Trouble in Paradise

Had to spoil a perfectly good weekend by having a fight with the husband last night. All is still not well in our little world. We kept to his schedule of "weekly talks" for awhile, and then we started to blow them off. We would sit down for our talk, and just look at each other and go, "Um…" I guess we thought we were "cured."

Found out rather rudely over the weekend that the lines of communication are NOT open. We tried to collaborate on a couple of household projects---always a dangerous undertaking. I wanted to set up some planter boxes for a salad garden, outside the back door. His first input was, "Let’s draw up a plan." I, on the other hand, have lived with him long enough to know that, "Let’s draw up a plan" generally means "This is not going to get done this century." Over the years, I’ve learned that a project does not get started in our home unless we jump into it impulsively. If we think about it too much (i.e. –"Draw up a plan") we start realizing how much work it’s ultimately going to be, and we scrap it. So I said, "Just go pick up a bunch of wood. If we need more, we’ll go get some more." We have built planter boxes like this before…it’s not like I was throwing us headlong into a project we had no idea how to complete (though I have had to do that in the past.) I didn’t realize that my simplistic approach had poisoned the project for him almost beyond tolerance.

To make a long story short, we each had a plan in our mind for how these things were going to be designed, which we failed to communicate to the other party. When I walked out on the deck and found him doing something that was completely opposite of what I wanted done, I (stupidly, I guess) stopped him and told him so. He seemed to take this calmly at the time, shifted gears, and made the changes I wanted. Later in the evening, while he was cleaning out the garage, he called me out there because he SAID he wanted my input on something. When I interrupted him with a comment, he got pissy. I was like, "If you already had a plan, and you didn’t want my input, why did you call me out here?" And I walked away. Saying something about needing to have a talk about his passive aggressive attitude.

At any rate, later that evening, we sat down to have this "talk," instigated by me.  (Note to Self:  Do not open a bottle of cheap champagne prior to fighting with husband.  He doesn't drink, and the empty bottle is now sitting out on the curb.  And I have a headache.)  We started out slogging through the "garage" argument, but ended up arguing about the stinkin’ planter boxes. Lots of resentment was sloshing around behind that calm, "husband-on-a-project" demeanor. Lots of intimating that I am a shrew because I don’t make a plan, then I have the audacity to correct him when he’s not going in the direction I was assuming he was going to go. Lots of that same old, "I can never do anything right for you" crap that I am sick to death of hearing after 28 years. And THEN it got worse. I can always tell we are having a serious argument when it degrades to a discussion about our sex life. It seems to be the font from which all other marital arguments arise. And that’s as much as I’m going to say on THAT subject.

It will be interesting, anyway, to see if we are on speaking terms when he gets home.