AIBU to be mildly annoyed when greeted in my own home throughout the day?

[Sugarnspicenallthingsnaice]

DH and I are normally a very close and loving couple but very different in this respect and I find myself irritated at times.

I greet him (very warmly and affectionately) first thing in the morning if we've woken up separately, or if one of us comes home from being out.

He has to verbally acknowledge me literally every single time our paths cross in the house. If one of appears up or down the stairs. If one of us comes out of the bathroom and encounters the other. When one comes inside from the garden. It's most often accompanied by a banal and rhetorical question; Watching TV? All finished? All clean? Minding your own fucking business? (OK, I made that last one up.)

Do you do this?
If you don't, would you find it annoying?

The replies 😂

Turn and give him a hug ffs.

are you sure you don’t live with my husband?! 😂 Mine does this all the time too and if I don’t respond, he’ll say: “Talk to myself then, shall I?”

I’ve got used to it after 20 years. I think it’s a form of social tic or some sort of anxiety thing in my husband’s case. He also waffles on nonsensically quite often, too, making up song lyrics and repeating a number of stock phrases every day.

It generally goes over my head but sometimes it does grate a bit!

As for “bids for connection”. Fuck me.

She does NOT sound like a grumpy cow! She just sounds like a woman who has had enough of her husband's constant, pointless, inane waffling and drivel, and the constant need to talk, comment, chat, ask questions, and talk bollocks, every minute of every day, even when conversation is not needed.

As a pp said, God forbid women don't sit there all polite, looking pretty, and being quiet, just waiting for their oh-so-important husband to speak!

JFC!

That would drive me mad 😩 The all clean and all good is 🤢

I think you should (nicely) tell him that everything you do doesn’t need clarifying or affirming or, as Basil Fawlty once said, stating the bleedin’ obvious!

And then he will say 'Ahhhh, are you giving me a hug?'

😂

Sorry, @Sugarnspicenallthingsnaice I couldn't resist!!! 😆

OP I totally get what you mean. My DH always asks “what are you watching?” when I’m watching TV but every single time he has no interest in the answer. It’s never something he’ll have heard of and he doesn’t even enjoy watching TV anyway. So it’s a pointless question. Which I think is your irritation too - the pointless comments. However I do take on board from the other comments that he’s probably just wanting to engage with me.

Only on MN should you end your relationship because of this. IRL you’d be seen as a total nutjob for ending a marriage over such a trivial thing!

I think it’s a mismatch in a need or desire to connect with the other person. Of the two of DH and I , I’m probably the more emotionally self sufficient and I don’t generally need to reassure myself that he loves me every time we pass. But with DS1, who’s 18 and pulling away from me as young adults must? I do feel a need to connect with him, often making a passing comment or asking what he’s up to. I almost certain that it bugs the shit out of him, but my urge is to connect. We don’t talk as much as we used to - also normal, but unsettling from my side anyway.

Which is exactly what I said

Jeez, ok. Some people are seriously projecting here, lol. I certainly never said she should be sitting around looking pretty waiting for some bloke to say something. I said talk to the guy. He probably doesn’t know he’s being an annoying twat, and it’s easily fixed with a conversation!

Hallelujah!!!!
This

I get you.

I call it stating the bleeding obvious.

Also “what are you doing” when I am literally scrubbing a plate clean stood in front of a bowl of sudsy water at the kitchen sink

What do you think I am doing?

Or “I bet you found (item) in the last place you looked.”

WTF does that even mean. Of course it was in the last place I looked. I didn’t find them, decide to ignore them and look elsewhere

Should add h is now xh

Perhaps it needs explaining why people do this.

As others have said, asking what might sound like a pointless question is a way to connect. There are endless angry rants threads on MN about the question “How are you?”, and why people ask it when they “obviously” do not care.

Seeing someone reading a paper, and asking “anything interesting in there?” is an offer to make conversation. I think the skill is in not asking the same question every time, and responding to somebody’s body language. Suppose a partner comes home from work radiating angry body language. Asking a simple “what’s wrong?” shows that you’ve noticed it, and gives them an opportunity to offload, if they want to, but equally, respecting if they don’t want to talk about it.

People often copy what they were brought up to do. If a DH came from a family where everyone acknowledges everyone, they will do it, probably without realising it. If you don’t like it, you should communicate that you don’t like it. I was brought up that if someone in or out of the family speaks to you, you must acknowledge it, even if it’s just a nod or a smile. The phrase “I’m not talking to you” was considered extremely rude. Even “go away!” was considered rude, we were supposed to say “leave me alone”, preferably with “please” in front.

In spite of that, I recently educated my 76-year-old mum on the way she does conversation. She finds silence very awkward indeed, and her way to break silence is to be extremely inquisitive, almost to the point of interrogation. If I mentioned visiting a cathedral, she would demand “who was the architect?”, or “you did make a donation, didn’t you?”. I eventually told her that this kind of questioning is exhausting, and she could instead say “tell me about your cathedral visit”, therefore inviting conversation, rather than demanding it. I think it’s because she was a language teacher, and in oral tests, she would ask lots of questions to keep the candidates talking. My brother told me that when she visited his new home, she demanded (among many other things) “where do you put your recycling”? His reply was “Do you really want to know?”And yes, she did really want to know.

Used a lot of emojis there, have you?

soz

I think it's annoying because it sounds so patronising, as if talking to a very small child or a pantomime simpleton. That's why it's incredibly annoyingly effective with stroppy teenagers whom you wish would leave the room.

Why would you see someone quietly reading and interrupt them ?

This would annoy the hell out of me!! Dh definitely tries to engage more than I do, but I find him really annoying so often don't. It sounds really bad when I write it down but if I was emptying the dishwasher and he says 'what are you doing' or 'emptying the dishwasher I see..' I'd probably be like 'what do you think I'm doing' or 'no shit'. We don't engage that much around the house doing routine stuff but we still do spend quality time together and get on just fine.

Can you please ask this to my kids and DH on my behalf. You'd think it would be common sense

In fact, I do feel really quite strongly about the fact that most often, we (especially Brits, it seems) don’t call each other out on these things: we’d rather appear to keep the peace, and seethe silently and resentfully. I had at least two friends in my adult life really suddenly cut me off, and I think it was because they didn’t like my clingy nature, and other things. One of them explained it later, when it was much too late, and I was really upset by this: not for their reasons, but their refusal to tell me earlier. (They probably thought I’d cling to them all the more.)

So if we don’t like someone’s habits, I think it can be really unkind not to tell them, before it gets to the screaming rant stage, or the good old mumsnet war cry of “LTB”, get your ducks in a row, etc.

It would depend if I know them, and I would look at their body language. You can often tell by looking if someone would be happy to be interrupted or not.

I think being an introvert is probably the route if the annoyance.

Im quite a sociable person and love being out but I can’t tolerate it constantly. A few hours and I’m peopled out.

There’s only so many questions I can answer in a day and if they are every 30 minutes I’d have run out of steam by 10am 🤣

I would also find those questions intensely irritating. It's like he's talking to a toddler.
Just ignore him if you don't want to ask him not to do it.

My DH can be a bit like this - incessant questions and commentary on pretty much everything. He has ADHD and just basically says everything that's on his mind without thinking. It drives me batshit and I often just say "well, what do you think?" or "I don't know, ask the cat".

It's not unreasonable to either be or prefer someone who's either a companionable silence type or a verbal communication type. Both are normal. But it is wildly unreasonable to only realise you're incompatible with your spouse after decades of marriage.

"He talks all the time" did you not notice this..... BEFORE you married him?

"He's always silent and antisocial" is the flipside of this and that gets complained about just as much.

Absolutely
It shows serious lack of communication skills imho