If there's one thing that will destroy the lines of communication between a couple, it's nagging. But, seriously, if he leaves his dirty underwear on the bathroom floor just one more time, you're going to kill him, and no all-female jury in the country would dare convict you!

What do you do?

Well, you could sigh, take a deep breath, and pick up the offending undergarments with your HazMat gloves and toss them in the laundry hamper. Or you could see if nagging him about the situation might work this time. Or you could think of some alternatives...

Find creative ways to get your point across. One thing that my husband Alex does that just makes me want to scream is he never pushes his chair in when he gets up from the dinner table. This is a problem for me because not only do we have a toddler who needs to learn how to push her chair in when she gets up from the table, we also have a beagle who will eagerly use the "out" chair as a perfect stepladder to get on the table and eat any crumbs or leftovers we may have temporarily forgotten. Besides, it just drives me nuts. But rather than ask him one more time to push in his damn chair, I quickly scribbled a haiku poem on a piece of scratch paper and stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet. Haiku, just in case it's been too long since your 6th grade language arts class, is a Japanese poem form consisting of three lines. The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables, and the third line has five syllables. No more, no less. My haiku went something like this:

One day very soon

Foaming at the mouth I'll be.

Push in your %$#@ chair!

Alex was not amused, and eventually I took the little poem down. I did notice that after my haiku was gone, he did push his chair in on a pretty regular basis, at least for a while. I'm thinking about finding some way to reward him without actually telling him that's what I'm doing, see if that works better.

He's also not one to clean the frying pan after searing meat in it. I never said anything about it, but one day Alex cleaned the frying pan before dinner was even served! My next haiku went something like this:

My awesome husband

Gave me a pleasant surprise:

A clean frying pan!

As the old wives say, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." Think about it.

Find a way around the problem. If your sweetie is the underwear-on-the-bathroom-floor kind of person, maybe you could put a small laundry hamper or basket in the spot where the dirty item is most likely to fall. At least that way you could pick up the container holding a few days' worth and dump them directly into the washing machine without having to actually (shudder) touch them. If you're the guilty party and you're tired of your spouse nagging at you, then put the small hamper or basket there yourself. Or maybe put a sticky-note on the bathroom mirror that says, "All underwear left behind will be confiscated and fed to the dragon in the basement" or something like that.

Learn to live with it. My father-in-law always told my husband as a boy that one of the secrets to a long and happy relationship was to never sweat the small stuff. And, frankly, underwear in the bathroom, cups or toilet paper turned the wrong way, an overflowing to-be-shredded pile and a dining room chair not tucked neatly under the table are all pretty small stuff, when you look at the big picture. Besides, there's probably stuff you do that drives your partner bat-bonkers that you don't even know about.

If your goal is to have a warm, loving relationship with a spouse who freely talks to you about just about everything, drop the nagging, and wait to be tapped by the haiku muse...