Dear Prudence: Help! My Absent-Minded Husband Forgets Our Plans and Then Blames Me for Being Contr

[minoanmiss]

I have a low stakes conflict with my husband. We’ve been together for nearly 8 years, married 4, and overall our relationship is wonderful—he’s kind, smart, funny, sexy, and a great and involved dad. But we have this one issue that we come back to again and again: He has a terrible memory. It’s probably one-part childhood trauma (he had an emotionally abusive monster for a father, thankfully deceased now) and one part personality—he rocks the absent-minded professor vibe. But the issue is we’ll often make a decision together, and then he COMPLETELY FORGETS ABOUT IT.

The most recent: On a Saturday, we made plans for the next day. The city we live in was hosting a multi-phase street fair, and we decided to go to one part in the afternoon and another part in the evening. The afternoon part was mostly due to his interest, but I thought it looked fun too, so we were all looking forward to it. Come Sunday morning, he mentions that since we’re not doing anything that afternoon, how about we take our kid to the playground? I told him we’d literally just made plans for the day. He’d forgotten, fine, I just reminded him. Except he then implied that we always do what I want to do, which made me see red, since it was his plan to begin with. And in fact, he’s usually the plan instigator! This dynamic works for us, as he’s great at coming up with fun plans, and I’m terrible at decision making. It just drives me bananas that he’ll act like such a martyr about this when we’re usually going along with his ideas in the first place. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, except I feel like I’m being gaslit, even though it’s not intentional.
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Any ideas for us to develop a better way of dealing with this?

— Conflicting Memories

Dear Conflicting,

First stop: His doctor’s office. This kind of forgetfulness is not normal, and it’s not a personality trait. If you do rule out a medical reason for his behavior, enlist a therapist to help him understand how this is affecting you and to give him some tools (like writing things down! Or using a calendar app! Or post-it notes, or any of the thousands of tricks people who are considerate use to keep track of plans with others) to improve.