If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon by Jenna McCarthy Page A

the frog sinks to his death, he demands to know why the scorpion would do such a foolish thing. “I’m a scorpion,” the predator replies. “It’s in my nature.” It’s an admittedly depressing and obscure analogy, but I totally get what the scorpion is saying. It’s just hard not to be what you are.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    The thing that drives me the most nuts about my husband is that when
he opens up a drawer or cabinet door to either retrieve something or
put something away, he NEVER closes it. I’ll come into the kitchen
after he’s put away dishes and it will look like that scene from The Sixth
Sense .
    WELMOED
     
     
    Joe and I used to have this one recurring fight that was so stupid I almost can’t bring myself to put it in writing, but I will because there’s a good lesson in it somewhere, I think. Joe has a favorite sandwich that he likes to make, and he makes quite a mess doing it. Because he is not actually a Neanderthal, and because I’ve trained him well, he even wipes down the counters and puts all of the ingredients away when he’s finished making it. Then, after he polishes off the sandwich, he brushes the crumbs into the sink and puts his plate in the dishwasher. Hard to complain about that—right?
    Wrong. For approximately ten years, I would watch this ritual, waiting until the precisely perfect moment to say casually, “Don’t forget to rinse out the sink, please!”
    “Does it really matter?” he’d ask.
    “Yes, it does ,” I’d reply. “If you do it right away, it takes three seconds. If you don’t do it right away, the crumbs harden and stick like little globs of glue and then I have to use a Brillo pad to get them off.” Those stuck-on crumbs had become symbolic, an emblem of all of my unheard pleas and unmet needs.
    “Big deal,” he’d mutter.
    “Exactly!” I’d shout, because when you have the exact same fight 6,392 times, you tend to pick up right where you left off the last time. “It shouldn’t be a big deal and it wouldn’t be a big deal if you’d just rinse the fucking sink when you were done! We’ve got the little sprayer and everything! How hard would that be, honestly?”
    But time after infuriating time he’d forget, and I’d march into the kitchen in a huff and resentfully scour away the evidence of his passive-aggressive hatred for me.
    “You do it on purpose, don’t you, just to piss me off?” I accused him one day.
    “Do what?” he asked, a shoo-in for Best Actor in a Clueless Role.
    “Leave your crumbs in the sink!” I bellowed.
    “You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, shaking his head and sounding genuinely hurt. “You actually think that I go through my day trying to think of hundreds of tiny little ways to irritate you. You give me way too much credit, Jenna. I’m not that conniving. Having a spotless sink just isn’t important to me, so I forget. I know it should be important to me because it’s important to you, but you have a lot of little ‘things,’ you know? It’s hard to keep track of them all.”
    Can you imagine? Playing the wise-and-rational card on me? The nerve! But I had to admit, I did sort of sound like a paranoid, insecure, and impossibly demanding nut-job when he put it that way. And I felt bad that I’d accused him of malice where there was none, but the important thing was that after that perfectly compelling little speech of his, he stopped leaving crumbs in the sink . I am not even making this up just to make him look good. Even though he was right that I did have “a lot of little things” that bugged me, and even though he had convinced me that he wasn’t borrowing extra crumbs from the neighbors so he could sprinkle them in the sink as part of an ongoing, evil plot to annoy me to death, and even though I essentially admitted that I was being difficult and the crumbs weren’t that big a deal in the grand, overall scheme of the eternity that was our life together , in