I Love My Husband, but...

 RHYS BOWEN: I don’t think human beings were meant to live alone with one person for long years. We are pack animals, society beings. Until now we would have lived with multiple generations in one house, with family around us in one village. This moving off into a house or apartment with just one person is not natural… or easy.

 I’m sure everyone reading this knows that when you go on vacation with a friend and the two of you are alone together for any length of time you find out qualities and traits you didn’t know about that person. Sometimes not so pleasant ones. Imagine then being alone with one man for over fifty years! Luckily I put all thoughts of murder into my books.

  have to say we get along surprisingly well, considering. We laugh at the same things. We have the same set of standards, expectations and morals which is a big help. However after all this time there are things he does that drive me crazy.

 One is that he half-rinses any dishes, cutlery that he uses and leaves them beside the sink. A perfectly good dish washer sits beside that sink but he has never learned to put anything in that dishwasher. So I am constantly finding plates, cooking utensils etc etc lying on the counter.  I bought a rack so that at least he can leave them drying over the sink but he won’t use it. Grrr.

 Since retirement he likes to do the shopping, but he will study the ads and drive to five different supermarkets to get a better deal on avocados. It is no use pointing out that he’s used five dollars worth of gas to save twenty cents. And his economy is sometimes skewed. He’ll drive five miles for those avocados but then came back with spider crab legs at $18 a pound. Never mind. I stay silent because he likes to do the shopping and I have to keep writing.

 But one thing I have learned is that I can’t send him out shopping for a specific item without some sort of surprise. At Christmas we ran out of Christmas napkins. “Go to the store and pick up more Christmas napkins,” I said. He had no idea what Christmas napkins were, never having noticed them beside his plate for the past fifty years. “You know. Santa. Snowmen. Something tasteful and festive.”

                So he came back with this….

 

“You said green,” he replied peevishly when I pointed out that these were hardly festive.

 

And over the weekend I mentioned that I had just eaten the last banana if he happened to be in the supermarket.  And. He came back with…

 

No use mentioning that bananas don’t last long and we can’t possibly eat that many.

As they say in the south, “Bless his little heart.”

 

So confession time, Reds. What does your spouse do ( or in Hallie and Julia’s case did he do) that made you roll your eyes in despair?

HALLIE EPHRON: My sweet husband did his “shopping” in other people’s garbage. We live at the nexus of 3 garbage-pickup routes so his evening rambles varied accordingly. I still remember when he brought home a steamer-trunk-sized wicker basket that was padlocked shut and pasted with labels written in Cyrillic. 

He hurried out again (maybe they were going to put out more choice stuff!) and sure enough, came back with ANOTHER steamer-trunk-sized wicker basket, slightly larger than the first. 

A nested set. 

And off he went again. Leaving me with visions of Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew Cubbins (the king orders him to TAKE OFF HIS HAT and when he does a larger/fancier one appears in its place… and a larger one… and). 

There was no third wicker trunk, but it’s an important plot point in NEVER TELL A LIE. Inside are found a bloodstained straitjacket… (The actual trunks contained massive accounting ledgers that even my Jerry willingly threw out.)

JENN McKINLAY: How much time do we have? Kidding. Mostly. Hub and I are cruising up on our 25th wedding anniversary this April and we have come to appreciate and tolerate our idiosyncrasies over the years. I sing all the time, apparently. I didn’t know that I did this until Hub pointed it out. Huh. Luckily, I can sing, it’s just that I get caught in my greatest hits loop (Bobby McGee, etc) that drives him batty. For me, it’s the cap on seat down issues. By all that is holy, do not walk over the cat vomit and then tell me about it like it’s my job. Finders keepers, my dude! Also, when unpackaging whatever, mail, food items, etc., we actually have bins for the remainders be it recyclable or not, you decide but pick one and use it!

I remember when I was attempting to train the Hooligans to be aware of such things as picking up after themselves, and I said to H1, “Put your cereal bowl in the sink. We don’t have house elves.” He gasped in shock and said, “You gave them clothes!” LOL. 

LUCY BURDETTE: after almost 32 years, I really cannot complain. John is a gem. Funnily enough on the cat vomit though, John would simply not see it. He gets very focused on what he’s doing and listening to, so that small things are not on the radar. If we do have an argument, it would be about directions and navigation. (Why ask for help if you’re going to go another way in any case??)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Aww, Jonathan is pretty adorable.He makes lunch, does the dishes WAY better than I do, and never complains that I am using the dining room table as a book marketing fulfillment center.  He does, like Lucy’s John, disagree with the GPS direction thing. ”It WANTS you to go the other way,” I say. “ It KNOWS traffic things you don’t know”. He doesn't care. 

Or sometimes  he’ll say: “Okay, you want me to go the GPS way?”  Like it’s MY fault if it turns out to be  a mistake.

Oh, I guess I could say..he cannot find anything. He'll ask: “Where’s the mustard?”  I’ll say: “ Fridge door, middle shelf, last thing on the right.” It’ll be right where I said it was–but he can’t find it.

But you know, who cares. He's the cutest.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: As we are coming up on thirty years this spring–I am gobsmacked at the thought, how could it possibly be that long?--I'm pretty good at ignoring the annoying things. (Especially as the hubby does things like fix my suddenly non-functioning computer keyboard at 1 a.m. last night!) But he does suffer from some of the same husband-itis quirks mentioned above. Leaving rinsed dishes in the sink or on the counter, not in the dishwasher. Leaving the mail I've sorted for him (because I am a "deal with it immediately and everything has a place" person) lying on the kitchen island for two weeks. Oh, and he can't find anything in the fridge either. Not that I can blame him, I suppose, as the contents are a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and you risk life and limb when you hunt for things–or at least having a jar fall out and break your toe.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I guess love is when you get to spend 30 years together and it feels way too short. Which is not to say my dear Ross didn’t drive me CRAZY at times. The socks, every night, on the floor on hs side of the bed. Because he was going to “wear them again,” which he never did, because I tossed them in the hamper. 

Like Rhys’s John, he would come back from the grocery proudly displaying the great bargain he had gotten: steaks at only $6.50 a pound. Total: $35. For one meal. For a family of five on a budget.

Like Hallie’s Jerry, he was a bit of a hoarder. I still have his textbooks from law school up in the attic (too heavy for me to lift)  and he graduated in 1986. When he died, I was finally able to get rid of the boxes full of his classroom materials he put away every summer and NEVER reused. Not going to lie - it felt good.

Like Lucy and Hank’s John and Jonathan (I guess we know what name was popular in the ‘40s!) Ross made baffling navigation choices; the most irritating of which was his refusal to just backtrack if he got off the route we had mapped out. He would always insist he could “box the compass” and get us where we wanted to be. Like… how hard is it to pull into a driveway and turn around? It’s not a judgment on your manhood.

Rinsed dishes in the sink? Check. Not finding things in the fridge unless right in front of his nose? Check. I guess Ross was kind of an ur-husband.

RHYS:  Any other husband/partner quirks to share? I guess none of ours can be too bad as we'll stuck it out for quite a long time!