I don’t know if all married couples do this. I imagine a lot of them do, but I can’t say for sure. I just know it happens a lot in our house.
“Hey, baby, we need to…” fill in the blank. It could be we need to mail the mortgage. It could be … we need to buy the kids new shoes. More often than not, it’s something not fun, like take the dog out because we didn’t do that tonight and it’s 10 PM and we’re in our pajamas and it’s raining and one of us is already sleeping.
Nothing good ever comes after, “Hey, baby, we need to…” Only bad things. Only work. For the other person. That’s because “we” never need to actually do anything. What this actually means is: “There is something that needs to be done, and I don’t want to be the one who does it, so I’m invoking the plural ‘we’ in the hopes that you, singularly, will go do that thing I don’t want to do, because if I wanted to do it I would have done it already before passively asking you in such a weaselly manner that takes advantage of the better angels of your nature to volunteer to do the thing.”
I know what some of you are thinking. This is not wife-bashing. This is Joe-bashing. I do this way more than she does. This is about me and my weirdness. Or maybe it’s not weird – maybe it’s standard husband behavior. Whatever. My point is this isn’t me complaining about the only woman on earth willing to put up with all of my various foibles. My wife does more by Tuesday than I do all week, and she does it without asking me but not actually asking me.
I do it. All. The. Time. And I only recently noticed that I do it. I do it so much, my wife now does it once in a while, too, because it was only when she eventually copied me that I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you want me to what? TAKE THE KIDS TO SWIM CLASS NEXT WEEK?! What’s this WE, lady?” Then I realized, “Oh, she’s doing me. This is what I do to her. The ‘we’ thing. I brought that into our house. In other words: I learned it by watching you, dad!” She’s not doing it out of spite. She’s doing it because I normalized not directly asking for things in our house. I played myself.
Why am I this way? I don’t know. We don’t have that kind of time, guys. I guess there are things I just don’t want to do, but even more than me not wanting to do them, I don’t want to ask someone else to do them, so I get them to volunteer, and the thing gets done, and I am absolved of the guilt of directly passing a burden along to someone else. And the worst part is I only do this to people who love me, for some reason.
I am sharing all this because perhaps my boundless immaturity can bring some measure of self-awareness to you and your beloved. Don’t allow my stupidity to pass through your front door. Maybe one or two of you will hear me when I say, “Hey, guys, we need to stop doing this.”
Joe, this is hysterical… and so very true. I’m also guilty. 😇
I feel like paragraph cuatro is about you saving your behind! Jajajajaja
Just kidding, I do it to my hubby ALL of the time. It’s done out of love.