by Aja Dorsey Jackson
My husband loves to cook, but with his love of cooking comes the part that no one seems to love: cleaning up.
While he is fairly good about cleaning up after he cooks, he will throw a pot of leftover food into the refrigerator with the quickness instead of transferring it to a container. It may sound crazy to some, but this is something that gets under my skin.
Opening my refrigerator and seeing a pot in it is akin to listening to the sound of someone running her nails down a chalkboard. When I was little, I used to say that sound made my teeth itch.
That’s how I feel about pots in the fridge. Itchy teeth all over again.
Of course I have a very logical explanation as to why this seemingly benign offense is so annoying to me:
1) Pots are typically round with a handle, making them hard to stack, so they take up more room than they should.
2) At some point, before the contents of that pot have been eaten, I will probably need to use the pot which means that I will have to transfer the contents to a container and then wash the pot before I can use it; an extra step that wouldn’t be necessary if it had already been done properly in the first place.
When I explained this to my husband some four plus years ago, he gave me that it’s-not-that-serious look and said that he would stop putting pots in the refrigerator, which he did”...for a little while. Fast forward to the present and it is once again a regular occurrence.
So what do I do about it? Do I tell him constantly (i.e., nag) that the pots in the refrigerator annoy me until he stops doing it? Do I take it personally, believing that if he cared enough he would be more considerate? Do I grumble about it but let it go-except not really because if he ever brings up my not putting the toothpaste back I have something to say?
Or do I just realize that a pot in the refrigerator is just a pot in the refrigerator and do absolutely nothing? The reality is, at the end of the day, after working, taking care of children and handling everything else that goes along with living life, I don’t want to spend what little time we have together arguing about pots. We both had a whole life before we met each other and in those lives we did things in very different ways; things like putting pots in refrigerators. I realize that for every pot that he puts in the refrigerator, I probably do something equally as annoying. We can choose to dwell on those minor annoyances and let them become major problems or realize that some things don’t really matter in the grand scheme of our marriage.
I choose to do the latter and to me it works out for the best.
Are there some minor annoyances in marriage that we simply have to deal with? What do you do when your spouse does the little things that bother you?
Aja Dorsey Jackson is a freelance writer and public relations consultant in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more about her at www.ajadorseyjackson.com or follow her on twitter @ajajackson.