Husband’s obsession not music to wife’s ears

Dear Carolyn: My husband enjoys playing music in our home. He recently installed speakers throughout the house and in our yard as well. Now we have music on ALL the time, at levels that prohibit conversation. I have moderate hearing loss in one ear as well, so the kids and I are constantly shouting at one another to be heard over the music. And in the yard, I just want to hear birds and breezes, not blaring music.

My husband gets annoyed when I ask him to turn it down/off and the music goes down momentarily and then right back up.

Is there a way we can coexist peacefully? He tried wearing headphones but it felt like he was living apart from us. — Not Music to My Ears

Answer: Shifts. That’s how I see you two coexisting peacefully. You get X hours of morning quiet before he turns on his music, and then you get another X hours of relief after that, and you find a volume over which you don’t have to shout when the music is on.

If he won’t come to an agreement with you on a number of hours per day with music and a number of hours without, and an agreed-upon-by-all-family-members maximum volume when everyone is home, and the veto power every family member has in event of, say, homework or headache, and a modicum of respect for your neighbors and backyard fauna, then this is not about music or speakers, it’s about your husband’s hostility.

That’s what it is when one person won’t compromise for the sake of others’ comfort, and/or sees compromise — or respect for hearing loss, for fox’s sake — as a nuisance.

I’m afraid your husband’s annoyance and re-cranking the volume already point to hostility as the issue here, but I still hope seeing the blueprint of an agreement laid out before him is sufficient to move him to compromise. Unacknowledged hostility from one partner toward another is the toughest relationship problem there is.

Dear Carolyn: My brother is having a destination wedding that’s going to require a minimum of a 12-hour flight and flying over an ocean. My husband and I have a small child, but no kids are invited, which I have no issue with. The wedding will be in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language, so neither one of us is keen on trying to find a baby sitter we’ve never met prior.

Most importantly, I don’t want to be that far apart from my child while she’s this young. I do travel for business frequently but it’s not far and not that long. How horrible is it if we don’t go?

My brother and I aren’t that close, so I imagine he won’t care, and the bride met us briefly twice. But my parents are getting really antsy about this and “how it looks.”

Well, how it looks is that a couple picked a very faraway destination for a wedding and banned kids. I don’t think it gets simpler than that.

Is this something wedding guests and future in-laws really worry about? I don’t think my husband and I have ever worried about such details at weddings we go to. — Destination Wedding Drama

Answer: If “how it looks” is the only argument you or they have in favor of going, then, yeah. Don’t go.

Depending on your definition of “really antsy,” I don’t even think this even meets the definition of wedding drama.

Maybe I’m projecting too much, and certainly in the United States of Selfies and Curated Social Media, it wouldn’t be unheard of for people to mistake appearances for values — but I wonder if your parents aren’t worried about something bigger and not finding the words for it. It would make more sense to me, at least, for them to be worried that their kids aren’t close and that their family is drifting apart.