Marriage may be about getting along, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that two people will ever truly think and act as one.  It’s more about balancing spheres of control, so both parties feel they’ve got power over something.  Couples are always jockeying for supremacy over little bits of household territory.  The classic illustration of domestic tug-o-war is the old gripe about women wanting men to leave the toilet seat down and men wanting women to leave it up.  In my house the tug-o-war isn’t over the toilet seat; it’s over the office seat, that is, the height of the revolving chair.  Same basic problem, but in reverse.

My husband K— is a tall guy with long legs.  If I’ve been using the office, he comes in and sits down to find that the chair’s about three inches lower than where he left it.  Momentarily, he has that uncomfortable sensation of being in free-fall, butt first.  On the other hand, if he used the office last, I sit down to discover that the chair comes up to meet me rather sooner than I am prepared to greet it.  I attribute my backside spread not to middle age, but to the flattening effect of these repeated sudden impacts.

Then there’s the matter of where stuff is stored in the kitchen.  Since our food arrangement is that I cook and K— does the dishes, he’s the one who puts things away.  It wasn’t always this way, however, and back in the days when I did the dishes I had a place for everything, a place where any item could always be found when it wasn’t in use.

Then K— started doing the washing up, and that was the last time anything was put in the same place twice.  Now, finding something in our kitchen is a lot like playing a shell game.  Is the vegetable peeler under the cup on the left?  The right?  Maybe the middle?  Or behind curtain number two?  Who knows?

I reach for a spatula to flip an omelet, but is it in its assigned place, the ceramic utensil jar where it resided for years before K—’s reign as scullery maid?  Of course not.  It’s gone on a little trip to broaden its horizons.  First I try the utensil drawer to the right of the range.   I rifle past the pie server, some silicone-tipped tongs, a lemon squeezer (haven’t seen that in a coon’s age!), a set of three nesting strainers and more, but find no spatula.  The omelet is setting quickly.  I scurry to the utensil drawer to the left of the range, pushing aside cheese knives, a whipped cream beater, biscuit cutters, a lethal-looking cleaver, and an instant-read thermometer (so that’s where it went to!)…but no spatula.  The omelet is looking rubbery.  In order, I move on to the cutlery drawer, the drain board and finally the sink.  Eventually it turns up in one of these places, but by the time it does, the omelet is so rigid I don’t need a spatula to turn it.

I serve K— the omelet.  “You’re not having any?” he inquires, seeing nothing but salad on my plate.  “No, just salad for me,” I answer.  He picks at his food, turning the omelet over with his fork.  (“Clink!” is the sound it makes.)  “It’s a bit…well done…on one side,” he observes.  “Yes, love,” I say, popping a succulent slice of cucumber into my mouth, “it’s Cajun style.”  “Cajun style?” he queries, uncertain what that means.  “You know,” I clarify, “blackened.”

And this is on a good day involving just a utensil.  When K— unpacks the groceries, it can be like I never went to the store at all.  $150 worth of provisions gone without a trace. Of course, everything turns up eventually, just not when I need it or where I expect it.

One day after I’d done the grocery shopping, K—’s Mom came over for lunch.  When it was time to serve the salad, I asked K— to fetch the blue cheese dressing.  He came back empty-handed, saying he couldn’t find it.  “Hmmm,” I thought, “that’s strange.  I know I bought some today.”  I went to search for the missing jar.  A few minutes later I came to the table and announced, “Well, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that I found the dressing.  The bad news is that it was in the freezer.”

Now that I think about it, putting things in unexpected places is a bit of a pattern behavior for K—.  If I rearranged furniture the way he used to rearrange our computer desktop, he’d come into the house, absentmindedly head for his usual chair and discover that he just sat on the fireplace tongs.  I say “used to rearrange” because I finally succeeded in putting a stop to that.  The day all my files disappeared seemingly over a cliff, lemming-like, I bought another computer—one that he can’t touch.  Of course, the old files turned up eventually on the old computer, just not where I expected them or when I needed them.

Other things in my house subject to constant oscillating states of being include the thermostat (I’m hot, he’s not), the lights (he turns them on, I appear to be the only one who turns them off) and the direction that toilet paper and paper towel rolls are put on the spindle (he’s “under” while I am “over”).  But in the end none of these are all that important.  All I can say is thank heavens I married a man with whom my differences amount to more of a Shrug-o-War than a real Tug-o-War.  Except for the part about my spreading backside.  Sometime before the dimensions of my rear earn it distinction as one of the country’s smaller states, I’ve got to get control over that situation.

I know—I’ll offer him a quid pro quo.  If he promises never to change the height of the office chair, I’ll stop bugging him about the pile of books, magazines, spare change and dirty socks that’s always by his side of the bed.  It’s deep enough to have annual deposits, like some sort of geological strata.  And if he doesn’t go for that, well, a great big wad o’ Super Glue should do the trick.