approximately one plastic bag away from a meltdown, I try to see the humor in how ridiculous this grievance really is. I can either continue picking trash out of the recycling bin and putting it in the proper place (which, I should note, is located literal inches away from the improper place) or I can shake my head, say “fuck it” and get on with my day. Same with the soap. It’s not like putting extra soap on a dish is driving us into debt—as we all know, right now, that honor belongs to eggs.
But I digress. The point is that my husband and I have a happy marriage because we prioritize gratitude and letting one another do things our own way. This latter trait is probably the one I most appreciate in my husband. He never tries to tell me what to do, and he never attempts to change me.
While part of the reason is likely that he knows that changing me is borderline impossible (I’m convinced the primary trait of an Aquarian is to politely half-listen to what you’re advising and do the exact thing we were going to do all along—and I have a sun, moon and Mercury in Aquarius), it’s also because R. likes me how I am. I promise you that he wouldn’t have made it this far if he didn’t. No one else could have possibly made it this far. Just ask my parents! They make sure to mention that every time I see them.
So, when I’m folding all R.’s laundry like precision and wrinkles don’t matter if you do it fast enough, he never complains. Even though he folds laundry like he spent time in the military. Even though he probably would prefer that I did a marginally better job. Even though he cares about his appearance and doesn’t want to look like he pulled his t-shirt from a garbage dump before putting it on. Despite these many desires, R. thanks me for doing it and tells me that I don’t have to fold his clothes (and you’ll have to trust me that he’s not saying it in that “Oh, you really shouldn’t have” kinda way).
At the end of the day, neither R. nor I want to nag one another about how to do household tasks. We follow these two unspoken rules, and we have a lot more fun together. We save our disagreements for bigger things. And while I think my husband and I could both do a lot better with how we express ourselves on the rare occasions that we do actually argue or let our anger get the better of us (we are, after all, a work in progress), we take care to mitigate a lot of the small annoyances before they turn into true gripes or internalized resentment.
It comes down to how I imagine we both want to feel in our partnership: loved, inspired, silly, connected, ridiculously horny. And we do feel that way because we choose one another over our need to control how the plates are cleaned or the clothes are folded. I love R. more than anyone and anything in the world. He gets me, he makes me laugh and he appreciates me for the weirdo that I am. So, it’s very simple, really. The way that I feel about him is worth a metric shit-ton of dish soap any day of the week.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
P.S. Know someone who could use a little more perspective about the small stuff in their partnership? Perhaps you could gently slide this newsletter into their inbox using the link below. Don’t even add a note. Make them bring it up. That will probably work well…probably.