Catharsis Begins

So it seems that my friend Cheryl is once again at the center of a situation of pleasant irony for me.  Yesterday afternoon I was skimming through my RSS feeds and noticed that The Naked Redhead‘s blog was not present.  My paranoia tells me that the “IT” guys at work are monkeying with my Outlook again, but whatever.  I pulled the feed again and read Monday’s post about relationships.  I commented on one of TNR’s posts and bopped on over to Cheryl’s blog – where, to my complete surprise, I saw that her topic regarded relationships and mentioned TNR’s post.

So I emailed Cheryl to say “wtf?  you read TNR’s blog too?? small world.”  Cheryl politely emailed back that she reads TNR because of my recommendation.  Oh. 

Both posts have their root in a Psychology Today article entitled “You’re Driving Me Crazy:  10 Relationship Headaches and How to Fix Them.”  Consistent with my status as a Y-chromosome posessor, I didn’t read the article itself – I got the gist from Cheryl’s and TNR’s posts.  And I’m single – I got 99 problems but relationship headaches ain’t one.

I haven’t always been single, though.  I’ve been kinda-sorta planning on writing an epic blog post called “On Being Divorced”, but just can’t seem to bring myself to do it.  Maybe I think that too many hot single chicks read this blog and they’ll be turned off by my former marital status.  That’s pretty dumb.  I’m sure I could use the catharsis. 

So here we go: a little bit of QJ heart smeared on your screen:

What Cheryl and TNR blogged about was the notion of “the partner in your head”, and the fact that just because one’s partner regularly does the same little things that piss one off, that doesn’t mean that one’s partner does such things on purpose.  The examples given were things like inability to get dirty laundry into the hamper and lack of desire to do household chores – despite regular conversations and repeated stern talkings-to about these things. 

I can totally identify.  When I was married, I did the chores.  I cooked and did the dishes, cleaned the apartment and did the laundry, took the dogs out to pee and cleaned the litter box.  One thing that totally mystified me was the fact that my wife always left her dirty underwear on the bathroom floor.  We didn’t have a big bathroom.  For whatever reason, this was a big pet peeve of mine – I talked to her time and again about it, saying that I had no problem being the one who did the laundry, but would she please, please, please put her dirty underwear in the hamper?  And to no avail.

This wasn’t the proverbial straw – not by a longshot – but, dang, did it piss me off.  Every time I saw a pair of dirty underwear on the bathroom floor, I took it as an intentional knife in my side.  I know perfectly well that she didn’t do this to bother me, but I had a real hard time getting over it at the time.  I’d like to say that eventually I stopped bothering her about it and relegated this habit to the pile of “oh well, I suppose I can live with this forever”, but I don’t think I ever shut up about it for more than a day or so.

Lesson learned?  Don’t marry a girl who can’t get her dirty underwear into the hamper.  Or one who won’t at least try to be accommodating.

Now before you flip over to someone else’s blog or finish your lunch or go back to work or whatever, let me say quickly that I don’t mean to give the impression that my marriage was entirely one-sided with respect to unintential pissing-off or household chores.  I did a little bit of the former and she did a little bit of the latter.  That still sounds bitter, doesn’t it?  Frig.  Well, dear reader, this is but the beginning of said catharsis and I never promised that it would be pretty or smooth.  I’m doing the best I can to remain objective.

Tagged as: blog, catharsis, Cliopatra's Writings, divorce, marriage, relationships, The Naked Redhead, TNR