Slaying Dragons
When I saw this cartoon on The New Yorker‘s Tumblr page, I had to laugh. Like many people (I imagine. Maybe this is just me.), most of the times I come across a New Yorker cartoon, my first reaction is to think, Wow, that’s smart! instead of, HILARIOUS! I think that’s probably the point. However, this one was laugh-out-loud funny. Mostly because it’s true, in our relationship, at least.
Tim has a habit of doing really big things as either romantic gestures or as a way to help out around the house. For example, two of the toilets in our house were leaking a little bit when we moved in. This, as you can imagine, was a problem, but not a huge deal. Neither of us are particularly handy, but Tim wanted to learn, so he went to the hardware store, asked some questions, bought something to install in the toilet that was supposed to take him five minutes. It took him three hours.
Meanwhile, I’ve been cooking, washing dishes, vacuuming, dusting, making the bed, cleaning the kitchen – all of those little things that totally eat up your day when you have to do them all together. Every time I turned around, there was another mess from another handyman thing Tim wanted to learn how to do. His part of the chores also were going undone because he didn’t have time to do them. Because he was working on bigger projects around the house.
Tim thinks that, because he is doing these big things around the house, or slaying the dragons, if you will, he is chipping in as much as if he had cleaned the bathrooms. I tend to think that it’s the smaller things that make a space livable, and that they need to get done before anything else.
I’m not sure if this is a men are from Mars, women are from Venus moment, but it does seem as if Tim and I are stereotypically different in this way. I relish the small stuff: chores done, flowers brought home, an unexpected “I love you.” Tim tends to think those things are useless and would rather go big or go home: man projects, extravagant date nights, dragons slayed. (Though, according to him, he is NOT a centipede hunter. Speaking of dragons.)
What do you think? Is your relationship like this at all? Or is this just us?