The Clogged Shower Drain Problem
If you're going to move to a new house in six months anyway, is it really that important?
Surely you’ve all had one—a clogged sink or shower drain. I don’t mean clogged, like it won’t drain at all, though we all know that’s the next chapter of the excruciatingly slow-drain story.
But rather that clogged stage where it drains so slowly that the shower or tub basin starts to fill up from the shower head during a normal-duration shower. It’s shit. No one likes it.
This was (maybe still is, depending on when you’re reading this) happening in the home of a nice couple I know.
They use Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play system, and routine plumbing problems are the husband’s responsibility, per their agreement.
So back in late January, when it started to become a problem, she made her husband aware of the issue and asked him to fix it. He said that he would.
But then, because he’s human like me, he didn’t fix it. He doesn’t use that shower in their house. He never made himself a note about it, so he never thought about it again. He forgot, not even clocking that there was a promise made, and a promise broken.
No Big Deal, Right? She Can Just Remind Him
I assume that’s how I’d feel about it 15-20 years ago. What’s the big deal? He’s got a lot on his mind between work, parenting, and everything else.
He certainly wasn’t intending any harm. The mistake, if we’re going to call it that, was an honest one. She asked him to take care of it. He said he would. Then he forgot.
We’ve all probably done that many times in our lives. Some more than others. (*raises hand*)
This is where nuance and context come in.
They’ve been married for 15 or more years.
This theme of I can’t count on you to follow through on the things you say you will do has been ongoing the entire time. (It’s an ADHD byproduct that my ex-wife and a zillion other people would say is a trust destroyer in their respective relationships.)
They’ve been actively working on their marriage. Discussing and practicing mindful, intentional consideration of one another—and as is often the case, he has more work to do there than she does. So this situation is the type of thing they’ve been discussing and working on together for a while.
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He Didn’t Think the Drain Was Too Important
This is another theme in their marriage. He often feels as if his wife is making a bigger deal out of things than she should.
His judgment is that some things just aren’t that serious, and he doesn’t understand why his wife suggests otherwise. He treats the important stuff as important, and the unimportant stuff accordingly. That’s how he forgot about the drain—it barely registered when he first heard about it.
When his wife mentioned it again, he got a little upset and a little defensive.
“What do you want me to do? Call a plumber?!” he said.
As he figured, they’re moving soon (like, actively boxing things up right now), so who really cares about that drain? Isn’t it smarter to invest resources in the new place?
I don’t know where you guys stand, but in a vacuum, I understand and relate to that thinking. If I don’t think about the relational impact whatsoever, I may also arrive at the same conclusion that he did.
And back in my old marriage, I’d surely have reacted defensively when my wife brought it up again, but that was my bullshitty, go-to move. Defensiveness. (Please don’t be defensive in your relationships. It’s a trust-killer.)
Here’s Why Scenarios Like This Threaten or End Marriages
I like this man very much, but let’s make his wife the protagonist of this story.
So every day—EVERY DAY—she gets in the shower for three months straight, and after the water runs for a bit the shower starts to fill up because the drain is clogged.
Every day is another stark reminder about her No. 1 problem and pain point in her marriage. She cannot trust her husband to exercise care around the things that negatively affect her if he doesn’t consider them important or worthy of immediate action. He only takes meaningful action when HE has decided something is important.
And THAT becomes the narrative in our relationships. That we’ll only show up for people when it’s convenient for us, or something that we want to do. If it’s not affecting us, and we don’t clock it as important? Well, you know.
So, the clogged drain starts filling up the shower again.
He still hasn’t gotten to it, she thinks. Pretty sure he’s never going to unless I say something about it again. Of course, he’ll interpret that as me nagging him, and I’ll be the bad guy. If I hold him to account for our Fair Play agreement, and ask him to keep his commitment, it’s going to be another fight, even though I didn’t do anything wrong.
She musters up the resolve to say something like she has hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. And she’s proven correct again. He’s defensive.
He’s kind of mad at her for giving him shit for something not on his radar that he doesn’t care about, and which seems to him to be so petty as to not merit concern let alone marriage arguments.
His experience:
My wife told me about a slow drain in her shower. I really did intend to take care of it, but forgot to set up a reminder about it.
Seemingly out of nowhere, months later while we’re in the middle of moving to a new house, she says something about it again, and it felt like she was reminding me of another failure. Another criticism. Another way in which I’ve failed her when I’ve really been trying, and I’m really busy juggling life and work right now.
I get it. It’s so common for people in his situation to feel that way. But this is, literally, how your marriage ends. It’s all very rational and understandable. It just fails to meet accountability standards, and it fails to calculate for the pain, sadness, anger that mounts up for others when they can’t trust us to follow through, and THEN, can’t even trust us to have an adult conversation about it.
Her experience:
I kindly notified my husband about the drain situation, and asked him to help me with it, per our household agreement.
He never worked on it, and I was reminded so every day while the shower drain wasn’t working. This is both another in a countless string of examples of a tiny broken promise in our marriage, and an especially disappointing and painful one right now, given that we are intentionally working on these types of scenarios and conditions in our marriage.
After nearly three months, I finally said something about the shower drain again, bracing myself for him to respond defensively and frustrated, because I don’t have confidence that I can count on him to bring my needs to his attention and actually have any good come from it. His history is to make the situation about him, and to justify why I have to keep eating shit, and how wrong I am to have any feelings around it. He DID respond defensively, justifying and reinforcing my fears about it.
When will I ever be enough? When will I be able to trust him to care about the things that affect me, even if they aren’t affecting him?
…
To his credit, the trend line in the relationship is upward. Both she and he said so today.
Nobody is being awful to the other, and certainly no one is intending to cause any pain or break promises.
But that’s how these things work. They’re blind spots. They’re “accidents,” usually.
And the work is in eliminating the blind spot. The work is taking accountability, and acknowledging that this pattern exists in your relationship, and that it’s not okay.
It’s not okay for our partners to witness us and experience us when we treat various things in our lives with importance. Our jobs. Our hobbies. Our kids. Our friends. All kinds of things.
Our partners know exactly what it looks and feels like to be treated with importance.
And then stuff like this pops up, and the juxtaposition is stark. I am NOT important to him. This is the exact opposite of what he does when he treats things with importance and care.
If you’re the kind of person who would prefer that your relationship partner not experience things like this, then it’s time to develop some new relational skills and habits.
It won’t just change their lives for the better. It will change yours too.
Fair Play author Eve Rodsky’s endorsement of my book This is How Your Marriage Ends:
"The home can be deceiving because it presents so small (like dishes being left by the sink) and Fray beautifully unpacks this. This funny and poignant memoir and how to evolves into a beautiful exposition on partnerships, love, and unpaid labor. Fray highlights the larger systemic issues at hand and offers a program for fairness out of the toxic man box and forges a path to a healthy way forward." — Eve Rodsky, bestselling author of “Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)”
This is How Your Marriage Ends is 40% off on Amazon, available in local bookstores, or you can order an author-signed copy here from my friends at Islandport Media.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF
I absolutely love your writing and how you unpack seemingly mundane events that are so much more than that!
Thank you, Matthew. 🙏
I really HATE when the defensive person, usually the man, says that he's really busy and has lots on his minds and with work, etc. SO DO WOMEN. Except that we're also expected NOT to be too busy or mentally overtaxed to remember all the things. So we develop coping mechanisms to keep all the pieces moving. Let's hold everyone to the same standards. Men, in my experience, aren't stupid.