Right and Wrong

Every weekend, I sit at the pool and listen to an acquaintance complain to me about his spouse. Two months of enduring this agonizing moaning has made me wonder about our perceptions of right and wrong. I'm not talking about the big right and wrong; the ten listed in the bible, the ones that put you away for life, but smaller stuff that can get on your nerves. I pose to you a question: What if you stopped seeing these things as right or wrong and just started viewing them as "alternative?"

Take the dishwasher. Many people have a specific way in which they put dishes in the dishwasher. My husband loads from back to front, I load from front to back. I contend that neither way is wrong because the dishes are getting in the dishwasher where they are automatically cleaned and dried. Front to back, back to front; who cares. Bottom line is, they're in there.

Then there's the matter of putting the dishes away. We have a drawer for utensils but my husband often puts the utensils in the silverware drawer. I used to spend precious minutes searching for missing spatulas until I figured out where they were. I would be annoyed, move them back in a huff and spend a few seconds calling him a bone head or some other such minor insult in my head. Then I unconsciously started looking in the silverware drawer for the missing implements. The placement went from wrong to alternative. I now have identified all the alternative placements that my husband uses when he unloads the dishwasher and I'm much happier for it.

Household division of labor can be a very contentious topic, and I think it's because we are all stuck with this idea of "my way or the highway." How much happier would our homes be if we just accepted that everyone has their own way of doing things? As long as the task is completed, that's the most important thing.