Dear Urban Diplomat: Should my wife be allowed to slap bumper stickers on our car against my will?
Dear Urban Diplomat, Recently, my wife came home with a set of the stick-figure decals people put on car windows (we have a toddler, two Labradors and a cat). I hate those things, and I’m barely over swapping my Audi A3 for a Honda Odyssey, which is now our only car, so I told her they’d go on over my dead body. She put them on anyway. Can you: a) help me understand my rage, and b) explain who’s right?
—Sticker Shocked, Upper Beach
I feel your pain: those stickers are a pox. They tap the same rage vein as the family updates that circulate this time of year about Hannah’s emerging clarinet prowess and Jacob’s med school acceptance. My feeling about taste-related domestic disagreements is that the spouse who objects to the application of offending adornments on common property wins. That said, some marital infractions—squeezing the toothpaste tube from the top, having sex with one’s socks on—can be forgiven. Others, like building a secret meth empire, are indefensible. It’s up to you to decide which category her sticker fixation falls into.
