Why Do We All Hate Our Husband's Driving? I Think I Know Why.
It’s not about them.
by Audie Metcalf
The short answer is that they’re all insane tailgaters and have far too much faith in other drivers on the road and clearly don’t understand that the only correct way to drive, especially on the highway at night, is that one must leave 6 car lengths between us and the car ahead. 10 when it’s drizzling.
But the longer answer is more complex.
Did you find yourself wildly nodding with widened eyes as you related almost exactly to my driving ideal I laid out above?
Well then. This is going to be fun.
Now, let me preface this by saying we are not wrong. We are better drivers. Men are twice as likely to get into fatal accidents than women. We have an ability to think of 87 different possible traffic scenarios (because most of us are professional futurizers), we’re scientifically better at multi-tasking and no, this isn’t a myth—we just do more and juggle more during any given day, so we get better at it. Did we get better at this because we had no choice because the men in our lives rely on a level of learned helplessness that’s near-comical as we’re ordering the presents, wrapping the presents, filling the stockings, planning the holiday events, RSVPing to the parties, crafting the Santa-is-real scenarios? Or is it because we were just … born this way? That can be a controversial article for another day, because today we’re tackling why we smash our foot on our nonexistent brakes on the passenger side when he fails to slow down even a little bit, though the driver ahead is clearly stopping, our heads down, bracing for impact, our fingers covertly googling divorce lawyers. And we think:
Can I really be the only one who feels this way?
Answer? No. You aren’t the only one. It’s so very many of us. But as much as I’d love for this to be rant about how men are mindless idiots, like most things in life where we discover some unbelievably specific shared feeling, we do, sadly, have to look within to discover what the hell is going on here.
It’s control.
We want control.
We hate being out of control.
Duh. Duh. And duh.
This isn’t a revelation. You know you like control. You may even require it. And of course we do not use the word controlling because that’s lazy and frankly a misnomer. Our husbands use it to describe us. But we do not identify as such.
So the next reasonable step here is … why do we need so much control? Are there women who sit in the passenger seat and simply … trust their husband will use his brakes appropriately and so they instead stare out the window thinking about how delicious Diet Coke is? Are there women who step on a plane and don’t scan the pilot’s face to see if he looks tired perhaps from another red eye flight and then plan out their eventual death from their impending crash and feel resigned because they always knew they’d die young anyway? Is there a woman out there who feels a strange tingling in her fingers one morning and doesn’t immediately google “tingling in fingers” to see if it’s a symptom of early Parkinson’s and then create a full funeral scenario and think through how the kids’ homework will possibly get done without us there to hover?
WE ARE TRYING TO CONTROL THE SITUATION EVEN IN DEATH YOU GUYS.
So, I went to see a guy a few years ago. A very … let’s say… unique guy. His name is Kerry Gaynor and he is a world-renowned hypnotist working out of L.A. He specializes in helping people to stop smoking, helping people with fear of flying, and helping people with anorexia.
And I have a debilitating fear of flying.
I have never been hypnotized and I don’t really believe I can be hypnotized even though he and I had a few sessions. I haven’t been on a plane since seeing him so I can’t speak to whether or not his methods actually work, but I can tell you that he had my number the moment I opened my mouth. And as someone who really fancies herself incredibly singular, this deeply annoyed me.
I told him about all my control stuff.
And then he told me that this kind of feeling that manifests in fears, anxiety, sleep disorders, even anorexia, in his experience of treating thousands and thousands of people, comes from one thing and one thing alone. Are you ready for it? Can you guess it? It’s very simple but it’s also very obvious and once you make the connection you’ll feel dumb you’ve never thought about it in these exact terms:
A profound lack of safety in early childhood.
Ugh. But of course. I would bet that many of you are feeling a wave of recognition. You’re scanning your early life. You’re remembering something. It all fits. Or maybe some of you aren’t able to pinpoint a specific moment. But think about your circumstances. Was someone volatile at home? Were you left alone to babysit your younger siblings when you were far too young? Did anyone drink too much? Did you ever feel responsible for your parent in any way, shape or form? Were you their confidant?
Welp. That’s a lack of safety. That’s it.
It doesn’t have to be Trauma with a capital T. It can be one or some or many moments where you, the kid, had to grapple with adult ideas, and much as we all built our personalities around being capable and strong (right??), those personality traits were a (helpful and smart!) response to chaotic circumstances where we just didn’t have someone there to soothe us to reassure us to take care of us.
And so, we took care of ourselves.
Well. Very well in fact. So well that we are now quite confident no one could possibly take care of us or take care of anything else as well as we can.
And the real rub is … that’s probably true. Because we are masters at taking care of things. We may have even married people who are quite bad at taking care of things so that we can snuggle right into our role of taking care of things, no problem!
And so now we have to reconcile the fact that we are better at this stuff. We are safer drivers. We do think through 14 scenarios before making a decision. We are hypervigilant with our safety, our child’s safety, our dog’s safety.
So then … now what?
Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe knowing this means we can explain to our partners why we are how we are and ask them to gently (but firmly?) take charge in some(?) scenarios when we’re too mentally exhausted. Or maybe we shift some of the present-buying to them this year and we sort of resign ourselves to the fact that perhaps every gift won’t be the greatest gift anyone has ever gotten in their natural lives and just sort of … be ok with that. Maybe we just hand them the entire task of dealing with food shopping for the holidays this year and when they come back with iceberg lettuce instead of white cabbage we just laugh and laugh and laugh and unclench our jaw and turn up a Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Geraldi and look out at the falling snow and all the stockings hung with care and remember remember remember that we can choose to be different and better and softer and gentler, and we aren’t unsafe anymore.
And, listen. Maybe they will surprise us. Maybe they will do a good job. I mean, we married them. So they can’t be all bad.
Audie Metcalf is the Editor-in-chief of The Candidly, and lives in LA with her family. You can find more of her articles here.
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