That Guy Should See This Letter

This morning, I ran into a couple of letters to advice columnists that addressed similar issues. In each case, a spouse was walking all over the personal space of another.

The first I ran into concerned a main breadwinner sometimes working from home, and randomly bombing parts of his stay-at-home wife's routine.

Miss Manners's reply to that one was basically for the wife to make her needs known. Fair enough, and adequate from an etiquette perspective, although I expect that the writer would want further advice on how to do that, as well as how to negotiate such boundaries.

Going further along those lines was a recent Carolyn Hax letter.

This one concerned a husband coming home and ruining his wife's alone time by interrupting a show she likes to watch then with unwanted commentary. This wife has a traditional job, and because their home is small, that night is her alone time.

Hax's advice is good, and accounts for different levels of severity of the problem, and she sometimes adds intelligent comments from her readers.

They're adorable, but keeping them from killing themselves for eight hours straight can be hard on you. (Image by Mike Cox, via Unsplash, license.)

One of these was something that could help a lot, assuming the offending partner had at some point shared enough of the responsibility for caring for a baby or toddler, as the below should make clear:

Here’s what we learned from having little kids: It’s the hope for relief that breaks you. Being on for eight hours without help is hard, but expecting help and having it not show up is torture.

It wasn't exactly PTSD, but that brought back memories from the time my wife was in residency and I had to take the kids -- a baby and a toddler at the time -- all ... day ... long for about half of each week. We used sitters and part-time daycare: It was hard whenever those fell through unexpectedly.

Too many people forget to take care of themselves, or forget that their loved ones need to do the same. It's important whether or not young ones are involved, but it's much easier to see with that kind of experience.

-- CAV