I found this hanging in my closet the other day. I’m not sure I even know where to begin.

I’ve been married for eight years, eight months, and six days. That’s 3,173 days total. Or 76,152 hours; but who’s counting? If you take into account the fact that we dated for a couple of years before that, and knew each other for a couple of years before that, we’re pretty well acquainted. But then he does something like THAT and I wonder if it’s possible to ever really know a person.

I get what happened here. The tank top wouldn’t stay on the hanger. Mind you, there are special hangers for the tank tops, but that’s fine. Whatever. This works too. Except no. This doesn’t so much work as it inspires immediate rage in the very core of my being. I know that is an overreaction, but I don’t think you can truly understand until you’ve spent at least 3,173 days married to someone. You don’t fight about the big things. You fight about THIS.

With that in mind, here are two lists, 3,173 days in the making:

Things Adam Does That Drive Me Completely Out of My Mind Crazy:

1. (see photo above)
2. If he sees something on the floor, he assumes it’s garbage and throws it away. Sometimes I keep important things on the floor, and I find myself giving him the same advice my father was given regarding land mines in Kuwait: If you didn’t drop it, don’t pick it up.
3. Sometimes he makes homemade soup, always in a large enough quantity to supply a soup kitchen. He puts a lid on the pot and stores the whole thing in the fridge, instead of transferring the remaining soup into smaller containers. When I bring this to his attention, he transfers the remaining soup into smaller containers, then freezes them. A year or two later, I throw the soup out.
4. He wears Nikes with everything. EVERYTHING. I would not be surprised if he wore them with a tuxedo one day. He claims his nicer shoes are uncomfortable, at which point I ask him if he thinks I’m wearing heels for comfort. Then he makes fun of me for wearing uncomfortable shoes.
5. I’m fairly certain he is in the early stages of a hoarding problem. He has boxes and Ziploc bags and tool chests full of random electronics parts and wires and speakers. I think he still has every cell phone he has ever owned. This bothers me now, but after the coming apocalypse, when he supports us with his scavenging, I’m sure I’ll be grateful.

Things I Do That Make Adam So Angry He Can’t Even Talk:

1. Every time I lose my keys or my cell phone or my wallet, I think it might finally be the time Adam completely loses it. I watch him go through all the stages - anger, frustration, disappointment, then this weird part where he tries to solve the problem of me losing things as if it’s simply a habit he can break me of. We’ve tried the key basket, and carrying a purse, and even this remote device where you put a sensor on your key chain and then you have this remote control that you can press, and it makes your keys start beeping. That definitely did not work as I lost the remote control.
2. If I have eaten even one cracker in bed, he totally knows. It doesn’t matter how careful I am. It makes him so crazy that sometimes I have this uncontrollable urge to eat crackers in bed just because I know I shouldn’t. Sometimes he thinks I’ve been eating crackers in bed when I haven’t, although it’s likely that the dog got into some crackers I forgot to put away so it’s probably still my fault.
3. Some mornings I set a series of three or four alarms so I can go back to sleep before I have to actually get out of bed.  I know this is not a healthy habit, but going back to sleep is the nicest feeling in the world. I suppose waking up five times every morning because someone else’s alarm is going off is not exactly the nicest feeling in the world.
4. Adam puts everything on his Google calendar, which I have access to (or so he claims, I haven’t really tried accessing it so I can’t be sure he’s correct). I still ask him every day what he’s doing tomorrow. At which point he sighs and stares at me. At which point I realize it’s a) on his calendar b) a question I already asked and he already answered and I forgot to pay attention or c) all of the above.
5. I used to give Dwight people food, but only when he was being really cute. And only when Adam wasn’t around. I told Dwight this had to stay between us, but then he gave it away by begging for food all the time and getting kind of fat. Now I can’t even give him a tiny piece of food without getting judgy eyes from Adam.

There are plenty more issues that could be added to these lists, but it would take roughly 76,152 hours and I don’t have that kind of time. The important point to remember is that these aren’t actually problems. These are distractions. These are the things you forgive each other for every day for years and years and years because it would be exhausting to be upset about laundry and crackers and lost keys and frozen soup all the time every day.

YOU GUYS I AM NOT EVEN JOKING ADAM JUST WALKED BY AND SAID “I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO SLEEP TWO HOURS AGO” AND GAVE ME HIS JUDGY EYES. 

That really just happened. He is denying that he was judging me in any way, but he thinks I would probably sleep better if I didn’t stay up so late. Oy. It’s a good thing the list of things that make me happy is way longer.