Reply to Husband can’t set a table and doesn’t care to learn how

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, I feel like I have a husband who is equally involved in household stuff and childcare. But we definitely both have stuff we care about more than the other one. I told him before we got married that I would never learn to put my shoes away — he does it for me. He isn’t organized with paperwork so I do all of that. He does all the laundry and puts his clothes away in a very particular way. If I suddenly had to do all the laundry, I would not notice which type hanger a particular kind of shirt went on. He cannot remember where my kid’s dance class is on Tuesday night even after months. He will go to the place she gets picked up on Mondays and Wednesdays if I don’t remind him. He’s obsessed with blowing any leaves out of the garage when we have people coming over (that will never set foot in the garage). Whatever. It all evens out in the end. But I’m not blowing the leaves out the garage because people are coming over — ever.[/quote]

I'm the same. Happily married to a man with whom I agree on the important things and we both agree to let go of the little things. If he wants to spend time optimizing the wifi signal, have at it. If I want to spend time organizing the pantry cupboards, I'm free to do so. But neither of us expects the other to care.

Putting healthy food on the table for our family? That's a priority. How the silverware and napkins end up on the table? Not a priority. [/quote]

9:39 PP here

I also think this is a perfectly acceptable outlook - there are things one spouse doesn't care about, and the other spouse is good with that - as long as it goes both ways.

OP's H doesn't care about table settings, fine.  But then he shouldn't give OP grief about not caring if they have the right type of snacks or beer at home, or if the screwdriver gets put back in the garage rather than the junk drawer (random examples that are stereotypical dude-like) [/quote]

This is a bit too black and white to work in real life, but I'd imagine each spouse gets 10 things they care about and can ask the other person to care about. Things beyond that have to be handled by the person who cares. Or maybe it's not 10 things but 10 hours worth of things a month. Or maybe you use an external scale for ridiculousness to decide if someone has to care if their spouse cares about X or Y. I don't know, but I don't like your tit for tat idea because it seems petty and frankly kind of nasty.

I don't bean count with my husband but I think we'd both agree that I am the pickier of the two and therefore there are more things that I care about that he respects than vice versa, so it's not exactly an even trade. But, for example, if I decided that I wanted him to load the dishwasher in a particular way (I'm not talking an efficient way, I'm talking a crazy OCD type way) then I could imagine him saying, you know what, that's on you, I'll handle the hand washing and you can load the dishwasher your very specific (and unnecessary) way. Or if he wanted me to park the car inside the garage within a chalk outline because it made him feel best if it was exactly the same distance from all the walls, I'd say you know, that's on you, feel free to move it after I've gotten home.

I don't think one spouse gets to use the other's refusal to do X as a reason to say well then I won't care about Y. I don't know what the metric is because I've never had to think about it - somehow my spouse and I have always been able to discuss what we care about and ask the other person to do in a way that works for us and have for 20 years - but your response rubs me the wrong way and I feel like it would lead to resentment.

I think enough people have posted that they don't care about table settings to make this something that OP reasonably needs to take on herself. Or, if she really, really cares about it then she can make it a priority, understanding that she may be swapping this out for something else she asks her husband to care about. [/quote]

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