One day, before we were married, I heard my wife spill a drink in an adjacent room.

“RICH!?”. 

I pondered the relevance of my name because:

A. I wasn’t the one who spilled the drink

B. I wasn’t in the room with the one who spilled the drink

Am I required to shoulder the blame for disasters that occur when I’m not in the area? My wife would have you believe so. 

Here are two examples of my wife finding a way to blame me:

The Lost Earmuffs

Heading to her parent’s house for the holidays, the Long Island Railroad section of Penn Station in NYC felt like The Hunger Games. The stakes were high as the ticket kiosks loomed.

Navigating the touchscreen with shaking hands, I managed to get my ticket before dashing down the tunnel onto the train. My wife followed. As the train pulled out of the station, we exalted in a celebratory high five, even though we were stuck standing between cars. 

Then, the mood changed.

A frantic look through her bag (often the first step to disaster) clued me in.

“Where are my earmuffs,” she asked.

Another signal of the developing situation: my wife throwing out questions that have no definitive answer.

“Uh…how would I know?”

As she dug deeper into her bag, then the next bag, I prayed for earmuffs to materialize.

“Ugh, I think I left them on top of the ticket machine. Why wouldn’t you watch my earmuffs– you let me leave them there,” my wife concluded. 

I guess this was a job I was expected to perform without being told. I have many such jobs in my marriage.

“I’ll buy new earmuffs for you,” I said — even though it wasn’t my fault. At that moment, I would have bought $500 earmuffs to fix the situation. 

“That’s not the point,” she said. 

I struggled with what the point was the rest of the way to Long Island. 

The Powder Room Sink

Back in 2019, we decided to host holiday cocktails. We procrastinated our setup until the night before. By 11 PM, I figured the house was ready to go. I signed off.

“I’m done. No more cleaning for me,” I declared.

My wife continued, punctuating each action with martyred huffing. 

At this point, she was looking for things to do. She decided that the powder room light had “too many bugs in it.” I’ve never cleaned a light fixture for a party.

While taking the glass light cover off the light, she dropped it. It careened off her head and into the sink, where it cracked a crater in the porcelain.

I had just laid down for a long winter’s nap. Relaxing in the bedroom, I heard a crash on the first floor followed by a wailing “Riiiiich!

I arrived with a solution.

“We’ll replace the sink eventually.” The practical fix. 

I could tell she was annoyed at me through her tears.

How could this be? Did I drop the light or break the sink? I was all the way upstairs.

She finally managed: “I was afraid to ask you for help. If I wasn’t so scared to ask you for help, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Next, she wanted to cancel the party. And if it was too late to cancel the party, she demanded a 12-hour sink order and installation (doesn’t that sound cheap?) She finally accepted the hole (it’s still there) after I covered it with duct tape in five minutes.

Impressively, my wife managed to blame me even though I was on an entirely different floor in the house.