Married to my wife 4 years, dated for 2. We've done couples therapy, not for anything major, just for optimizing our relationship and learning better tools for conflict resolution (mostly Gottman method). I love my wife and our relationship is generally good, except for one thing.
My wife is a perfectionist and has extremeley high standards in general. She is super neat, clean, and organized. She plans vacations months in advance with a spreadsheet. Her closet is like a showroom – clothes organized by function and color, and the hangers spaced exactly a finger width apart. I think she has a touch of OCD.
My wife brings her high standards into our relationship, to the point that she can't resist calling out minor failings on my part. Constantly. The types of things that are, in my opinion, typical of any human.
Example 1: She's going shopping in a couple days and tells me her plans. The day of shopping, she's gone a few hours, and when she comes back she has a bunch of stuff. She's telling me about how helpful the lady was helping her pick new makeup, and I say "what store was that again?" She then gets pissed and says "Uh, Sephora!? I told you that! Do you ever listen to anything I say??"
Example 2: Occassionally I will do something like leave a kitchen cabinet open, or leave a pair of socks on the floor by the bed. When I say occassionally I mean like 1-2 times per month. This annoys her greatly and turns into "you're always doing that."
There are no major underlying issues at play. This is just how she is. She has unrealistic expectations of everyone in her life. We have talked about it countless times, alone and in therapy, and she can't seem to fully acknowledge this fault. In her mind she's just "helping people be better".
What makes this even more annoying is she makes the same basic human mistakes I do, just slightly less than me. And when I give her a taste of her own medicine by calling out these failings, she doesn't take it well.
I feel like I'm at a breaking point. I'm not the type of person to just "suck it up and deal with it, that's just marriage". No it isn't. There are plenty of marriages where each partner is kind, patient, and accepting of basic human imperfections.
Question: What can I do/say to help her understand how unhealthy this behavior is, short of separating?
TLDR: Wife is intolerant of basic human failings, can't resist pointing them out constantly, and refuses to acknowledge it or work on it.