The Blue Glass
March 3rd 2011
My husband and I have a set of six 12-ounce plastic glasses. Other than being slightly blue, they are nothing special—just your average, non-breakable, boring containers designed to hold fluids. However, my husband always chooses one of the blue glasses for his daily water intake, and he has a habit of forgetting about his glass of water in the evening. Every night, I subconsciously sweep the house looking for his blue glass. Last Friday I found two: one full of water in my office right next to my computer and a second empty one in our bedroom on top of the dresser. I am starting to think my husband is color-blind, but only with blue objects.
Despite my routine blue-glass pass through our house, I hate to clean. I leave dishes in the sink for days, and I ignore layers of dust despite my minor allergies. However, I cannot stand for things to be “out of place.” When I was a child, my mother stopped coming into my bedroom because she said I could always tell if she moved my pink hairbrush with clear nylon bristles even one inch on my dresser. By nine years old, I had a place for everything and any disruption in my ordered environment upset me. When I recently reorganized my office, I had a meltdown when I saw stuff all over the floor and I had to make a path to reach the door. I knew it was temporary and that my office would look much better when I finished, but the mess seemed overwhelming. If you come to my home, you will see dust, but you will rarely see piles of crap.
My husband is practically the opposite of me. Dishes in the sink overnight? Never. Dust on the shelves? Ewww. For the most part, our cleaning styles complement each other well, but like all couples, our personal habits sometimes unnerve the other person thus becoming pet peeves. He hates it when I push the snooze button on my alarm clock multiple times and/or forget to turn it off. Of course, I don’t see his complaint as a big issue since it has not happened in over eight months due to our job situations. Meanwhile, I don’t understand why he refuses to turn off his phone at night when he knows the slightest noise wakes me up. I have lost track of how many times I have cursed the BEEP from his iPhone “Words with Friends” app (i.e., Scrabble). I thought we had resolved that problem, but he turned his phone on vibrate instead of silent. One night when I heard a humming sound coming from the top of the dresser, I wanted to throw his phone out the window. Why won’t he turn it off? And who plays Scrabble at 3am?*
The thing about pet peeves is that you have to figure out what falls into the reasonable and unreasonable category as well as the fixable and unfixable category. It reminds me of math, specifically the four quadrants of the Cartesian coordinate system. If you took algebra, then you probably remember drawing the x and y axes on graph paper and coming up with four sections. Think of pet peeves as having four categories: reasonable, fixable (RF); unreasonable, fixable (UF); reasonable, unfixable (RU); and unreasonable, unfixable (UU).
- A typical UU request might be women expecting men to fundamentally change who they are after they get married such as a wife wanting her husband who hates theater to buy season tickets and attend plays with her.
- The snooze button issue is a good example of an RU pet peeve. My husband’s request is entirely reasonable, but it is unlikely that I will be unable to change my sleeping pattern after so many years. I can certainly try, and now that I know how much it bothers him I will make more of an effort in the future.
- The cell phone is a tricky one because it is a matter of perception. I think my husband would argue that it falls into the UF category, but to me, it’s a perfect example of an RF request. He thinks he has a made a giant concession and I don’t think he has done enough.
Then there is the blue glass—the one I always pick up. I stopped reminding my husband about it years ago. Honestly, nagging him about a glass didn’t seem worth it because no matter how many times I did, he didn’t remember. I think it falls into what I call the “black hole” (we all have one) of his brain. His blue glass is my snooze button: a reasonable, unfixable pet peeve. I could bug him about it, or I could just pick it up and put it in the sink of dishes that I won’t do for two days.
Don’t misunderstand. I don’t like picking up the blue glass, but I accepted it a long time ago. I will admit though … when my husband was working in Detroit, I thought about him every time I opened the kitchen cabinet and saw all six glasses lined up in their place—not a single one missing. That’s when I realized how much I missed the blue glass, and I will pick it up every night for the rest of our marriage.
AWW — XoXo
*My husband now puts his phone on “silent” instead of “vibrate” at night. Baby steps.
