Funny Habits My Husband Picked Up During Quarantine

My husband is forever the love of my life, but social distancing has made him acquire some eccentric quirks! While everyone is confined indoors with their families, I hope we remember to have a sense of humor to keep our spirits up. 

(Yes, my husband knows I’m posting this and is totally okay with it.)

Rearranging the Dishes

After only a couple weeks of social distancing, I started noticing dishes in strange places in the cabinet. The red plates were moved up a shelf and the white bowls were moved up two shelves. They seemed to be organized based on his favorites. I moved them back without fretting over it too much. 

A week later, I noticed all the large plates, small plates, and bowls were now organized by color. The brown dishes were on the lowest shelf; the white dishes were on the next shelf up; the red dishes were on a shelf above that. When I asked my husband why he rearranged the dishes, he simply said, “now it’s organized.” I didn’t care much, so I let it be. 

Within another three weeks, the dishes were rearranged a third time. This time they were grouped by type: plates on one shelf, small bowls on one shelf, large bowls on another shelf. By this point, my love’s funny new quirk was amusing me. Maybe he’s feeling a little out of control of the world around him right now, so reorganizing the cabinets helps his life feel less chaotic. I’m curious to see the next cabinet makeover.

Office “Visits”

Like many people, my husband is all of the sudden working fully remotely. He doesn’t get to put on a button down shirt, drive to work, talk in person to coworkers, and sit in his office for a few hours. I suspect this is the reason behind his new “visits” to my “office.” 

We’re both working from home, separated by a wall. In the middle of work, multiple times a day, my husband likes to take a quick five-minute brain break to visit me in the den. I’ll be typing away and all the sudden he appears in the chair behind me, or stretched out on the carpet behind me. Usually he’ll say a couple of words. Sometimes he’ll even rub my shoulders for a moment. Then he’ll give me a kiss and go back to his own “office” just around the corner. 

It can occasionally be a challenge to focus on the sentence I’m writing when he spontaneously appears. However, I find it incredibly sweet that he still misses me while he works, despite all this additional time we have together at home.

Talking to Inanimate Objects

Talking to random objects around the house as if they have feelings has always been something I do, and something my husband teases me about. I’ll tell the vacuum that it’s doing a good job. I’ll scold the smoke alarm for going off when I’m just trying to make lunch. It’s pretty normal… probably…

But I got a huge chuckle out of it when my husband started imitating my silly habit! He started referring to the vacuum as a “he” when it sucked up a wire. There’s something so endearing to see my manly macho guy with big biceps waggle a finger at the vacuum. 

Constant Bird Livestream

During the first couple of weeks of working fully remotely, it took us a while to find our new work groove. Our home was quiet, besides the whir of the air filter. We would turn on YouTube playlists of various background music: classical, tropical jazz, instrumental Disney music. Eventually, we started turning on a livestream of someone’s backyard bird feeder. Listening to the continuous, yet always changing, bird calls and watching pigeons and blue jays bicker over seed became his new favorite background noise for work. It gives your eyes a nice break from staring at a work screen too. Sometimes, we switch to a live aquarium feed, but the birds are our main go-to.

I highly recommend these streams, if you’re curious: 

And 

And

Laundry

I can’t figure out how, but my husband has been making MUCH more laundry during social distancing! (And sadly, he’s been forgetting to do it.) Before everything started, my husband was a champ of keeping up with his laundry. While I would usually have a small pile of clothes in my hamper to wash or ready to fold, he never seemed to have a stray piece of clothing out of place. Being a tidy person, he regularly kept up with all of his laundry, and all of our towels and dish clothes too. I don’t think I washed a single towel the whole first year we were married!

Somehow, lately he’s had two or three baskets of clothes lying on the bedroom floor. The laundry itself, tshirts, sweatpants, basketball shorts, seems to accumulate much faster than before. Plus now, he seems to be forgetting or too stressed to keep up with it. Thankfully, I’ve gotten a little better at keeping up with mine, so I’m happy to help him.

It’s mysterious to see how the change of the world’s normal routine affects people differently. I’ve certainly picked up new habits too. (Hopefully they’re not too pestersome!) For example, I’ve gained a strong thirst for trying new things! New recipes, at-home dance classes, painting classes, even learning a new language all appeals to me now more than ever before. I try to drag my poor husband along to try the new things with me, but he’s being very patient with me.