Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and scream, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.
Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.
The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless – my son refuses to sleep if there’s even one toy on the floor. My wife’s and daughter’s room look like a trailer park after a tornado. To my son and my dismay, they both hum wherever they go.
More here.
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