My fiance deals with stress in a lot of strange ways, then periodically, he gets legitimately quiet and doesn’t say much for a few days.
Other times, he tinkers with an outdated vehicle in the garage that he swears will be up and running one morning.
Now that we’ve been married for 15 years, it’s straight-forward for me to option up on his stress and the habits that follow. This past month has been tied up for him at labor and he’s been missing a lot of time at home with our teenagers. I know he wishes he could be there for everything and so do the teenagers, however sporadically labor has to come first; Last night though, I found him doing something legitimately odd. I was fast asleep and I woke up to a bang and some rustling. My first instinct was to tell my fiance, even though he wasn’t in bed. I went downstairs and found him coming in from the garage with a pack of air filters. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that he was taking the outdated air filter out and replacing it with a new one. I asked him why he was doing it in the middle of the night and he responded by telling me he woke up in a panic because he forgot to change the air filter and he was afraid our Heating, Ventilation, and A/C system would stop running efficiently. I let him upgrade the air filter because it seemed legitimately important to him. Once he was done, I insisted that he come to bed and assured him that our Heating, Ventilation, and A/C system would run perfectly fine now that there was a clean air filter.