I do a lot of work on our cars (I have two, she has one) and my tools have become rusty and dirty over the years. I used to never wear gloves when I work on cars (truthfully, it felt manly to just raw dog it when I was younger) but when I got with my wife 10 years ago who is a bit of a clean freak, I’ve gotten to wearing rubber gloves whenever I do anything.
I ran out of gloves about a month ago and haven’t gotten to replacing them. Today, I replaced the shock assemblies on my daily. It also rained briefly while I was working on them; I was dirty as hell. My hands are covered and look like they’ve been charred.
My wife stepped out to help me clean up my tools and went off on me about how disgusting my tools look, compared them to our friends’ tools (how they’re so much cleaner than mine) and that basically she can’t stand the idea of intimacy when she sees me working on our cars like this. My knee-jerk reaction was to just get pissed but I stopped myself and got a gallon of that pumice hand-cleaner shit (I always use it, I was running low). I’ve told my wife that I am extremely thorough when it comes to cleanup, but she says that she can’t get over the image of my disgusting hands.
My thoughts are that our friends do not do as much handy work as I do. Not only do I work on cars, but I remodel homes. I’m extremely comfortable in dirty situations, but I always, always clean myself thoroughly not just for her sake but for mine.
I guess I’m asking for advice on how to continue being as handy as I am without disgusting my wife. There have been instances where even when my hands aren’t black as night, she just recoils at the mere sight of my tools.
Thanks for reading.
UPDATE:
Thank you all again for your words. It really helped me figure out why I was so upset.
There was a nagging in my head that I couldn’t get rid of until I realized that I felt disproportionately disrespected by being compared to our friends’ husbands. We had a talk before my shift today (it actually made me an hour late but who fucking cares, she’s the light of my life).
I should also say that there are a lot of stressors in our life currently. We had our first child 10 weeks ago, the house I’m flipping has been postponed an ungodly amount of times, our savings/my full-time job only allowed her to be at home for 4 months while I continue working, and we have four dogs in our house, the latest of which is an unsocialized, loud GSD that I’m watching while my parents settle their divorce (seriously counting the days until she’s gone). This morning, she came running out to me because two of the dogs (GSD and one of ours) had gotten into a fight and blood was everywhere. I broke it up and cleaned up promptly.
I told her that I will strive to be a much cleaner person when I’m working with this stuff but that I had a problem with how she compared me and how rudely she brought up this problem today. “I don’t have a problem with the content, just the delivery” are my words verbatim. She brought up everything above, and that she’s been stressed out of her mind especially this morning with a crying baby and raging dogs. I told her that I empathize with her, but even while I experience the same stressors, even after she blatantly compared me to our friends’, I could not fathom being as disrespectful to her as she did me. We talked more about concrete, long-term and short-term solutions. She apologized for acting so rudely and we promised to have a team mentality.
Again, I want to thank everyone here for your words. This has helped us tremendously.