Marriage Advice from an Infamous Houseplant Killer
I recently asked a friend for some advice about love and marriage and she offered to write some of her own advice anonymously. She's been married over a decade as have many of her friends and truthfully has some useful advice in the form of a personal story.
Her Story
There were two warning signs before I married my husband.
The first was when I first entered his apartment. It was immaculate and well-decorated with an Asian screen and tropical plants. This scared me for two reasons: I am not what you would classify a super-clean person by any stretch of the imagination and I am a known plant-killer, still wanted in four states for my ruthless abandonment and failure to water house plants.
The second sign was a seemingly innocuous statement about his ex-girlfriend. He told me his biggest pet peeve about her was that she did not carefully wash out the sink after each tooth-brushing. This is when I realized that he was a perfectionist. How could it work? What would I do? Details are not necessarily my strong point.
They say if you fight about something early in a relationship, it is likely that the issue will not be resolved. For me, it was the cleaning. Though I try and regularly clean our living space, I am not thorough enough and don't see the dirt as well as he does. As far as I'm concerned, the dust bunnies hidden under the bed can stay hidden there. Being a methodical cleaner, he fails to see my logic in this assessment, resulting in repeated discussions that seem like a reverse scene from "Everybody Loves Raymond". I am not funny and I am not a sportswriter, but I would definitely be seen as the less domestic of the two of us.
He recently left for a trip and I had one household duty and one duty only: to water the plants. I was terrified. He knew of my "murders" in the past and his plants are his pride and joy. It didn't help that we were in the middle of the worst Seattle heat wave in almost fifty years. I called him to report on my progress as the not-so-trusted plant waterer.
"What about the upside-down hanging tomato plant?"
SInce it was upside down, hanging on the doorway, it wasn't really in my view. I had missed it. He read me the riot act, failing to give me credit for the 60-odd plants that I had "saved" from the 100+ degree weather.
During our relationship, which has spanned over a decade, we have argued approximately 463 times about cleaning, more about cooking (which is another blog post altogether), and some about finances, which is again another matter altogether. We have made improvements on the problems and have tried to meet halfway, but the main issues still remain the same.
Whatever problems you have in the beginning of the relationship will probably be the same things that you fight about later on. That doesn’t mean that you have to give up your relationship, just that you should think about whether you can live with your partner before making a long-term commitment to them and that if you are still arguing about little things later on in the relationship, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the end of the world.
