Thread: Crabby!

Any advice on how to deal with a crabby spouse? Typically, my fiance is a great person. Chipper, funny, helpful. But every couple months he goes through what I call "dude PMS" for lack of a better term. During this time, he's a total slob, selectively absent minded, and SO crabby I can barely stand him. This last for 3-7 days or so. He won't tell me what's on his mind (me thinking perhaps it's a bad week at work, or he's feeling sick or whatever) so I'm unable to at least try to ease his mood. In the meantime, I feel like a prisoner in our home - I can't say anything to him without getting the huffy/eye-rolling/door slaming/furled browed/7-year-old-boy-who-got-grounded reaction.

Here's an example of what I'm dealing with... We always take our shoes off before going inside. On Sunday he went to go sight in his shotguns for deerhunting with a few friends on their farm and he helped them round up steers to get them corralled for their shots. Fine, no problem. The problem was when he came home, tromping his cow-pie covered boots throughout the house, into the living room, sat down on the chair and plopped those poopy boots up on the upholstered footrest. I asked him to take off his boots and leave them at the door so he didn't track mud and cowpoo in the house. The response? "Whatever." followed with a huff and staring blankly at the TV. Now, we're all entitled to have crabby days (Lord knows I have them too lol!), but not to the point that you're disrespectful of your spouse and your own home like that.

Aside from chaning the locks and sending him to live in the dog's kennel until he's over his dude-PMS, how do I handle this? So far I've been just going with it, knowing that in a matter of couple days he'll be back to his normal self, but I'm honestly starting to get resentful. And that resentful feeling is carrying over into the time when he's over his crabbiness and back to being his happy self again. So I need a new approach...