Stop Trying to Decide What Should Be Important to Your Spouse
Geplaatst op 11-06-2025
Categorie: Lifestyle
My husband takes care of almost all home repairs. If it doesn’t fall into the category of plumbing or electrical, he wants to handle it. I tried to go around this once and hired an outside company to come in and re-do our floors, and lo-and-behold, a couple thousand dollars later, our floors are falling apart. I have yet to live down my involvement in floor-gate, so I leave all repairs now to hubby the handyman.
For the last…I’m not sure how long, the lock on the front door to our house has been broken so that you can’t unlock the door from the outside. When I come home, I have to enter my house through the side door.
I don’t know why Hubby the Handyman has not fixed the front door yet, eventhough I’ve mentioned it to him in subtle, and not-so-subtle ways, over and over again. Coming in through the play room door instead of my front door drives. Me. Crazy. And he doesn’t understand why.
“I don’t understand why this is important,”he says. “We do have another door.”
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All he sees is a door; an alternative means to an end, and that end is entering our house. Me, on the other hand, I see something completely different.
Said door is on a side of the house that is not well-lit. It has a ramp leading up to it instead of stairs with wide openings between the boards. In the summer, flying bugs like to congregate in front of it.
Where he sees “another door,” I see a dark death trap where I can be cornered by a stalking maniac; a rickety ramp that tries to swallow my stilettos, a bug motel, not to mention, a slanted surface where I can’t rest one of the milliion things that I am always carrying while I attempt to open the door.
Not to mention, being able to walk in through my front door is just important to me, because, well, that’s what people do.
*****
A little while back, my husband bought a new pillow for himself for our bed. The pillows we have were too flat for him, so he invested in something a little fuller and firmer. (I have body parts I want to trade in for fuller, firmer versions from time to time.)
Sometimes I go to sleep before him. When I’m on my way to dreamland, I typically don’t check which pillow I’m resting my head on. I just sleep on whatever pillow landed in my spot when the bed was made, which sometimes is his.
The last couple of times I did this I woke up to a husband with an attitude that had just a little bit of stank on it.
Why is he being such a baby? I asked myself. Its just a pillow. I don’t understand why this is so important.
But where I see just a pillow, he sees a night full of neck pain, resulting in waking up to a less-than-comfortable morning, which is hard when you are up at 4 a.m. anyway, which he normally is.
So why am I rambling on about doors and special pillows? Because whether its a door, or a pillow, or a toothbrush, your spouse probably has things that are important to him or her that you don’t understand. Some of these things you probably find downright stupid. But it doesn’t matter so much why something is important to your spouse; it just matters that it is. When we say “I don’t understand why this is important” and then fail to react, all our spouses are hearing is “I don’t care enough about your discomfort to do anything about it” and not because making an effort to accommodate you is hurting me in any way, but because I don’t understand.
Yet your lack of understanding doesn’t decrease how important it is to the other person, it only increases the frustration at your refusal to try. You don’t get to decide what is important to your spouse. If we all decided to take the approach that it is really not up to us to determine why or why not something should be important to someone else and instead just accepted that it is and tried to be understanding of our spouse’s need, sometimes regardless of the “whys”behind it, we would all be better for it.
What can you try to be more understanding about in your marriage today, even if its not important to you?