Is there one thing in your spouse – a peculiar habit, a gesture – that annoys you tremendously, drives you crazy at times? More than one thing? I’m afraid I can produce a rather long list and all the annoying habits of Jonathan’s will be equally painful for me to tolerate. But there is one that’s simply killing me. The noise. The man was gifted (cursed?) with the loudest voice in the universe. His whisper (not sure I hear it often) is the equivalent of my normal voice. When he talks in a normal voice I have an urge to cover my ears to tone it down. When he screams, and he does it frequently when on the phone with his workers, I have a serious concern that I might become hearing disabled soon…
Ironically, I like silence. I get disturbed by noises, excessively loud sounds wear me down, make me lose my focus. And it’s not just his voice. When he walks – he needs to stomp. The TV always has to be on, the volume up. The doors are slammed. That’s the way he is, noise fits in perfectly in his world. We are not compatible in this sense.
But some nights, when he is working late, the quiet house freaks me out. Something feels wrong, something is missing. The silence then becomes so awkward and almost too loud to endure. I turned on the TV or music, but somehow still fail to reproduce the usual level of noise. I miss HIS noise. I miss him in this inexplicable way of missing the thing I dislike about him the most. Isn’t it fascinating at times how the whole relationship notion becomes so controversial? Yet that’s how the true attachment is formed. We acknowledge, accept and get used to the annoying habits we wouldn’t stand in anyone else. Those are the things that we remember when the beloved is far away. One of those twisted features that come in a package called love.
What Annoys Us the Most
