Would You Get Divorced Over This?

If my life were a reality show, you’d see the same type of squabbling as Jon & Kate Plus 8. (Our reality show would have to be on Animal Planet, though, because it’s Me & Him Plus 8 [Cats] right now.) Our fights are just as epic and just as irrelevant, only right now neither one of us can afford to drive off in a new sports car to a bachelor pad with a caravan of young women we met in bars (or in my case, a stud bodyguard). Not until that reality show money starts coming in, anyway.

Just like Kate, I’m a sniper critic. Under my breath, barely audible, I maintain a running commentary of how I’m not getting the cooperation and labor needed to keep our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning. Mumble, mumble, mumble. If cameras were on me, I know I would mumble louder, hoping the entire camera crew would turn on him and guilt-trip him into keeping our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning.

Like Jon, he is largely unresponsive to sniping. He saves his retaliation for three main arenas – the kitchen, the car, and who let the cats out? And he’s no mumbler either. The shouting can get epic, awesome and FTW, as they say on Twitter. An outsider would find some of these verbal beatdowns comical because the causes are so off-the-wall. Okay, sure, sometimes I did let the cats out on purpose, but most of the time, it’s not like I did something just to aggravate him. If any of his meltdowns or my sniping were packaged as a weekly TV show, you would definitely think we were headed for divorce.

But alas, we are too poor. We have to stay together.

What do we fight the most about? Not in any particular order:

- Who let the cats out

- The fact that I use the garbage disposal to grind up and dispose of leftover food (Isn’t that what it’s for?? Isn’t it? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer from him on why garbage disposals were invented and what they are supposed to be used for.)

- Why he piles junk in the garage without leaving a passageway to get through the garage and get to the junk

- Why he keeps trying to turn any room he spends time in into the garage

- Why I don’t run the garbage disposal for a precise amount of time (which only he knows) before I run the dishwasher

- Why I don’t wash the dishes BEFORE I put them in the dishwasher (Isn’t that what the dishwasher is for??)

- Why he leaves damp washcloths around the sink in balls instead of spreading them out so they actually dry

- Why he won’t flush the toilet before taking a shower (it does not steal all his hot water, this is just crazy. I flush toilets in the house while he’s in the shower and he doesn’t even know it.)

- Why he spends so much time in the passing lane

- Why I drive at all when I am clearly a woman

- Why doesn’t he write it down when he withdraws cash from the ATM

- Why do I sell everything we no longer use (because we no longer use it???)

Wouldn’t this make a good television show? I think so. Then we could get enough money to live in separate places.