How often do you find yourself arguing with your spouse but can’t remember why? Do you often bicker for hours on end for no apparent reason? Have you ever thought about shaving your loved one’s eyebrows after a night of binge drinking?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you might have a horrendous drinking problem, but don’t fret! It’s also entirely possible that one small verbal tic is at the root of your marital issues: The word “we.”
Let me give you a statistic. According to a study from the Schadenfreude Institute, four out of every five couples admit to using the pronoun “we” incorrectly and often to disastrous effect. It begins innocently enough with a phrase like, “We should go to the store.” Perhaps the speaker truly meant that both parties in the marriage should actually go to the store. Marriage, after all, is a partnership and it’s quite natural to want to include your loved one in daily activities. Unfortunately, pronoun misuse is a slippery slope and what was meant to be used as a word of inclusion can quickly become something different altogether.
“We should go to the store” slowly transforms into “we need to re-grout the shower stall” or “we need to express the dog’s anal glands,” and from there it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to “we should see other people.”
It’s a sad but common occurrence and particularly so because, when used correctly in a sentence, the word “we” is a statement of unity. When used incorrectly, however, the word implies a false sense of dual ownership in an unpleasant task that was meant to be assigned to just one spouse.
Let’s take an everyday sort of experience that most couples deal with as an example to see what’s said and how it’s interpreted.
What the wife says: “Honey, we have got to deal with the badger in the bathroom.”
What the husband hears: “We need to install a urinal in the garage.”
What the wife means: “You need to deal with the badger in the bathroom because I don’t want to get rabies and I’ll leave you if you don’t.”
It’s a classic case of pronoun misuse. Through the misuse of the word “we,” a joint ownership in the project is implied when, clearly, only one party is being asked to remove the badger from the toilet. The issue is compounded by the word “we” as well in that it conveys a lack of urgency. As a result, the badger remains in the bathroom and becomes increasingly detrimental to the health of the marriage as well as anyone who wants to use the toilet.
Men can be just as complicit when it comes to pronoun misuse. Let’s look at the following phrase to, again, see what’s said and how it’s interpreted.
What the husband says: “We should install a urinal in the garage.”
What the wife hears: “I’m not removing the badger in the toilet.”
What the husband means: “I’m tired of you yelling at me for pissing in the backyard because there’s still a badger in our toilet, so I’d like to install a urinal in the garage.”
Note how the situation has escalated. By failing to denote ownership of the issue, the badger remains in the toilet and has now become a legitimate thorn in the marriage. Due to the lack of urgency conveyed in the first conversation, the husband attempts to provide an alternate solution to the problem but also fails to use the appropriate pronoun. Confusion abounds as to who should be installing the urinal in the garage, the husband continues urinating in the backyard, and the marriage continues its inevitable decline.
It’s a sad state of affairs but one that repeats itself time and time again to the detriment of marriages across the globe. The result? Obviously, skyrocketing rate of divorce due to the misuse of a single pronoun, but much worse, a badger still living in a toilet I would very much like to be using.