Advice...or something

The Best Advice Ever Given? Well..not exactly. I just liked this book cover.

But after attending my nephew's wedding, and seeing my newly-married cousin over the weekend, I was thinking about advice for the new bride.


So I was reading a few articles recently (I told you I like to read magazines) about “How to Get Your Husband to Do Stuff You Want.” There's a title to grab you, right?


Most of the advice from the magazines seems pretty obvious to me now, but I do remember a time when I thought he should just do what I want because he LOVES me. And wants me to be happy. And can intuit my wants through our magical psychic bond.

Yeah, THAT didn’t last very long….

One of our big fights when we were first married was about how to do the dishes. He thought you needed to wash dishes before you put them in the dishwasher; I thought that it was the POINT of having a dishwasher for IT to do the work. Call me crazy.

And then there was the issue of when exactly is the dishwasher considered FULL? According to me, it was when you couldn't possibly cram one more thing in there, but my husband had other ideas.

But anyways, there was a lot of, “You’re doing the dishes wrong;” “ No, YOU’RE doing the dishes wrong,” for a while. Until we both learned something, that I will illustrate here with a little parable. Wow, it’s almost like Sunday School, isn’t it?

True story: A few years ago my neighbor was going out of town, and at the last minute asked me to have my daughter (who was about nine or ten) come feed her dog while she was gone.

Actually, now that I think about it, she was already GONE, and she had asked me only to have my daughter come feed her fish before she left, but then suddenly it’s: Oh yeah, there’s a dog too. She had not offered to pay my daughter anything for the fish, and she did not offer to pay her for feeding the dog. But I didn’t want the dog to starve to death, so I said okay.

So for about four or five days I had to take my daughter over there, unlock the door, make sure she fed the dog and walked it and make her clean up if it had pooped the house, which it HAD most days. It was annoying, but I did it, as a favor to my neighbor. Also, I paid my daughter myself, to make sure it got done.

Then my neighbor came back in town and called me.

To say, Thanks for feeding my dog; I really appreciate it? Or to say, Let me give your daughter some money for her trouble? Oh nooooooo.

She said the dog had thrown up and she wanted to know WHAT exactly my daughter had fed it.

Uh, the dog food you left? I said.

She said we must have fed it too much, or at the wrong time or something, because now it was sick. She said the food bowl was too full and that if the dog ate too much food it would throw up. So WHY, she demanded, did we feed the dog wrong?

I was actually speechless here, but what I wanted to say was, You’re WELCOME!

I mean, first of all, the dog had not thrown up the whole time she was gone, because we didn’t see any barf; we had only had a few poop accidents. Besides, if the dog has food issues, shouldn’t you have told me that BEFORE? When you asked me to FEED it?!

But mostly I said nothing. And the next time she asked me to feed the dog while she was gone --oh yeah, she DID ask me again!-- I said I was busy. For the rest of my life.

So my point is, When you ask someone to do something for you, DON’T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE WAY THEY DO IT! Or they won’t ever want to do things for you again.

And that’s why these days when my husband does the dishes, on rare occasions, I do not say, “Why did you run the dishwasher with three forks and five plates in it?” or “Why are half the dinner dishes still in the sink when you said they were done?” I say, “Thank you,” and leave it at that. (Oh, and complain about it later on my blog, but that’s just a technicality, right?)

And there’s some advice for the new bride. For whatever it’s worth.