My husband and I have an ongoing battle when it comes to the dishes. We do have a dishwasher but I never had one growing up. The first time I ever had one was when I bought my place several years ago and since I didn’t know how to work it, I would wash my dishes in the sink then use the dishwasher as a drying rack. Because of this, my husband thinks that I’m terrible at loading the dishwasher (he’s right) and so he wants to be in charge of the dishes…which would be totally fine, if he actually did it.
See, here’s the vicious cycle that happens all the time: (1) the dishwasher gets run but it never gets emptied; (2) because of this, all current dirty dishes simply get piled into the sink; (3) the pile keeps growing until it’s so tall and precariously stacked, something is sure to fall and break until (4) I get fed up, empty the dishwasher of the clean dishes then load it with the dirty dishes and then (5) my husband complains about the awful way I’ve loaded the dishwasher.
The other thing my husband loves to do, especially with things that either don’t fit in the dishwasher or are supposed to be washed by hand, is soak dirty dishes. The grill we made chicken on? Soak it. The gigantic pasta pot? Soak it. Wine glasses? Soak ‘em. The problem is that he’ll leave things to soak and then they’ll just sit there. For days and days on end. Then other things, like utensils and small plates get put into the pot of soaking water (which has at that point turned cold and is no longer soapy) only to end up greasy or covered in tomato sauce. So not only do the original dishes never get cleaned but then the other ones end up dirtier than when we first used them.
My husband’s idea of being “in charge of the dishes” is to pretty much ignore them until we no longer have room in the sink to stack any more dishes and we’re eating off of paper plates with our hands. We’re gonna need a bigger sink.
