I want to continue my discussion about when the difficult person in your life is your spouse. Google “difficult people” and most of the advise you get is how to deal with difficult people in your life, with one of the key elements of success being minimizing your exposure to them - focused on dealing with difficult people outside your home, in your workplace, social setttings,etc. And of course the Christian spin on the advise is when you must face that difficult person or persons in your life, treat them charitably and kindly, then move on quickly.
When you live with a difficult person - it’s different. Avoidance is not really an option. Most of the perfect world psychology advisers on the internet assume you are married to someone willing to sit down and compromise and work out solutions.
That is not always the case. Case in point - my situation.
Caveat: she is my wife - of 22 years. She is not a bad person. She doesn’t go out and spend all my money. She doesn’t drink or party. Her’s is a different situation. Mix of depression, despair, health issues, chronic pain issues, age, and twinge of neuroticism about certain things. She doesn’t work. She stays at home. She doesn’t go out socially. No friends. A lot of it is self imposed - she has no physical restrictions to getting out. She is mobile, can drive, not otherwise disabled.
Example.
Laundry. We have a laundry room in our house. In it we have a one year old still like new front load washer and dryer - state of the art in laundry technology. Were I to generally categorize my life - 2012 was her war against dust. Because of her common dust allergy, she declared a war on household dust. She’s had allergies for years, been to allergists, etc. She provided information from allergy experts that the allergic person should not do the cleaning, so, being I am the only other human being in our house, she says it’s my job. I work full time. Her typical fashion is to go overboard on everything. You might be thinking, ok, you have to some housecleaning. Ah! Not just housecleaning. Every nook and cranny, baseboard, seam, crack, surface is subject to her white glove. She goes around with a flashlight and shines it across surface to show the little particles of dust. Her response: I did a bad job cleaning and if I cared about her I’d do a better job, so, lest she start nagging and screaming, I best get the rag out and clean again. Literally.
So the laundry… the war on dust expanded to the war on lint. What do clothes dryers produce? Unfortunately, copious lint. She declared the laundry off limits to her - it may as well be radioactive. I sealed the seams of the dryer duct vent. We had the service company come out and we had a sympathetic repair man who opened up the dryer and sealed off seams that he could seal off. We got the lint down to bare minimum. So one of my duties at home is to keep the laundry room spotless - literally. If you were to come to my home, you’d comment on how clean everything is, especially the shiny laundry room. To her - everything is “filthy”. You know in a sunbeam coming through a window, you see the little speckles of dust? to her, it’s nuclear fallout and when it settles on surfaces, it’s my failing to keep it clean.
And doing laundry - her war against dust mites. Her - there are dust mites in everything. So - her mandate for laundry - I can’t just do a normal load of laundry. These new high efficiency front load machines use less water and take a lot longer per load than the old style machines. When I do laundry, I have to use the Allergen and Sanitize cycles which take over 2 hours just to wash. Sanitize takes 3 hours. AND - her requirement is that when the load finishes, all her stuff has to be run through the machines “Drain and Rinse” cycle to further make sure there is zero soap left in the stuff. So that adds another half hour. Then the drying and lint. AND - she mandates that after so many ‘dirty’ loads like towels - I have hand clean the interior of the machines, which is like every other day. More than once, she’s pulled stuff out of the linen closet that I had laundered, put them up to her nose, declared them still dirty because I did not clean the inside of the machine out, and she’s thrown them on the floor to be done again.
AND - she uses a thing once and tosses it in the laundry pile. Towels, wash clothes - one use and they are dirty and need to be cleaned. Her rule. So laundry is never ending. and guess who has to do it all. And clean the house to her exacting requirements. And work full time. She cannot comprehend why I might object; afterall, she says, she’s sick and needs to be taken care of. NOTE: I have allergies too; I pop an allegra everyday, take a sudafed every now and then and carry on.
Yes - we tried hiring maid services three different times - she ran them off. They didn’t clean deep enough for her. They actually left saying they couldn’t meet our needs.
Sense some frustration? No time for one self. No time to pursue any interests or hobbies. It’s like when I walk in that door from work - she owns me. She may as well have a bell and ring it everytime she needs service. I’m expected to jump and tend to it -afterall - it’s what a loving husband does for a wife in need right? (that’s the guilt trip she puts on it).
Future posts - I’ll share what’s involved in keeping up her bed chamber. And cooking.
And needless to say, it’s hard to keep a Christian face and attitude when the person you live with majorly gets on your nerves and literally is driving me insane. And I can’t say that she drives me to drink. That’s no outlet for me. I need to stay sober and alert around her because her response to any objection that I might have or any suggestion I have for compromise to yell and scream.
Her mold specialist doctor is out of state and consults with her over the phone periodically. Unfortunately, she’s giving my wife her ammunition that she needs to pull away from the offending activities. Everyone assumes the sick person has a loving family supporting them that absorb all the tasks. And this may generally be true, and it’s probably true that not every patient is as picky and demanding as my wife as to how things must be done. It her way or the highway. There’s no in between with her. No compromise. When cleaning has to be done to such exacting standards, it’s never ending. You go from one end of the house the other, then you start over because the other part got ‘dirty’ again.