Why Husbands Do What They Do

The title of this blog will probably give tons of married women hope but I wouldn’t invest too much into it. I am going to write about a couple incidents that have happened to my husband in my presence that now explain why he never listens to me. 

On our first trip to Paris together, my husband was meeting up with his best friend who lived there at the time. We also met said best friend’s girlfriend for the first time. The moment after we arrived we had lunch with both of them at a restaurant on the Champs Elysees. It was delicious and we overdid it. We took to walking the city afterwards so that we could digest our enormous meal and so that my husband could become acquainted with the sites as well. We made our way from the Champs Elysees all the way to the Latin Quarter. My husband spent most of the time talking and catching up with his best friend while I got to know the girlfriend. 

As we crossed over into the Latin Quarter from in front of Notre Dame, I called out to my husband to ask him a question. In trying to pay attention to me, he didn’t notice an enormous pile of doggie doo in the street so he stepped in it. This made me laugh for quite some time because he was very frustrated by this situation. The girlfriend mentioned that this was normal in Paris and was considered good luck. My husband didn’t really want to hear this. I kept laughing at the whole thing because I had been through this myself. I also had never seen my husband so upset in all the time we were married. But his upset behavior was more comical than scary. 

On another occasion my husband and his friend were walking in front of me while I was taking in the sites and enjoying myself. I called out to him again for some reason that I can’t remember now. He just narrowly missed stepping in another pile of puppy poo and again, I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m not about shadenfreude. It was more my husband’s facial expressions that made me crack up. They were so childlike in frustration and yet totally ridiculous that I couldn’t control my laughter.  My husband said at that time, “see what happens when I listen to you?” It should have been a warning but I never thought about it as anything other than a funny situation. 

Back in NYC, we had another encounter with canine excrement; this time he didn’t miss. Now that I think back on it, this explains a lot of why he never listens to me. If the consequence of listening to me is his shoes get soiled, then I know what he’d rather avoid. It took me a while to learn this important lesson but now I know. 

So married women out there, think really deeply on some kind of situations that created patterns when you tried to talk to your husband or get his attention. You may find yourself in the same situation as I am in now – a husband that refuses to listen to me because he’s afraid of getting smelly shoes.