It has become an ongoing issue that my wife complains that she smells something, then gets angry at me if I am unable to smell that same smell, sometimes accusing me of gas lighting her or calling her a liar, when actually I just don’t smell the smell she’s smelling.

I’m not making implications or accusations, I’m not trying to mislead or confuse her, I just can’t smell whatever she’s smelling and that fact frustrates the heck out of her as though I’m personally letting her down. Then she gets a bit aggro and I have to change the garbages / kitchen compost in the hopes that perhaps those are the sources of the smells I can’t smell. Sometimes that helps. She will never change the garbage or take out the compost herself.

When she insisted that she smelled a gas leak from our furnace that I couldn’t smell, we called a professional who confirmed our furnace was working fine and there was no gas leak; but I was still the villain for denying the gas leak ahead of time. Three times in the last 6 months this has been a thing.

Whether apple stems are perpendicular or parallel to the surface of the fruit.

We disagreed for years about the color of our couch. I called it brown. He called it blue. It was a weird grayish brown colored couch, but because it was labeled “slate” when he bought it, he insisted it was blue. We then added a teal blue couch to our house which just solidified my “this is the brown couch” position. We do not, to this day, agree. Eventually we got rid of the couch.

My wife’s siblings and her all have the same weird trait: when things get stressful, they clam up and do this “shut up and let me save the world” thing. Her sister’s worked on it a lot because #fireman, but it’s a strong compulsion.

The “hmm, maybe if you’d talked to anyone instead of going missing-person” is extra fun when it’s a tech thing, as after the stress and the teeth-pulling contextual questions, it’s two mouse clicks and an object lesson.

And, when THAT fight’s over…

An ex wanted to break up because she was still in love with her ex. Her ex is in prison for decades after going on a rampage against homeless people and critically wounding at least a few. Live happybadger reaction:

Hard water vs soft water.

So many times we’ve been in a hotel room and I’ve taken a shower and commented on what soft water it is because it feels like the soap never rinses off and I feel slippery all over. She always tries to correct me by calling it hard water. She grew up in a desert city that has naturally hard water, so she’ll always say, “I know what hard water is, I grew up with hard water!” when the “hard” water she grew up with was softened by some means. It doesn’t matter how many articles and blog posts and ChatGPT sessions on the topic I show her, she always insists they’re wrong and she’s right. We argued about it a few times in the past, but now it’s a running joke between us.

So this was part of a much bigger discussion and turned out in reality to be mostly due to some unaddressed mental health issues. But on the tail end of an argument, y’know when you’re starting to talk nice again and resolve things, I said something like it’s okay, sometimes you’re just a sad pancake. She burst into tears because she wanted to be a waffle. Hormones and mental health are wild, y’all.