A few months after we got our first house together, dh (who had been working long hours so hadn’t been around to do his share of housework) stepped in to oversee me unloading the dishwasher properly one weekend.
He proceeded to turn all the spoons the same way round in our kitchen drawer and mansplained that now the spoons snugly nested together, the drawer was no longer in a mess.
Of course, when he attempted to shut the drawer, it bounced open again due to the protruding spoons. I watched silently while he turned half the spoons around again so the drawer would close.
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I remember one summer dh and I decided to buy a kit for a multi-tier wooden raised bed for the garden. I love building and gardening as I used to do help my parents out in their huge garden but dh insisted he would build the kit alone, as it was a one-person job (it wasn’t). He started by attempting to level the ground, but it was very compacted and hard work and he quickly announced he was going to give up because “the weight of the wood will push the ground level as I build it.” It clearly wouldn’t and I mildly suggested why that that might not actually happen and the risk that would make the joins harder to connect together.
Three hours and a lot of swearing and sweating later, dh finished. I said encouragingly, “well it turned out ok” to which dh replied without blinking, “it’s wonky, if you look closely. The problem is some of the joins aren’t perfectly square with each other and I had to bend some of the internal screws to make it connect. It was bloody hard to do. I think it may be because the ground was uneven to start with and the wood wasn’t heavy enough to push the ground flat.” Riiiiiiight.
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Last year, while I was doing the weekly shop, dh took it upon himself to “finish off” tidying up our front garden which I had been working on for a few weeks. After 20 years of marriage it is an accepted that I do the plants and he does the grass, because in the past some lovely plants have died under my dh’s not-so-tender care.
When I got home from the shop, I burst into tears the moment I saw what he had “achieved”. Dh confidently told me he had removed the dead stuff I hadn’t gotten round to, including tugging out that dead twiggy plant next to the fence which was “rooted quite deep actually.”
Once I stifled the sobs, I was able to confirm that he had also chopped up all the “dead” plants so they’d fit in the garden waste bin.
I am afraid, MNetters, I did yell at him.
“Those plants were not dead, they were hibernating, it is still f*ing MARCH. And that dead twiggy thing was the last cutting of my mum’s heritage shrub and it took us four years to get a cutting to take in my garden and we succeeded just before she died. Which, if you ever listened to a word I say, you would already know. And before you suggest we can go and buy another one, no - I already know we cannot because it originated in my great-grandfather’s garden and has probably been growing there for several centuries and definitely does not exist in any garden centre any more.”
And finally - after years of mansplaining so much of our domestic life - dh apologised.