Curmudgeon Alley

“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”

I am reasonably sure I know the answer to the question.

The question: Is it harder for an OCD person to live with non-OCD person, or vice versa?

Señora has had two major surgeries on her back. This has put limitations on what she can and cannot do. It is just part of our reality as the two of us age.

One thing she finds difficult is loading items into the bottom rack of the dishwasher.  As much as possible I try to take on this household chore.  I have explained to her multiple times that I do not mind loading and unloading the machine.  I really don’t mind doing the dishes manually as it is one of those household tasks that you can step back from when done and feel a sense of completion. However, like many household chores as soon as you turn around and say Beetlejuice three times, it needs to be done again.

My mother’s attitude growing up was that she had five sons and a husband to feed; she was not going to also wash dishes for that crew.  In my first bout of matrimonial fever, once the kids reached a certain age, we all took turns washing dishes, marking our turn on the calendar.  The goal was to have everyone with the same number of turns at the end of month. As a teenager, I washed dishes “professionally” at a few different restaurants.   After all that, I would just as soon load the dishwasher.

I started out talking about OCD.  When I load the dishwasher I do it a certain way.  I try to group spoons with spoons, knives with knives, dinner plates with dinner plates, etc.  I do this as it requires less sorting when I am unloading the dishwasher, simplifying and speeding up the operation.

Since Señora only partially listens to me, being a founding mother of the Idle Hands School, she will frequently just hand wash the dishes. She will also occasionally add items to the dishwasher. I was cleaning up after some meal, and I had gone through the exercise of reordering the dirty dishes in the dishwasher after her additions earlier in the day.  Since Señora was in the kitchen with me, I thought I would explain my system to her.

After I had completed my little spiel on the OCD way of loading the machine, she looked at me with arched eyebrows – thankfully she did not peer at me over her glasses ala my mother – and said, “Good luck with that Melvin Udall.”

Yup, I am reasonably sure I know the answer.

And so it goes.

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