“If you had asked me when I was 28 and in my wedding dress if I ever thought I would end up in my forties flipping my husband the bird over potato chips, I’d say you were crazy,” snorts Jenna McCarthy, 42, author of the recently released book If It Was Easy, They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon.
Like most of us, when McCarthy married her husband of 11 years, Joe Coito, she got the usual warnings: money, sex and children are all likely obstacles to marital bliss. But like most of us, she could never fully know what comes after happily ever after.
“You are not prepared for the minutia,” she warns. The potato chips in bed. The battles over the remote. The dishes. “We went back and forth for six years about the crumbs in the sink. I’d say: ‘Why can’t you just rinse out the sink when you’re doing the dishes!?’ One night we got in the ugliest fight, and I’m thinking: ‘How can I hate someone whom I’ve committed adjacent cemetery plots?’
After one of those clashes, McCarthy took to her blog and asked her readers: What does your husband do that you hate? Comments and emails flooded in:
He starts all his sentences with the word ‘no.’
He wears socks to bed, and then kicks them off.
He’s obsessed with Magnum, P.I. on VHS!
Next year I’ll be walking down the aisle, and reading these women’s confessions, well, I was getting a little worried. What am I not ready for? What did my mom omit or forget to tell me about life after marriage? There was only one way to find out.
I called my mother. Twice married, she just celebrated her 10th wedding anniversary. “No,” she says definitively, “you can never be prepared for marriage. You are marrying a completely different person than yourself, and you cannot know how you will grow and change or how they will grow and change.”
Very wise, but I wanted specifics. Says my mom: The one-word summaries of the day—“fine,” “nothing,” “eh”—are pretty universal. “They’re men,” she confirms. “They think like men, which I’ve come to find out is not like women.”
Okay, I’m learning. What else? According to my mom, the makings of dinner “is a bunch of hoo-ha.” Plus, men do like to gossip, are not always handy, and when it comes to snoring, “ear plugs help.”
With married life providing so many opportunities to pester, annoy and infuriate your beloved, I started getting self-conscious. What do women do to irritate their spouses? McCarthy’s husband Joe has apparently been threatening to write the male rebuttal: What Were You Thinking? Living With the Diet-Coke Addicted, Shopping Obsessed, Never-Shuts-Up Woman You Married.
I emailed my soon-to-be. I’m not annoying… right? Sure enough, he cites multiple pairs of shoes strewn across the living room, Q-tips that don’t quite make it in the bathroom trash and occasional outbursts at technology as common irritants. Ugh. I guess we’re even.
Is there a solution, I wondered, or are we all doomed to a life of mutual aggravation until death do us part? “Let it go,” advises McCarthy. “Those things that bug you are the things you have exclusive rights to, which is nice. Try to embrace it.”
“Make sure that you laugh a lot,” counsels my mom. “And remember that you’re together because you really like each other…at least most days.”
Readers: What do wish your mother had mentioned before you tied the knot? And what are the little things your spouse does that you never could have imagined would bug you so much?
Jenna Goudreau is a Staff of Forbes where this article was first published. Follow her on Twitter @Jenna_Goudreau.
