Don’t peeve me this way
Snoring, saving used tea bags, not hearing the doorbell… In long relationships, it’s the little things that irritate the most. Three couples reveal the gripes that really get their goat
he first chapter of Dr Jane Gregory’s recently published book Sounds Like Misophonia* is titled: ‘If you loved me, you’d breathe quietly’. It is an exploration of misophonia, a disorder defined as being ‘an extreme emotional reaction to certain everyday sounds that most people would find relatively easy to ignore’.
In other words, it is a bible for anyone who has ever listened to their spouse chomping loudly on cereal and seriously contemplated divorce.
But what if thunderous chewing is only the start? What if someone walks too quickly? Or always leaves the doors to kitchen cupboards slightly ajar? Or drops his or her towel breezily on the bathroom floor and never considers picking it back up again? We asked four writers to share what annoys them most about their husbands and wives.
DAMP LAUNDRY & MISSING DOG LEADS
Name Mary Killen
Married to Giles Wood
The problem These are some of the things I find annoying about Giles: the turning down of every social invitation so that he can do more gardening, me having to expend depleted reserves of energy on persuading him to go, then he goes and is on marvellous form and everyone says, ‘Giles was such fun but Mary seemed a bit flat.’
Hanging wet clothes from a hook in the beam of our sitting room or on the curtain rail on the grounds that they ‘need to be aired’. There they remain, dangling in your field of vision even though we have an electric clothes horse. Moreover, they give the wrong impression to smart neighbours going past.
Shouting up the staircase all day: ‘Mary?!’ I then have to get up from my desk, cross the room and open the door and call ‘Yes?’
‘Where is the coffee?/the dog lead?/ Where are my walking boots?/my binoculars?’ So, I reply, ‘In the usual place.’ ‘No, it’s/they’re not there.’
I go down and walk to the usual place and hand him the ‘missing’ thing and he replies, ‘Well, it wasn’t there a few minutes ago. You must have put it there to gaslight me and make me think I am going mad.’
The worst thing of all is the shouting from the room he is in, rather than walking towards the room where I am and speaking his question. It’s all very disruptive. And when I do run down the stairs to help him find the thing, he stands blocking the doorway I am trying to go through. When
I say, ‘Can you get out of my way?’ He replies, ‘There’s no need to be aggressive. We’re not in Northern Ireland now.’
He doesn’t answer knocks on the front door on the grounds that ‘I’m not expecting anyone’ or ‘People should know better than to drop in without ringing first.’
‘But they did ring first,’ I screamed at him the other day. It was the plumber.
(I had just popped into the garden for a moment to hang clothes on the line). ‘I told you he was coming.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know you were talking to me because so often when I think you are talking to me you say that you are actually talking on headphones to someone on your mobile. So I’ve learnt not to listen when you are talking.’
Nor does he answer the landline, which is a good thing because, stuck in the prefraud-boom 1970s as he is, he would more than likely be inclined to blab out his sort code and account number to anyone who asked. Even worse, he doesn’t carry a mobile, which is the ultimate in passive aggression.
But all in all, I can’t overlook the fact that he does the driving, the gardening, the dog walking and the cooking. As my older friend Anne constantly reminds me, I would be paying a fortune were I to have to employ a retinue of staff to perform these functions.
On the other hand I wouldn’t be so psychically drained.
COSTLY GREETINGS CARDS & IMPRACTICAL IRONING
Name Giles Wood
Married to Mary Killen
The problem It helps to marry someone roughly from the same background as yourself so you don’t get into a muddle when your partner says, for example, ‘Let’s have tea.’ We both came from medical families hailing from provincial middle-class backgrounds and therefore we are culturally congenial. However, we live differently to our parents’ generation and we are without domestic help. For this reason I don’t want Mary to spend her precious man hours (I use the term advisedly) ironing and folding her inherited collection of Irish linen napkins and tablecloths, which may or may not have only been used once.
My wife has a Hyacinth Bucket streak to her character and is constantly trying to raise the tone of our marriage in our ramshackle country cottage nicknamed the ‘grottage’. An argument always ensues when she brings out the linen napery.
What will she revive next? Irish linen napkins may have their place on special occasions or religious festivals but I think they belong to yesteryear. We simply don’t live like that any more. They belong to the world of Upstairs Downstairs when the full-time job of one member of staff would have been washing and ironing napkins (and inserting them into silver napkin rings).
What’s wrong with using super-absorbent paper towels, or kitchen roll, which is used in almost every other household, to mop up our modern messes?
If left to her own devices, my wife would probably put antimacassars on every chair back. Incidentally, a single male friend of ours made the mistake of buying a headboard for his bed which, I have pointed out, acts as a promacassar.
Next week, while she goes to the Isle of Mull in Scotland for a week of socialising, leaving me in the cottage, I will revert to type. Out will go the tablecloths and on will go some sports pages of the Sunday papers, so good at absorbing spillages from ketchup and mayonnaise left by messy eaters.
While she is away I will probably have a log fire in the grate, all the better to dry overalls with the residual heat from the hearth. No doubt I will also hang clothes from the curtain rail facing the street in a process Mary calls ‘Gorbals-isation’.
You could say my wife is upwardly mobile and I am downwardly so. I am against all forms of extravagance and I am dreading Mary coming back from Mull with another £100 worth of greeting cards that she buys from an upper-class woman who lives on the island and glues pressed flowers and locally sourced sea shells on to them before she sells them at £6 a time.
While she is away, I will ‘offset’ her extravagance by eating up the tins of sardines that I panic-bought at Lidl during Covid and lockdown.
Marriage is like the changing weather.
The earth’s system is in a constant struggle to maintain equilibrium. Nevertheless the institution needs support and we can’t afford to run two houses.
Bring on the girls’ week in Scotland!