—Kristin
The thing that consistently irks me that I consistently forgive is the abyss between the kitchen counter and the dishwasher. Apparently, the activity involved in getting dishes from the sink/counter/table actually into the dishwasher is my man’s Kryptonite.
—Jenny
He is obsessive about washing his hands. He has to do it literally hundreds of times a day. I guess it’s good that he’s so clean, but really?
—Laurabeth
He never changes the clock in his car when it’s Daylight Saving Time. I can’t just look at the clock and know what time it is, I have to think about it and do math. Currently, for example, when I look at the clock and it says 6:30 P.M., I have to stop and think, wait—that means it’s really 7:30 P.M. It’s a small thing, but it bugs me.
—Scarlett
My husband not only passes gas whenever he feels like it, but he tenses up to “push” it out and then sighs loudly with satisfaction. Being in the same room is bad enough, but he also does it when we’re cuddling on the couch. My rule about it is that it has to be away from my general direction. It hardly ever works.
—Danielle
So, we’re curled up on the couch watching a really good movie when I hear this sort of crunchy, snappy sound. I look over and see my husband totally engrossed not just in the movie, but also in picking at his nails or some dry skin on his foot! I know he does it subconsciously, but man is it annoying. I try to ignore it for as long as I can . . . about forty-five seconds . . . and then I smack him and ask him lovingly to please knock it the hell off.
—Carmen
He wears shoes until the soles literally have holes in them. Once, the sole of his shoe actually flapped away from his foot as he walked, and when I got him new ones, he said, “Why? What’s wrong with the ones I have?”
—Tricia
My husband is a brilliant man but sometimes his ADD gets the best of him, like the time he couldn’t find the phone. He looked everywhere . . . and finally found it in the freezer. Or the time we couldn’t find the garage door opener for two weeks. One day I was transferring his wash into the dryer and heard a funny clunking sound. I thought maybe it was a belt buckle or loose change. No, it was the missing garage door opener that was a stowaway in his pants pocket. I love my husband, but one of these days I’m going to strangle him.
—Rachel
He eats ice cream every single night, which sucks for me because I’m trying to keep in shape, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he leaves the damned spoon in the sink every single night. I mean what the hell, it’s a spoon, one tiny spoon, and he can’t bring himself to wash it no matter how many times I ask. So every morning I get to be reminded that he gets to eat ice cream every night and I don’t. I swear I’m going to start leaving them on top of the remote, or under his pillow, or up his you-know-what!
—Julia
He blows his nose into the air without a tissue. He says nothing comes out, but sometimes it does.
—Lynn
He lets our yard, especially in the back, get way out of control and then he invites all these people over for a barbecue and is hustling an hour before and has it looking great for our guests. Unfortunately it’s only about five times a year that we have a nice-looking yard and it’s not even for us, it’s for our guests!
—Amanda
He can’t bend. When he looks in the refrigerator, if he can’t see an item from where he is standing, it must not exist. I think he thinks he gets bonus points if he doesn’t have to move anything around. I have actually labeled the refrigerator shelves so I can provide more direction: yogurt, back of B1; cantaloupe, left side of A2; carrots, right vegetable bin, under the onions. He also won’t eat the last of anything. If there are seventeen chicken wings, he’ll only eat sixteen and leave the last miserable one sitting in there until I throw it out.
—Cheryl
When he clips his toenails he does it on the front porch . . . like our neighbors really want to see that disgusting sight. Ick!
—JC
My husband does not know where the dirty clothes go (same place they have always gone), does not know where the dishes go (even after he got them out), has more shoes than a woman and gladly leaves them out for everyone to admire, continues to pile garbage upon garbage in the can instead of changing the garbage bag, could not put a toilet seat down or close a shower door even if his life depended on it, and leaves his spit bottles sitting wherever he last used them (he dips Copenhagen).
—Crystal
He bites his nails. I don’t mean he just bites the edges off; he chews them down to the quick. He then proceeds to crunch on the pieces for hours while on the computer. It drives me crazy! Recently, he had to go to the urgent care clinic and spend $100 because his finger was so raw from his biting it that it got infected.
—Lynn
He eats sunflower seeds in bed. Then he will leave the gross bag full of spit shells on the floor so I have to clean them up. To top it off, when I’m sitting next to him, the sound is awful (crack, crunch, spit), and they kind of smell bad. Oh, he eats them on road trips, too.
—Karin
He smacks his food. Just the other day, I asked him not to. His response was, “What is ‘smacking’ anyway? And how do I stop?” Umm, it’s chewing so loud I can hear you smack your food around. Should I demonstrate with my hand?
—Tara
I love my husband but I really want to cancel his World of Warcraft account and kick his freeloading sister out of our apartment.
—Kelly
My husband has given away many of my possessions over the course of our seventeen-plus-year marriage without asking me, including two bicycles, golf clubs, and a sewing machine. Now, his line of reasoning was that I did not use these items, but what irks me is that they did not belong to him, so he had no right to give them away! This past school year, my son needed a costume for his social studies class. I had to staple the fabric together because I did not have a sewing machine.
—Liz
He always has to move the dishes around in the dishwasher before running it. Granted, he can usually fit more in it than I manage, but this is EVERY single time!
—Stephanie
For the past twenty-seven years—as long as we have been married—my husband has brought the exact same thing to work for lunch every day (unless he goes out to lunch or has a lunch meeting): PB&J (has to be crunchy peanut butter), fruit, and a soda, although he did switch to Diet Vanilla Coke and swapped strawberry preserves for raspberry about ten years ago. I love varied lunches and it annoys me that he is so boring in his food preferences, but since I don’t have to eat it, I let it go.
—Rosemarie
My husband and I work together rehabilitating birds, and we often bring our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter along for the fun. Since she’s got a toddler’s short attention span, one of us completes a volunteer task while the other entertains her, and then we switch off. My entertainment ideas run to making bird feeders out of pine cones and helping to cut up tofu for the resident raven. But my husband thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to let our daughter walk around the center holding and petting dead rats intended for the owls’ dinner.
—Melissa
The man does not blow his nose. Instead he tears off a long strip of toilet paper and shoves one end up his nostril. He will walk around the house like this, and it doesn’t seem to bother him that he has a strip of toilet paper flapping in the wind in front of his face. It has to be toilet paper; even if we have tissues, he still uses toilet paper. He used to come to bed like that when he was sniffly until one morning I woke up with THE SNOTTY STRIP OF TOILET PAPER STUCK TO MY FACE! He is no longer allowed in the bed with toilet paper shoved up his nose.
—Sara
He scratches the couch with his finger the whole time we watch TV. If I smack his hand away, he’ll just move it back or scratch with the other hand.
—Teri
My husband, bless his he
art, does not brush his teeth at night. It drives me crazy. I mean, besides the obvious hygiene issues, I’ve got to admit his breath is a little rank by the end of the day, especially if there were onions or garlic in our dinner.
—Brynna
He leaves his big, bulky shoes all over the house, and it drives me bonkers. He always places them in the most inopportune places, like in our two-year-old daughter’s room or in front of the couch, where I am sure to stub my toes on them.
—Lisa
My husband wears a CPAP machine at night to stop his horrible snoring. It is a sight to be seen when it is on, which is not that often because he falls asleep every night before putting it on. And when he does wear it, he will take it off in the middle of the night and hold it in his hand for dear life. Then he flips out when I try, with loving care of course, to put it back on.
—Robin
His idea of “cleaning” a table or counter is to either sweep the crumbs onto the floor (like I don’t have to clean that, too!) or pick them up off of a glass top by using a wet finger.
—BJ
Whenever we are out together, my husband runs me over when he walks. It’s like I have some gravitational pull, and before you know it, he’s stepped right into me. It doesn’t matter where we are. The last time we were in the airport and he did this to me, I told him to follow the row of square tiles—those were his, that was his space, and this row was mine. Stay in your own lane.
—Teri
My husband is a good man, but I am going to smack him with a frying pan one of these days because:
1. He smacks his gum when he chews it.
2. He likes to walk around in his underwear in the summer. We have the same “put on your darn pants” fight every year. It’s worse this year, because now he does Wii Fit in his undies.
3. He keeps the bar codes from the boxes of things we buy “in case we need it,” but never identifies what the bar code is for. We have tons of mystery box ends.
4. Oh, and his farts could be an Olympic event.
—Lisa
AFTERWORD
Famous Last Words
(by Joe)
Jenna is a wonderful wife and an amazing mother and obviously an extremely talented writer and I am lucky to be married to her. However, in addition to swearing a lot (sorry about that, Dad), she also has a tendency to occasionally embellish details for the sake of a good story. In fact, since marrying her, I call any extreme example of exaggeration a “Jennaism.” So I thought you should know that this book—which I have read from cover to cover and heartily endorse, by the way—may contain one or two slight Jennaisms. All of the parts where I come off looking generous, capable, or just really nice, those are all 100 percent true. With regards to the remainder of the intimate details about our life that you have just read, I urge you to use your good judgment in discerning where the light leaver-onner my lovely wife may have liberally employed what she calls poetic license.
—JOE
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Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Maybe you married your gay best friend because neither of you was getting any younger and you both wanted to have kids, or perhaps the common bond you share with your partner is that neither of you has a single carnal need or desire, so you’re in one of the billions of supposedly happily sexless marriages CNN is always reporting on. If either of these is the case, feel free to skip right to the next chapter; there’s very little for you here.
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