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Comment by chacham15 | Hacker News Reader

> I now understand that when I left that glass there, it hurt my wife—literally causing pain—because it felt to her as if I had just said, “Hey. I don’t respect you or value your thoughts and opinions. Not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher is more important to me than you are.”

I think that here lies the issue. Is this the only way that you show that you value their thoughts / opinions? If so, the problem was never with the cups. If not, then this is how you comfort / reassure your partner and not "lets agree to disagree." From that place you have a conversation where you both figure out how to best make the both of you happy. E.g. "we'll get a special/specific cup which looks like it belongs in this area and you can leave it here as long as its empty and only use that cup." There are always various compromises that can be made as long as you have that conversation and are both looking for the best for each other.

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Yeah I think the cup is just a symptom of neither of them being able to step into the other's shoes, but it's hard to diagnose without a larger picture.

The husband could have said "I understand that this is a small thing that really bothers you and even though I don't understand, it's clearly an asymmetrical thing in terms of my effort vs. your being bothered, so I will put the cup away."

The wife could have just as easily said "I understand that this cup bothers me more than you think it should, if you're really that deadset on not putting it away can we find some other way to compromise?"

But who knows, maybe she tried to explain that to him a bunch of different times and even when she was saying "it's not about the cup it's about not feeling listened to" he still just heard "it's about the cup"

It isn't just about respect. It is about you leaving work for your partner to do even though you could have done it yourself. This is about emotional labour and the uneven divide of household jobs.

There's a whole spectrum, from misalignment on the proper state of the house, to the feelings of respect, to the increase in household jobs for the other partner.

If the husband puts his cup by the sink at night, then picks it back up again in the morning, and finally after a few days it ends up in the dishwasher, then you'll never convince him that it's mismatched emotional labor, because in his eyes the cup didn't need to be put away.

If you try to tell him that it's not fair for her to put his cup in the dishwasher every night and his response is "I was going to use the cup again tomorrow" then the conversation will never make any progress.

No one is right or wrong in a conversation about whether it's ok to put your cup by the sink at night and then pick it up again the next day. It's just one of those things in marriage that you need to agree on how it will be, based on effort vs. how much one partner is bothered. And then stick to the agreement while giving your partner some occasional leeway.

But I don't think in this case he said there was uneven divide of work. Also he wasn't leaving work for her to do, he did the work just not on her schedule, it was the wife who had the issue of the glass being there until end of day.

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