Wedding Day Wisdom: Always Have an Automatic Dishwasher

It was more than 28 years ago that my young bride's grandfather gave us a word of advice and a gift to back it up.

The advice was as simple as it was sound: always have an automatic dishwasher in your home. Her grandfather felt so strongly about this admonishment that he gave us the money to buy our first dishwasher. And when we returned home to California from our wedding in Pennsylvania, the first thing we did was go out and purchase an electric dishwasher for our kitchen.

That advice, and the money to make good on it, immediately removed one issue from our young married life that we might have argued about: whose turn it was to wash the dishes.

We didn't have any spare kitchen counter space in our first home under which we could install a dishwasher, so our first model was on wheels and we could roll it around the kitchen. It had a hose that connected to our kitchen faucet for water. It wasn't fancy but it did the job. Well, actually it did two jobs, it kept our dishes clean and kept us from bickering about washing the dishes.

We've had a dishwasher every place we have lived since then and I can say, under oath, that we have never argued about washing dishes.

Okay, maybe sometimes we'll disagree on the proper way to load a dishwasher. My wife tends to jam large bowls onto the bottom rack, preventing truly efficient use of the dishwasher's internal space. I prefer to give large bowls a quick wash and rinse in the sink. But we don't argue about it, honest we don't.

Fortunately we see eye-to-eye on the major dishwashing issue: where should the bowls go: top rack, or bottom? Our domestic tranquility is safe here; we're both bottom rack bowl people.

It may seem like a small thing, but my wife's grandfather gave us advice that was true and it was something he could influence, something for which he could actually take some responsibility.

He could have said, "Always give my granddaughter the respect she deserves!" And it would have been a true statement. But honestly, it's not a standard that any of us can always uphold. Great words, but impossible to keep.

He passed away many years ago, but I can truly say that we've kept his advice every single day of our marriage.

And our marriage is as strong as our dishes are clean.