What's the dumbest couple dispute you've ever had?

Hard water vs soft water.
So many times we've been in a hotel room and I've taken a shower and commented on what soft water it is because it feels like the soap never rinses off and I feel slippery all over. She always tries to correct me by calling it hard water. She grew up in a desert city that has naturally hard water, so she'll always say, "I know what hard water is, I grew up with hard water!" when the "hard" water she grew up with was softened by some means. It doesn't matter how many articles and blog posts and ChatGPT sessions on the topic I show her, she always insists they're wrong and she's right. We argued about it a few times in the past, but now it's a running joke between us.
- Okay, so the water in hotels that sucks at getting soap off (it doesn’t really, but it feels like it does) is softened water. It has been treated to remove calcium, magnesium, and other cations, to prevent scale buildup.
  As I understand it skin feels slippery like it hasn’t removed the soap for potentially a few reasons. General consensus is that either you’re feeling whatever salt they put in the water to treat it, or you’re feeling the lack of those minerals. That is, you’re use to the water making your skin feel less slippery because of the various minerals in it, so the absence of those minerals makes it feel slippery. You get used to this eventually, but it’s annoying if you aren’t used to softened water.
  The confusion comes in because in home water systems, you really only need a water softener if the water in the area is particularly hard. So it’s easy to associate softened water with hard water. Because you don’t really need to soften water that isn’t high in mineral deposits (unless you’re a hotel trying to minimize cleaning costs and are treating a fuckload of water centrally).
  So you’re both right. It’s soft water because it’s been softened. And it’s been softened because it’s hard water. 😂
- Oh man do I hate soft water. Granted soap doesn't lather as well with hard water but whenever I shower someplace with soft water I feel like I'm spending 20 minutes just trying to get the soap off. Also I hate drinking softwater
  
  The lather isn't what gets you clean anyway, they even add stuff to make the detergents lather more because of the perception that it gets you cleaner. Any lather at all with a proper soap says you're using enough soap to get clean.
- Just had this discussion/argument with my mom last week!

It has become an ongoing issue that my wife complains that she smells something, then gets angry at me if I am unable to smell that same smell, sometimes accusing me of gas lighting her or calling her a liar, when actually I just don't smell the smell she's smelling.
I'm not making implications or accusations, I'm not trying to mislead or confuse her, I just can't smell whatever she's smelling and that fact frustrates the heck out of her as though I'm personally letting her down. Then she gets a bit aggro and I have to change the garbages / kitchen compost in the hopes that perhaps those are the sources of the smells I can't smell. Sometimes that helps. She will never change the garbage or take out the compost herself.
When she insisted that she smelled a gas leak from our furnace that I couldn't smell, we called a professional who confirmed our furnace was working fine and there was no gas leak; but I was still the villain for denying the gas leak ahead of time. Three times in the last 6 months this has been a thing.
- Hey, not sure how old y’all are and such, but this can be a sign of dementia. This happened with my great grandma telling us things smelled of sulphur.
- Flip the script, say she’s gaslighting you by pretending to smell things that aren’t there.
  (Don’t actually do this unless you really hate your relationship.)
- My wife also has a better sense of smell then me. We don't fight about it but I have spent a bunch of time trying to find the phantom smell.
  She's pregnant now and her super smell is even more potent. So I had to do a lot of kitchen cleaning and I had to a lot of cooking. It's a thing for sure

My wife's siblings and her all have the same weird trait: when things get stressful, they clam up and do this "shut up and let me save the world" thing. Her sister's worked on it a lot because #fireman, but it's a strong compulsion.
The "hmm, maybe if you'd talked to anyone instead of going missing-person" is extra fun when it's a tech thing, as after the stress and the teeth-pulling contextual questions, it's two mouse clicks and an object lesson.
And, when THAT fight's over....

My ex-spouse accused me of cheating on him.
.....with a character in the video game.
.....because I "clearly love him more that you love me!"
Whenever he'd be upset (for whatever reason), he would snap and say "Why don't you go talk to the person you actually love??" before giving me the silent treatment until he needed something.
It was the beginning of the end.
Don't miss it lol
EDIT: oh fuck, I forgot.. he actually sold our PS4 containing the game/save file completely out of the blue a few months after his first accusation, without telling me first. The game in question was "Stardew Valley". He was a shitty little man.
- Told the gf about this, she needs to know which character it was.
  
  Shane, of course! Who tf gets jealous over Shane??
- Lol, my girlfriend says she always marries Sebastian because he reminds her of me. I hope that's a good thing. She wants me to play but I struggle getting into top-down games 😕
- Wifey found your post very insightful and also funny. Despite not being funny. As we're currently in a stardew-marathon and she (being not a hardcore gamer) asked me if I knew if anyone ever fell in love with an NPC. I didn't knew, then I stumbled upon your comment and showed her 😁
  
  It's funny in its own weird way! No worries.
  I tried to show the game to my then-spouse, because I wanted him to play, too! He didn't want to play """a lame girl game""".
  Have a fun marathon!! And keep doing stuff together! (:
- What I'm reading is he was right on the money about the pixel character being a more appealing love interest.
  
  Wet moldy socks were a more appealing love interest.
- I bet he was short and sensitive about it lol
- What a Clint
  
  Imagine if Clint & Shane were combined.
  It was baaaaaad lol
- Was it the poet who lives on the beach? That was the only one I'd have been threatened by
  
  Lol nah it was the alcoholic. Ironically enough, the two of them were the most alike!

Whether a specific colour was green or yellow. We eventually looked up the RGB value to settle it, and as it turns out it is the exact shade that's halfway to yellow and halfway to green.
We were both equally correct in the end.
- So it was chartreuse.
- Was this a debate about tennis balls? My spouse and I have had this exact disagreement!
  
  Not tennis balls, no. Quite frankly I can't remember what it was. Just the colour stuck 😅
- Colour theory is extremely complicated and you can't really tell from an RGB value in isolation that it represent a colour "exactly halfway" between green and yellow. Colour is perceptual, not a physical phenomenon, and this has significant meaningful consequences. But I'm glad you found a narrative that saved your marriage.
  
  It really messes with your head when you realize magenta is the color equivalent of the Source engine missing texture error
  
  Yellow is Red + Green, so half way between Yellow and Green would be what, 50% Red + 100% Green?
  Like you said, color is perceptual, and not only will everyone's eyes have a slightly different sensitivity for each wavelength, each display will have a slightly different calibration for its RGB channels.
  If the original color was in real life, the camera sensor would also be taking the full light spectrum and collapsing it into 3 RGB values, and the camera sensor's sensitivity/calibration will determine the ratio it converts a yellow wavelength into red and green. (Or maybe the real object isn't actually yellow, but pure red-+green light, it's impossible to tell after converting to RGB)
- Did you date my former coworker? I used to use a chartreuse coathanger because it was the only one of that color, which made it easy for me to spot. One day, as I was putting my coat away, this coworker started talking as if we were already mid-way through an argument. "It's so green. I don't know why you said it's yellow." Huh? I had no idea what he was talking about at first. I asked if he meant my coathanger, and I responded that I didn't know what color it was. (I didn't know what "chartreuse" meant yet.) He ranted on, claiming we fought about it once before, even though this was the first time he'd even talked about my coathanger. It was bizarre.
  I think that guy had something psychologically troubling going on. I'd also seen him: ask a question, make up an answer for that question, then immediately proceed to believe the answer he made up with 100% certainty. The question? "How do those Magic Eraser cleaning sponges work?" His answer? "They use paint." I asked how it could possibly match the color of every surface it's used on, but he insisted his answer must be right. Truly magical thinking.
  I also saw him watch an ad for a random product, then promptly declare that he needed that product. I had always thought of ads as something to tune out, but he legit followed them as if they were friends giving advice. I had never seen anything like that.

I attacked my wife on the Game of Thrones board game while she was at 6 castles and I was at 4.
- I just decided not to play games that cutthroat with mine
- How dare you, that's a relationship ender right there

My ex-girlfriend worked at a restaurant and they had an annual staff party which was just a house party at the manager's house. When we opened the door and started taking our shoes off one of the new server girls was shouting at the manager "Don't call me Lonestar!" and he was like "Yeah whatever Lonestar" and she screamed at the top of her lungs "DON'T CALL ME FUCKING LONESTAR!!!" and shoved him hard, he fell backwards and landed on his ass and she screamed a battle cry and started punching holes in the drywall, busting up her knuckles and bleeding everywhere. We put our shoes back on and just left. She got fired
- That's.. Not really a couple dispute, is it? Still, pretty funny lol
  
  He had the hots for her but I guess that doesn't really count
- She should've just given him the raspberry.
- What's up with the calling Lonestar?
  
  Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
  
  Look, just don't, OK?
  
  I imagine she formerly worked at a Lonestar Steakhouse. That or she had some affiliation with Texas. Being that these were restaurant folk, I'm leaning toward the first.
  
  Just completely random

Whether apple stems are perpendicular or parallel to the surface of the fruit.
- Considering that it was about topology, that might very well be the smartest couple's dispute I've ever heard of.
- Incidental Tangent to the surface where the stem starts.
  
  approximately
- Now, that's an interesting discussion!
- Is the answer not both? Depending on what part of the stem?
- No thats totally fair argument.

We disagreed for years about the color of our couch. I called it brown. He called it blue. It was a weird grayish brown colored couch, but because it was labeled "slate" when he bought it, he insisted it was blue. We then added a teal blue couch to our house which just solidified my "this is the brown couch" position. We do not, to this day, agree. Eventually we got rid of the couch.
- A similar debate with my partner is how I'm found out I'm colorblind lol
- When you say you got rid of it, is it for sale? I'm in the market for a blue couch
  
  JD?
- Do you still have the picture? We'd love to see.
  
  This is the couch up against our old mantle with painted brown bricks (we didn't do that, we were renting)
- Poor couch 😥
  One can also have endless arguments about the color turquoise. Is it rather green, or rather blue? Same as teal I guess.
  
  A couch is for life, not just for Christmas.
  
  One can also have endless arguments about the color turquoise. Is it rather green, or rather blue?
  The answer to that question is "no".
  It's turquoise. You wouldn't argue about whether orange is yellow or red, either.
  
  I had very constructive arguments about this with my grandma :
  Can you fetch one the green tiles ?
  What green tile ? You only have blue ones.
  Goes to fetch it herself. See ? A tile, and it's green.
  But it's clearly blue...
  I don't know what you mean, can't you see that it's green ?
  I can see very clearly that it's blue.
  No this is green, this is blue, and the tile is closest to green.
  It isn't though, it's definitely closest to blue.
  A while later
  This is pointless... Let's just call it turquoise.
  Turquoise it is.
  The next time
  Your new oven mittens are quite nice, the blue goes well in your kitchen.
  They are green...

They had a whole stupid argument about… Cheese. It went from small arguing to actual conflict.
- Look, cheese is serious eats. And business.
  
  And atrocity against vulnerable individuals.
- One time I was at a specialty beer and cheese shop and I saw this guy pushing a cart alone with two children. He generally looked beaten down and glum. The kids are rambunctious, he’s exhausted, wife is missing but obviously in the store with them.
  He is browsing the cases, killing time waiting for his wife to come back. He grabs a small block of cheese, looks interested it and adds it to the cart.
  A few minutes later, the wife returns and immediately spots the cheese block. She picks it up and screams “$10? For a block of cheese you haven’t even TRIED yet? Absolutely not.”
  Then she hurled it back in the case and stomped off while he sullenly followed her with the cart and kids

An ex wanted to break up because she was still in love with her ex. Her ex is in prison for decades after going on a rampage against homeless people and critically wounding at least a few. Live happybadger reaction:

So this was part of a much bigger discussion and turned out in reality to be mostly due to some unaddressed mental health issues. But on the tail end of an argument, y'know when you're starting to talk nice again and resolve things, I said something like it's okay, sometimes you're just a sad pancake. She burst into tears because she wanted to be a waffle. Hormones and mental health are wild, y'all.
- Your comment is great, so I told my partner about it. He asked the cat if she was a wɑffle or a pɑncɑke. I said pɑncɑke, because she's a good sleepy circle. Now we're arguing whether waffles should be squares or circles.
  
  Hm, round. To fit the plate.
- mostly due to some unaddressed mental health issues.
  I expect all the stories to be this. Why am I in this thread??

The dumb part of any dispute I've had with my wife is thinking I could win.