Why We Nag.

Relationships get easier as you get older. At the beginning everybody expects perfection, which means it’s nag, nag, nag. “Did you pick up my clothes at the dry cleaners?” “Did you drop off the mail at the post office?” Did you stop and get butter at the store?”

Of course, you’ve gotta defend yourself. “You never told me to pick up nothing.” “You never told me to drop off nothing.” “You never told me to buy nothing.”

And then the arguing starts: “Of course I told you! We were sitting on the couch watching TV, and I said this, and you said that, and blah blah blah.”

Then, about ten years into the relationship, it hit me: I didn’t need to defend anything. I was old and married and stupid, and it was about time I used that to my advantage. “Okay, maybe you told me,” I said. “Maybe I forgot. What, you think I’m some kind of genius? I’ve got to look down to make sure I’m wearing pants.”

There’s plenty of ready excuses when you’re older -- plus you’ve got a history together, so now you don’t have to care. Early on you pay close attention, because you know there’s going to be a quiz. They’ll have a birthday or expect some kind of thoughtful gift somewhere down the line. Every time they pick up a catalog you grab a pencil and paper, ready to take notes about anything they like.

After eight or ten years, it doesn’t matter so much. They flip through a catalog and their eyes grow wide. “Oooh,” they exclaim. “I like that!”

“Yeah,” you reply, sick of their voice. “You like all kinds of stuff.”

Live a little.

Relationships are always annoying. Once you get past the big stuff, the small stuff starts to spiral out of control. Over twenty-something years, my partner and I haven’t stopped arguing for one second. For the first year it was all about monogamy, for the second it was commitment, for the third it was about balancing work and home. By the tenth it was all about coathangers, and whether we need to leave the room when we fart.

Year nineteen was marked by an annoying little phrase. “Live a little” was about the only thing Mike ever said. Whenever I had second thoughts about buying something, or hesitated for a split second at the store, out it came. “What, you won’t buy butter unless it’s on sale? Christ. Why don’t you live a little?” “You don’t want to see Rufus Wainright because tickets are a hundred bucks each? Jesus. Live a little, just this once.”

One Tuesday a kid left a flyer on our screen door. “Tuesday at Pizza Village is free topping day!” it announced. I like food and I love bargains, so didn’t even stop to think. Hungry and tired and not looking forward to making dinner, I scurried over to Mike with the ad. “Hey, it’s free topping day,” I said. “Whaddaya say we call?”

He shot me a withering glance. “Live a little,” he said, handing me a crumpled buck. “Spring for two freakin’ toppings for a change.”

Out of all our arguments, I think this one bothered me the most. First, he was implying that I was beyond cheap, and well into stingy. I was frugal, maybe, but somebody had to plan for our future. And second, he seemed to be saying that something as stupid as mushrooms on pizza was what I really needed to brighten life. “Oh, you are so right!” I replied, smacking my forehead. “How can I have been confused for so long! Here I’ve been leading my pitiful, dreary little life of quiet desperation, when I could have been happy and carefree just forking over one little dollar for a bit of pepperoni!”

This year’s argument is more melancholic, seeming like incontrovertible proof that time is moving on. Mike is turning into an old woman, or at the very least Jerry Lewis. He’s become totally fixated on cleanliness, and claims everything has a bad smell. He tosses out our sheets before they get their first spot, dumps socks before they have a chance to fuzz. When we go on vacation he’s temporarily back to his old self, but the bad attitude returns the second we get home. “Christ,” he sneers as we swing open the front door, “What kind of pig sty is this?”

While I unpack he cleans, and cleans, and cleans, but it’ll never be good enough for him. He wakes up in the morning with his nose wrinkled. “It’s a pig sty,” he announces when most people say “Good morning.” “It’s not a place where human beings should live.”

I glance around. Disarray, which is fine with me. Still on this side of squalor. “It’s not that bad,” I say.

“It is,” he announces as his final decision. “And it smells bad too.”

He pours enough Downy into each washload to float the Titanic. He spends two hours making the bed, then glares at the sheets the next morning. Hell, when we first met we didn’t even notice if we had sheets under us. Nowadays we go through them like Kleenex. “You just bought new sheets last week,” I say. “We need new ones already?”

He scrunches his face like a raisin. “They’re dirty, and wrinkled, and disgusting. Plus, they smell bad too.”

One day I was getting dressed and discovered that all my underwear was gone. “Don’t tell me,” I say, sighing. “They were dirty? They were wrinkled? They were disgusting? And they smelled bad too?”

He seems irked that I’ve stolen his arguments, so he rewinds to last year. “Buy some new stuff,” he says. “Live a little for a change.”

The good news is that while time erodes the passion out of relationships, it burnishes them to a high gloss with wisdom. I’ve come to realize these arguments mean nothing at all. No matter how much our paths diverge, I know we’ll always be together, because there’s one important fact that surpasses everything, no matter how annoying all the little details get:

Every time he buys luggage, I take it back to the store. And -- Christ! -- how the old stuff smells.