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>Airing our Dirty Laundry
67715 years
by signewhitson
in relationships
>Passive Aggressive Diaries has been getting a good collection lately of stories about sugarcoated hostility in relationships. So many of them center around household chores…here’s a funny one posted by Shelly Schoenberg on 9/30/09:
When I lived with my boyfriend I used to do the laundry. Every Monday and Wednesday I would take a laundry basket to my mom’s house to do the clothes. Since we lived in an apartment, if I did the clothes there I would have to pay about four dollars a load. Our apartment was on the third floor. I am not a big person so I had trouble carrying this big basket down the steps. I would ask my boyfriend to take the basket to my car every Monday and Wednesday before he went to work.
My boyfriend is a slob and a construction worker. He would come home from work, take his clothes off right at the door, and leave them there. Meanwhile as the week progressed so did the mound of clothes behind the door. He also left clothes scattered around the house and never picked up after himself.
One Monday morning I asked him to quickly pick up his clothes from around the house, throw them in the basket, and take the basket out to my car so I could do the clothes. He threw a temper tantrum and said that he “didn’t have time, and why couldnt I just do it”. I told him that instead of wasting time complaining to me he could have had the clothes picked up and in the basket. He said a few nasty choice words and left, leaving the basket for me to carry and his clothes to pick up.
Well at 5am I was not very pleased with his actions. So, I took all of his clothes out of the basket and threw them on the mound of clothes that was already mounting behind the door. I proceeded to take my clothes to my moms and wash them. When I came back to the house, I found him sitting on the couch staring at the pile. He asked me if I washed clothes, I told him yes I did (trying my hardest not to smile). He said “why is there a pile of my clothes behind the door then?” I simply answered “Were your clothes in the basket? Because if they were then I did them, if not then, no, they didn’t get done.” He was furious because he was out of clothes for a week. Now he does his own clothes.
Where have you experienced passive aggression in your relationship? Do chores like laundry, errands and dishwashing bring out the worst in you? Please leave your own stories of sugarcoated hostility here!
>Wake up!
1415 years
>Found this one years ago…one of my all-time favorites!
A man and his wife were having some problems at home
and were giving each other the silent treatment.
Suddenly, the man realized that the next day,
he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 AM
for an early morning business flight.
Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE),
he wrote on a piece of paper,
“Please wake me at 5:00 AM.”
He left it where he knew she would find it.
The next morning, the man woke up,
only to discover it was 9:00 AM
and he had missed his flight.
Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t wakened him,
when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.
The paper said,
“It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.”
>A Little Help Here?
015 years
>Intentional Inefficiency is our term for the type of passive aggressive behavior that occurs when a person complies with a given request, but carries it out in an unacceptable manner. The frustrated requestor usually ends up doing the task himself and refrains from asking the person to do it again in the future…which suits the passive aggressive person just perfectly!
This great example of intentional inefficiency was posted on Passive Aggressive Diaries.com by “anonymous” on 9/16/09:
Frequently when I ask my boyfriend to help out cooking, which he absolutely hates, I find that he, all the sudden, loses his ability to function properly on his own. He moves at about the pace of a snail. He claims that he does not know what he’s doing and that he never learned how to cook. I therefore explain to him exactly how he is supposed to do that particular task. He then proceeds to act extremely clueless, like I’m explaining how to do brain surgery. Then I even show him. Once I’ve shown him the proper way to cut the fat off of a piece of chicken, he annoyingly, and EXTREMELY slowly, proceeds to do so making sure to do it in a way unlike that which I just showed him. He does so because he knows that once I finish preparing everything else, I will become annoyed with his lack of production and take over the task myself.
Do you have examples of intentional efficiency or other passive aggressive behavior in your relationship? Please post them here!