Boyertown PA
6-26-2026 4:23am

THE MEASURE: Mars v. Venus: My Foot.

by Phil Repko

The dishwasher needed to be unloaded. I commenced with the items on the bottom rack. My wife chuckled. “I always do the top first,” she said.

I grunted without motive.

“We are just opposites,” she laughed.

What I said to her with a laugh as well was this, “Well, it’s not really that we are opposite. It’s that you keep doing everything wrong!”

“Or that you’re not smart enough to do the top first,” she said.

It was a light moment. But it has become quaint and sweet to discern how easily we have adopted platitudes and bromides over the years. We say things that have no real teeth in response to situations that might. It’s a coping mechanism that is critically important.

In my head – and in our past – I would have followed up such an assertion that she was wrong with a detailed set of reasons why emptying the bottom rack of the dishwasher made the most sense. In this case, I didn’t, and I had no need for biting my tongue. Persisting in such petty discussions is harmful, and foolish. It took us time to learn this.

After 40 years, we have both learned, without studying, that some lessons do not need to be delivered, nor mastered. Sometimes – no, most of the time – the critical learning should focus on what needs to be learned and taught, and what doesn’t.

The dishwasher, loading and unloading, is not particularly important in the grand scheme of things. However, neither are many of the other things we used to argue about.

I distinctly remember our earliest relationship dynamics. My wife and I earned notoriety among our closest friends and family members for the persistence and regularity of our disagreements.

From 1982 to 1988, most of my wife’s brother and sisters got married. On my side of the family, five of nine of my siblings tied the knot. This is mentionable because those family members were quick to note – in a critical voice - that Julie and I were often actively engaged in squabbles and debates.

My brothers and sisters, and their respective spouses, loved to point out the consistency of our arguments and discussions – with a faint hint of superiority reverberating in the voice. We laughed them off at the time. It didn’t feel as if we had any great acrimony behind the bickering and needling.

Five years later, we watched our friends and family go through their marital growing pains. They grew into their arguments and disagreements. By contrast, our relationship dynamics were overshadowed by the responsibilities of life, work, and family raising. By 1991, we had three kids, a ramshackle house, and endless tasks and troubles. There was no time for disagreement or discussion. Things needed to get done.

Occasionally one of my brothers would mention our early phase of consistent head-butting. “We weren’t arguing,” I said. “We were negotiating.” (Heavy pause). “Now that we have ironed out the details, we have only marital bliss.”

During the next ten years of relationship calisthenics, Julie and I rarely argued, disagreed, or even discussed. What we did was plan, delegate, and assume responsibilities. Our kids and our lives were prioritized and in high focus. In short, the urgency of the situation distracted us from personal or trivial concerns with preferences. Quite simply, life taught us that some lessons need neither to be learned nor taught. My thoughts on how best to fold the laundry, or Julie’s positions on how best to manage the dinner, bath, and bed rituals became inconsequential.

Getting things done – outcomes - overshadowed any need to focus on technique.

Now, to be fair, we certainly had flare-ups that were reminiscent of our bristly courtship. For instance, our first-born did not tolerate whole milk, as we started the path to regular foods. We began a revolving door of baby formula experimentation. When moving on to the ‘next’ type tripled the price, a price that was sure to put a strain on the weekly grocery budget, I suggested she try regular whole milk. After all, he had struggled with the transition, but he was a few months older now.

My suggestion was rejected, and the possibility negated. She wasn’t taking chances with our child’s health. The implication suggested that I saw the boy as a sort of guinea pig for infant nutrition. Yikes.

A week later, a random stranger buying the same formula at the grocery store suggested to my wife that a return to whole milk was worth a try. His first child had been able to tolerate whole milk when he was a bit older, and the formula bill disappeared.

She didn’t say anything. She just tried whole milk. It worked. I didn’t realize it for weeks.

These days, after 40 years of marriage, we have found things to disagree on, though they are rarely the little things that never really mattered.

Here’s an exception. For twenty-five of our forty years of marriage, my wife was in primary charge of child-rearing and house management. At about the 25-year mark, the nest became mostly empty. For the past eight years, she has been primarily in charge of the child care for many of our 8 grandchildren. I don’t mean she’s the primary caregiver. I mean that she is the central connection between us and the grandkids. She sees them each week, and they all know and love her to a degree that ought to make anyone jealous.

For most of our marriage, I had primary responsibility for paying bills and keeping us financially afloat. This is not to minimize the value of her financial contributions as a hairstylist. She simply didn’t have enough hours in the day to juggle home, children, and business to a degree that emphasized finances. I had that on my plate. Consequently, we both adopted and retained a view of life that valued economy and rejected wastefulness. We saved, conserved, reused, and repurposed. In truth, we were unrepentant worriers and Do-It-Yourselfers. Julie learned how to feed a family of 5 during the 90s on $50 per week. I learned how to fix washers and dryers or change tires and oil with no talent as a handyman.

So where that history leads is to our most recent clash over whose money is whose.

My wife continues to fret over the purchase of a new table lamp, for instance, to replace the old one. The obstacle to pulling the trigger and making the purchase? It costs $75!!!!

I ask her how long she thinks we are going to own that lamp. She answers hypothetically and accurately that we will probably still have it when we’re dead – or someone will. I ask if thinking that the lamp might cost us $3/year if we live for 25 years will make it easier to decide. I ask more conservatively if thinking it will cost $7.50/year should we live ten more years? She doesn’t budge.

You see, the real issue is that she has a depleted checking account this week, and making the purchase will mean she is spending MY money!

My money? MY MONEY!

We made the decision years ago that she would have access to most accounts, including credit cards, when necessary, for both of us. I have never had access to her accounts, as they have almost always been directly associated with her personal business. Easy and clear.

Yet she has scrimped and scrounged and saved for so many years, the idea of splurging on a $75 table lamp is overwhelming if she isn’t buying it with “her” money.

I tried to explain that even her money is OUR money, but she doesn’t want to assimilate that fact. She knows it’s true, but operating under objective truth is beyond the power of routine and history.

I know I like to say that we negotiated for five years, and we haven’t spent much energy trying to change one another since then. Nor have we been disappointed that the person we married is the same person forty years later. (I know I am speaking for her here, but I am very confident this is true.) However, I am sometimes surprised that we, and most of our respective siblings, have stayed with marriage #1 for a lengthy period.

I believe that our good fortune, and our collective credit, are tied up in the dynamics mentioned at the start. It doesn’t matter if we load the dishwasher the same way, or listen to the same music. It doesn’t matter if I leave the toilet seat up, and she leaves it down (though I almost always put it down). It does matter that she knows I will delay cleaning the ‘guest’ bathroom, the one I always use, until the build-up of scum is disgusting. I use the place almost exclusively in the morning, when I am half asleep, and I don’t notice until things are living on the shower curtain. It’s a fault. She tells me to thank her when she cleans it, and I do. I should know better. I don’t. I am not confident that I will improve from here.

Likewise, next month, or at some point in the future, she will need to make a timely purchase when her bank account is low. She will agonize over spending MY money.

I will probably chastise her for the fretting, but it will be half-hearted. We are no longer really working on our faults. We are doing our best to keep the blemishes private, however.

So, what’s the lesson here? Emptying the dishwasher because it needs to be done is far more important than perseverating over the top-to-bottom or the bottom-to-top approach. In relationships, end results really do matter. Taking care of one another is far more important than choosing a strategy that makes the execution more pretty or palatable to some arbitrary set of standards.

But emptying the bottom first is far more logical.

Phil Repko is a career educator in the PA public school system who has been writing for fun and no profit since he was a teenager. Phil lives with his wife Julie in Gilbertsville and is the father of three outstanding children, two of whom are also poets and writers. He vacillates between poetry and prose, as the spirit beckons, and has published two books of poetry “Pieces of April” and  "Homestretch," both available on Amazon. 

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