While we're being honest....

Nini and I had a nice light-hearted (and yet stupidly dangerous) discussion today - one of those ones married couples have that starts as joke, but can all too easily spill over into the divorce courts - about our top five irritations with our partner. At least, it started that way, but Nini didn't seem prepared to stop at five and kept going, so I had to walk out while she was still in full flight.
Here is the gist of the five things I did manage to hear:

1. You are the grumpiest man in the world in the morning. It is a close-run thing, but I think I actually prefer the mornings when you don't speak, and simply fart loud enough to wake the dead before stamping out of the house to go to work. Compared to the days where we actually engage in any conversation before 8:30 a.m, those are your polite mornings...
2. Stop telling me to move out of the way or hurry up. I am not a child, you are not at work so I don't need 'product managing', and most of all you are not the boss of me.
3. When we are watching TV and the phone rings for me, you tut and sigh and make me go into the other room, saying "That's why we bought a cordless!" When we are watching TV and the phone rings for you, you tut and sigh and make 'turn it down' gestures, snarling "I'm on the phone". Both of these scenarios often happen in the same evening, often within minutes of each other, and I swear that if I have to suffer this double-standard one more time, you will be needing the phone to call for an ambulance - and I will be turning the TV up as high as it will go while you try and make that call....
4. When you come home and ask "What's for dinner?", and I tell you, do not then either sigh loudly, or say "oh" in a disappointed voice. It is incredibly rude. Furthermore, you need to grow up and understand that nobody can expect cheeseburgers or toad-in-the-hole for dinner every single night: that is a childish fantasy, and there is compelling medical evidence to suggest that people who only eat stuff like that are dropping dead all over the place. When nutritionists recommend 'five-a-day', they are not talking about your favourite processed meat product, or bags of pickled onion Monster Munch.
5. Can you please, for the love of all that is good in the world, stop cupping your genitals? You don't even know you are doing it, and you do it all the time...look, you're doing it NOW, while I'm talking to you about it...

And for me, regarding her:

1. If we were ever to gather all our drinking glasses together we would have far too many to fit in the cupboard. Fortunately, that will never happen, because you like to keep a big collection of them sitting half-filled next to your bed (adding a new one each night), or on random windowsills of the house to collect dust.
2. What's the point in having a mobile phone, if you leave the bloody thing at home? There's already a non-mobile phone line at home, we don't need another one. This is particularly galling if, when you go out and I need to reach you, I try to call you up only to hear your mobile ringing from three feet away, under the sofa cushions. And I will also add that mobile phones don't run on magic, and even if you have actually taken it with you, it still needs to be both charged up and switched on before it can actually function in the way it was intended...
   
3. I don't care what you say, that is your hair blocking the plughole. It's ten times longer than mine. Why I am I dealing with it?
4. When I say I don't like satsumas or some other food product, it is NOT - and I want to be very clear here - because I have "never been given a proper one to try". It is because I don't like the taste of satsuma. The taste of satsuma has not changed dramatically since I last tried one, and the fact that it is you who chose it in the supermarket will make absolutely no difference to the flavour. This also applies to recipes; I will not magically start liking rice pudding because you made it, it is still just rice pudding, you don't know best here, and I don't want any.
5. Dammit, woman, I have to cup my genitals to keep them protected because you have the habit of catching them with a swinging arm, or the edge of the hoover, or a thrown object, on pretty much a weekly basis. You are basically clumsy around my genitals, and it is not funny when you (or increasingly, our daughters - who are so like their mother) manage to inadvertently wallop me in "Daddy's special hurty place" and I end up with my face pressed into the carpet moaning softly. Also, when that happens, please do not sit one of the children on my back and say "Look girls, Daddy is a horsey". You might find this hilarious, but it is just not funny, and I think it encourages them.

Ah, honesty in marriage. I can see why some folks think it's overrated.