That thing where men can't find things...

[Lakesfun]

I'm on holiday with newish BF. I.e. our things and finances are comletely seperate, if his stuff is lost it's entirely his problem, there's no "we" to replace it.

He has a fancy sports watch, which is important to him. He's been saying for two days that he took it off in the car and it's disappeared. He's been to look several times and getting increasingly bothered by it.

I have left him to it, thinking I'll have a look when I'm next in the car, which was this morning. It was literally the first thing I saw when I opened the door, in the passenger footwell. Found in less than a second.

There was no benefit to him in it being missing, and he definitely cared about it. What is it that makes them "all" so useless with this stuff?

I think they just lie and want you to do the work.

There have been reels made about this. It's a thing.

It's means they're too bloody lazy to look for something that isn't jumping up and down waving itself about.

Yes, I would say that he hasn't actually looked and essentially wants you to do the work for him, whether that's a conscious decision or a subconscious embedded pattern of behaviour.

Did you leave it there and tell him that you'd seen it?

I used to have a lot of fun with this with my now ex-husband.

When he used to ask me if I'd seen "yada yada yada" I'd make things up like "oh yeah it's upstairs on the bedside table" just to see him go to get it and chuckle about it.

Funnily enough, he fell for it every time, he never seemed to learn.😂

It’s definitely a mentality left over from childhood probably when a highly efficient, slightly controlling mummy sorted everything out for them.

I say this as someone whose DH is not like that but I very much am (lazy, instantly overwhelmed and want someone else to deal with it).

With my first husband, it wasn't so much the fact that he'd put zero effort into actually looking, it was the regular "what have you done with...?" accusations that used to get to me. What the hell would I want with your 3mm left-handed widget twiddler, you fucking idiot?

With DH, I'd have said there was an element of knowing I'd deal with it if he didn't, but in this case it was something he really cared avout but which if it was lost was lost afaic.

we have something we call "fresh eyes" in this house. Yes, it is MORE likely to be DH who needs fresh eyes, but it can be me too. I spent an increasingly irritable half na hour searchign for the knife sharpener in the kitchen a few months ago. With embarassing uptick in door and drawer slamming and muttered, "who keeps moving my shit". Eventually, I calmed down enough to ask DH to come and look with "fresh eyes" secretly assuming he'd put it somewhere and he'd shamefaceldy find it in a ridiculous place. He walked in, and picked it up from next to the stove. Where it is routinely, and usually kept.

😂that made me chuckle

It's definitely not all men. Out of all the men I've been in relationships with, I've never experienced this. In fact, I'm more likely to be the one who loses things (ADHD) 🤣

This is definitely me not my husband in my relationship 🤣 - I will admit that at times I cut to asking him quite quickly because I know he’s more likely to find something than I am (FAOD I do always try first!) but he just has a brain that spots things in a way that mine doesn’t! It isn’t laziness. There are plenty of other things I am more reliable at than he is, it balances out.

In this house we have the stereotype where I can locate anything and everything belonging to the other 4 people but often have no idea where my own stuff is....

Would echo what @Wac90 says though. A helpful reframe is that teams play to each others strengths. Maybe you're the Chief Finder in your relationship and he brings something else to the table that you've traditionally not been great at 🤷🏼‍♀️

I can never find anything. I just don’t see it. I’m not lazy or doing it deliberately, I don’t accuse
others of moving my stuff. Once I phoned dh to see if he had seen my charger and he told me where it was - he was in France and I was five feet away from it . I am terrible at finding things in the fridge.

Agree with this. Once I stopped going to help immediately the children learned to look properly, exh never learnt. DD does sometimes admit to looking with "dad eyes" so even she'd noticed how pathetic and lazy he was.

Dh’s ‘best’ was being unable to find things in shops. One that has gone down in the annals was telling me that in the huge Asda, where he’d just been shopping, there was no loo cleaner.
‘No, none at all! Yes, of course I LOOKED! Yes, of course I looked PROPERLY!!’

😂😂

Ever since then he’s had the sense to ASK!

This is possibly the worst example of blaming a woman for a man's faults I've yet seen. OP's boyfriend can't find his watch so he has a controlling mother, wtf 😂

I'm the one in our house who can't find stuff and DH will spot it right in front of me. If I can't find something and say I've looked he will query if I've had a proper look or a Dappledthings look.

10 minutes ago, my DH asked me where I had hidden the tin of olives.
I opened the fridge door and pointed out that the glass jar was at eye level in the door of the fridge.
He insists that he looked 5 minutes before and I must have moved them.

The other day I admitted I had in fact hidden the laundry tabs. On the middle shelf, on the right hand side, right at the front where they always are.

It’s particularly annoying that he can’t keep things in the right place in the fridge. Apparently it doesn’t matter.

When my DH does this it usually means he forgot to look. One memorable occasion he came back with no cheese, bread, milk… they were out of all of those things, honestly (not lockdown or Christmas btw).
Our other running joke is when he comes back with far more beer/treats than were on the list and he says they were giving them away. And we all reply ‘In exchange for money’ 😂

I doubt you would find out, but I do think it may be linked to upbringing. Some parents ensure they have capable sons. I remember a vast difference at university between some of the male students and others.

This is such a thing in our house that DS, when he was younger, invented the phrase 'Daddy Looking'. The annoying thing is that DH is absolutely certain that he's really, really good at finding things, genuinely considers it to be one of his positive traits, but in reality he can be staring straight at the thing, in the place where it has always been kept, with a 6ft flashing neon arrow pointing to it, and he still won't find it.

My DH is like this and it is always mega important items- car keys, wallet, phone, to name a few. Often when we are just about to leave the house.

There's a Substack from Shelley the Middle Aged Lady Mom about "ornamental eyes" that the men and boys in her life have.

And how it makes you want to bludgeon them.