Speak up! You can't expect spouse to read your mind.
Q. I've been married almost 10 years. Just before Christmas I got really sick; flat-on-my-back, fever, taking-antibiotics sick. I was pretty much down for the count for over a week. My husband had e-mailed some work associates a week prior and suggested that a bunch of people get together at a bar downtown for New Year's Eve. No RSVP, no idea who would or wouldn't show up, just a general, "Hey, let's all get together and party" kind of thing.
By 5 on New Year's Eve, I still wasn't well enough to contemplate going. I told him he'd have to go without me (never thinking he'd actually go) -- although I couldn't see why it would be so important to him considering he had no idea if anyone he knew would even show up at that bar that night. He went anyway, saying, "I don't want to be known as the guy who suggested everyone get together and then didn't show up myself." Essentially, he wants people to be able to take him at his word.
So off he went, and I stayed home on the couch with old movie reruns.
He never saw the irony of "being true to his word" when it came to staying home with me. Is it too much to ask that he choose to stay home with me rather than run off to a bar just in case some of his friends from work showed up?
Irritated
A. Is it too much to ask that you say what you mean, instead of expecting a spouse to read your mind?
If it was important to you for him to stay home, then you should have said so. He may still have chosen to go -- reasonably, since, even though the gathering was clearly informal, he was even more clearly its host (plus, you weren't hanging-by-a-thread sick, you were let's-see-how-I-feel-at-5 p.m. sick). But at least he would have been able to discuss it with you before the fact, instead of paying for it after.
In other words, if you're capable of seeing the irony in your questioning the quality of his word -- when you told him with utter and knowing insincerity that he should go without you -- then you'll have to agree that your husband did nothing wrong.
Q. My future sister-in-law, whom I have never met, just informed me that her entire left arm has tattoos on it. Part of the tattoos are skulls soaking in blood. I am not a tattoo person, and I am kind of freaked out. I had planned on the bridesmaids wearing spaghetti-strap dresses. What do I do?
W.
A. On behalf of the merging families, please treat the tattoos as the nonissue they are. Even if they did somehow affect or reflect on you or your wedding, which they most emphatically don't, they still wouldn't be worth tanking your relationship with your husband's sister before it even starts. She is family, not family with an asterisk.
And on behalf of humanity, please reconsider the spaghetti straps.
Given that even great bodies look awful in them if they're the wrong bodies, odds are, in at least one case if not more, the dress will be an instrument of torture to bridesmaid, congregation or both. This has been a public service announcement.
© 2008, The Washington Post Co.