My (28M) wife (40F) nags me about menial household items, even though I pull my weight around the house. Need a way to address it and avoid confrontation.

I’ll start off by saying that I’ve read a few other posts with similar tag lines to this one, usually it seems like someone thinks they’re being nagged but often they aren’t contributing much to the household.

In our case, we both work full time jobs, I do the (>90%) majority of the cooking at home, yard work is all squarely mine, we split laundry and cleaning, and I maintain both of our vehicles and do quite a bit of Reno work with the house too.

My wife will take the time to stop and tell me about things that are left out of place, or not done the way she would, or if I overlook something that ought to have been done. It makes me feel patronized when this happens, as it does several times a day.

When I have brought up how the engagements make me feel in the past, I get responses from her like if I remembered these things, there would be no issue, but I forget to do a lot of stuff so it gets on her nerves. When I find something she’s left out of place, I never feel the need to talk to her about it, I just fix it if it needs to be fixed and move on.

I want to be understanding of her need to communicate things that are important to her, but I feel that the way things are going puts a needless strain on things. I suspect that the way she responds when I have brought this up is her being defensive.

Does anyone have a recommendation on how I can bring this up to my wife, maximizing the odds that she’ll be understanding rather than defensive?

TL;DR: help! I am looking for ways to address an ongoing issue where my wife makes a point to pull me aside to talk through everything that is out of place/not cleaned up/etc., and I can’t figure out how to address it.

Submitted January 30, 2022 at 07:54PM by travellinman https://ift.tt/9Ua6DbjZm