My husband refuses to squeeze the toothpaste from anywhere but the very bottom of the tube, a habit I found charming for approximately the first six months of our marriage and increasingly insane every month after that. "It's not that hard," he said, the fortieth time he caught me squeezing from the middle like a savage. "You just flatten it as you go. It's a system." "It's toothpaste, not a retirement fund." He started leaving little sticky notes on the tube….."BOTTOM, PLEASE" which I ignored on principle, which led to him buying us two separate tubes, labeled his and hers, which felt like an actual escalation of the marriage itself. His mother visited last spring and, unprompted, opened the bathroom cabinet looking for aspirin and found the two labeled tubes sitting side by side. "Oh, he still does this," she said, delighted, holding one up like evidence. "His father used to fight him about this exact thing for years. Poor kid got so tired of being yelled at for the middle-squeeze he just started buying his own tube at fourteen." "He's been doing this since he was fourteen?" "Longest-running grudge in that house," she said. "Outlasted two dogs and one kitchen renovation." I stopped fighting him on it after that, mostly out of respect for a fourteen-year-old who'd apparently already lost this exact war once and simply decided never to lose it again. We still have two tubes. I still squeeze from the middle. He still says nothing, which I've decided is its own kind of growth.