I’ve been secretly doing this to avoid my wife from picking a fight with me over housework and I need to tell someone about it So I kinda stumbled a strategy to even avoid walking into useless arguments with my wife and not kidding it is wildly effective. Wife and I were getting ready for bed, and she’s doing that thing where she starts picking up the bedroom, muttering about the kids’ socks, the laundry basket, dust on the dresser, etc. We both work hard all day every day to run our household together but she tends to stress over things not being perfect all the time and sometimes takes it out on me because I understand it’s not realistic to have a 100% perfectly in place home. And apparently that bothers her A LOT. Now this isn’t the case where she’s burdened with an unfair amount of housework it’s just that her expectations are part of the problem. Anyway with that out of the window this would be the type of situation where I’d try to “help” which somehow always spirals into me doing it wrong or me doing the wrong thing or me asking too many questions or me looking “confused” (her word, not mine) So this time I remembered my new favorite move: Do Nothing.
I stand there, leaning against the doorframe. She’s buzzing around, narrating everything that’s wrong with the room. I stay there with her, listen, nod a bit, letting her talk it out.
Eventually she stops, looks at me, and goes: “Are you going to… do anything?” I just say; “I’m listening. Keep going.” After maybe five minutes of that, she sort of slowed down and went, “You know what, I’m probably overthinking this. We can keep it simple.
It’ll be fine.” She instantly relaxes. And calms down, maybe does a thing or two she really wants to push it out of her way FOR her (not for the household). Honestly this has prevented so many stupid arguments between us and has gradually made her less likely to get bothered by things that are sometimes just out of our control.
