OT: For the married fellas

Every once in a while, it's important for us to embrace the things we all share in life.  Yeah, we all love sports (or at least, a sport) which is why we're here in the first place, but what else is there? 

Look, I love my wife, you love your wife, we all love our wives.  But the reality is that when I get home from work and she asks me how my day was, no matter how awful or great it was, my answer is invariably some sort of half-response because I'm tired and just need to veg for 30 minutes and let the stress wash off me while I do a peloton ride, or walk the dog, or do anything that doesn't require affirmative brain function.  On the other hand, when I ask how her day was, I get a 30 minute diatribe about the women she works with and their highly dysfunctional inter-personal relationships.  Every.  Single.  Day.  

To be honest, we get along fantastically and really don't fight at all, but this is the one thing that I just can't stand.  I don't know why it bothers me as much as it does, and I know it's stupid so I just sit there and do my best to act interested, hoping that she won't ask me a question that would require some sort of recollection of what she previously told me during one of these episodes. 

Getting back to the point of this thread, my understanding is that this phenomenon is universal among married couples but who knows.  Anyone else experience this or some derivative of this? 

 

I'm with you on every part of this except for the Family Guy clip since I despise the show.

This is something I've learned to cope with and live with, but it is annoying... largely because it's so constant. My wife is aware of this completely and usually ends her rants with something like, 'Thanks for letting me vent,' or 'sorry for being annoying,' even though she knows I'm only half listening.

The other thing is she complains about the exact same behavior from other friends of ours and especially from her mom. If I feel like I wanna stir the pot a bit (at my own peril) I can point that out. Especially when I come home and start cooking or changing or whatever and she follows me around room to room to tell me these stories, a move we've dubbed the 'follow-bother.'

On one hand, it's annoying and I don't fully understand it since I don't like to unload the things I'm annoyed about from my day on her. I do, sometimes, but in general I'd rather not revisit all of those things at the end of the day.

What I do now is call on my drive home so the air is mostly cleared by the time I get home. It doesn't totally take care of that, but kinda helps, and you might not get caught not listening as easily.

Anyway, it's annoying, but I understand it's part of my job, but we don't get to vent about THAT annoyance back to them. I guess that's what this thread is for, though.

Jesus I could have written your post word for word. My job is boring, some days are slow, some are busy, most are in between. I have few fairly uninteresting encounters with my coworkers. There is nothing I do in any given day that’s worth retelling and I can’t remember minutiae to tell her anyway. Her job is crazy busy every day, yet still incredibly boring to me. She supports a high level executive of a Fortune 500 company. She tells me about him, about all the people that report to him, all of the admins that support the other executives, his travel plans, what he had for lunch, difficult coworkers, the traffic on the way home, and 10,000 other small details that make my eyes glaze over. It’s like characters in a play and I get the audio book version of it. Every day Monday through Friday. Sometimes she tells me when she gets home (almost always after I get home). Sometimes she calls me on the way home. If there’s one thing you should know about me it’s that I despise talking on the phone to anyone. ANYONE. One time I made the mistake of telling her that I don’t care about any of this. She responded angrily “then what the fuck else do you want to talk about?” So she vents and I listen when I just want to eat my dinner or read my book and not have to hear about her TPS Reports.

I say all this with the caveat that I love her, but for fucks sake it takes her an entire work shift worth of time to tell me all of this at the end of a long fucking day like she’s telling it in actual time and at those times I just wish I was the guy from Scanners and make her head explode so that she’d stop telling me about her day aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!