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maleficent · 08-29-2005, 08:16 AM

A gentleman caller wished to weigh in on this topic: he makes a very good point

Quote:

think many relationships and marriages suffer from a syndrome I'll call Unspecificishness.. yep, it's a word. The majority here are belaboring the fact that when you ask your husband or boyfriend to do something, and he does it, it's not done right. You don't have to lower your expectations at all, or even yell and scream that he didn't do it, or he didn't do it right. If you're SPECIFIC up front about the issue, then it saves a lot of emotional hurt on both sides of the equation. In the dry-cleaning example above, I would have acted exactly like your husband. Not that I believe if I bring it in, it is your duty to hang it up -- but I wouldn't have THOUGHT to hang it up. Now I'm not exactly the dumb brute male, but dry-cleaning to me breaks into three things;

Get clothes.
Dry clean clothes.
Return clothes.

To most people, I think this is a reasonable assumption. But when you're asking someone to do something FOR you, its likely that you want it done a specific way. You are asking them a FAVOR, even if you've been married 30 years -- you're still asking them to do something for you. I know that you've gotten to the point that you expect him to do the dishes every-so-often but its still a favor.

In the example above, tell him that you don't like your dry-cleaning wrinkled, and when he brings it home he should hang it up. Now there's certainly many ways to say this, most of which are not a good idea. If you make a joke out of it.. "Hey, honey.. bring the dry cleaning in next time.. hahahah".. you might not get the reaction you desired. It sounds like you're mocking us for not understanding your individual criteria for laundry care. If you just tell us.. "Bring in the damn dry-cleaning when you bring it home.." you might get one of two reactions. One, you're treating us like our Mother, and we'll rebel like any good teenager. Two, we don't remember WHY you wanted us to bring it in, and we might forget. So.. tell us that you really want your clothes dry-cleaned, you'd really appreciate if we did it, and brought it in and hung it up so you'd have nice smooth clothes to wear. And if he still fails -- remember, we're all still human.

Above all, it can be related to a technical (engineering) task. If you create specifications for the project that you want done, and they're done to those specifications -- you cannot be upset when another "implied" specification was not completed. We read it exactly like you said it, and we did the bare minimum to meet that specification. If you want the dishes over here, and the towel here and the dry-cleaning hung up -- save us both the pain of anger and resentment and be specific!!