I'm glad I'm not alone in my hate of the telephone. I rarely get phone calls anymore; they dropped off a lot after I married a couple years ago. My family never calls me (and I rarely call them). DH mostly gets calls from work and from his parents. For some reason, their phone calls get on my nerves, even when they don't involve repeated calls and voicemail messages.

I'm not sure why their calls to him bug me so much. Part of it, I'm sure is that I'm jealous that his parents pay at least some attention to him, as mine mostly just ignore me. But I think it goes beyond that. They just seem so obligatory on both ends, and that makes me kind of sad for everyone involved. My husband and his parents don't talk weekly because they actually have anything to say to one another or something meaningful to discuss (unless their weekly visit to Subway is "meaningful"). Rather, they appear to be driven because of some shared parent/adult child obligation. It would be nice if their conversations were born from something deeper and more genuine. It just seems really superficial to me. Maybe that's normal; I don't know. I have so little normal in my own familial relationships.