Bodacious Boomer

Have the number of pleases and thank-yous diminished in your everyday conversations with your significant other? Does your spouse treat strangers better than you? Are what used to be considered “common courtesies” a thing of the  past at your place?

I noticed for awhile now that in my house the pleases and the thank-yous have become few and far between. (At least the ones headed in my direction.) When I was young I was always taught that everybody got a please and thank you every time no matter what the question or situation. If I was at a friend’s house for a sleepover and their mom handed me a moldy piece of moose meat for dinner my response would’ve been “Thank you.” My mom taught me that whatever what I was given by an adult, that had better be my response. I never actually had a severed head served to me when I was little. However, my mom had that response so deeply ingrained in me I”m sure my response would’ve been “Thank you.”

It seems to me that most of the time now, I am summoned now by my husband. I’m not really asked if I can do something. It’s not really a question anymore, it’s more of a command- “Check on this” or “See if you can find that.” Then whenever whatever has been done and he’s told about it I get nada,  no “Thank-you” or “Good job.” Now in his defense, Doug is a really nice guy. He helps cook, clean, do laundry and the dishes. If he’s cooked a meal, he always sees that I’m served before he is. He’s a very generous person both financially and in more “personal” ways.  He still opens doors for me when we’re out. I don’t want to paint him like some knuckle-dragging troglodyte.

However, I just miss the pleases and the thank-yous. I know he still uses the words. I hear him use them when he’s talking to other people. So why don’t I get them as well? When I mentioned this to him this morning he actually said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He was clueless (or so he said) that this had been going on awhile. I explained to him again then for about the 4K time that what happens between us later that night is determined by how my day went. He looked at me with a puzzled expression and said “Really?”

If I’m in the kitchen and he’s in our home office, AKA the extra bedroom, and I call to him, without fail the response I get is “Whaaaaat?” He sounds like an annoyed Burgess Meredith when he played the Penguin in Batman. (It’s this really nasally sound that doesn’t really sound like Doug at all.) He does it so frequently now that even Amanda and Nate kid him about it when they hear it. I’m not expecting him to act like Sir Walter Raleigh and throw his cape down in front of me for every puddle I encounter. Nor would I want him to pick me up and carry me across. (If he did that, then he’d need a truss afterwards.) But are the those words just too much to expect when you’ve been married this long? Is anybody else going through this too? I’d love to know.