A Few Things Americans Get All Wrong, According to My Danish Husband
Not everyone is special (and it's okay)
My Danish husband, now living in the U.S., loves to talk about this weird country of ours. For someone so set in his ways, the move to America was a radical adjustment. It took an enormous amount of paperwork and phone calls to get his, and his daughters’, life up and running again.
We laughed. We cried. We made it work.
During all of this, my husband became convinced that there were a few things we got all wrong in America. Here are just some of them.
Not everyone has something to say
One of the first things my humble Danish husband noticed upon his arrival in the U.S. was that Americans had a lot to say. And they said it loudly. Not only conversations around us were loud and assertive, but people used other, smaller, opportunities to express themselves.
“Why does his license plate say Bad Ass?” my naive husband wondered about the car he saw in the street.
I laughed and explained to him what a vanity license plate was.
“Surely, they can’t think those plates make them look clever?” he pondered. I shrugged.
That’s when he began to realize that almost everyone in America had something to say, even if only through their license plate, or at least a bumper sticker. Opinions, views, hobbies, political parties, you name it, had to be slapped on a car, a t-shirt, or a Facebook page.
“There’s no need for all this excessive self-expression,” my very Danish husband concluded.
And then: “Most people really don’t have anything interesting to say.”
Fixed shower heads are weird
“Where’s the regular shower?” my husband stared at our new bathroom set-up in his first American home in Brooklyn.
“What do you mean?” I asked him, but I already knew the answer. Europeans prefer hand-held showers, which are considered much easier to use for washing both yourself and shower walls.
My husband tried to rotate our shower head, but it didn’t budge.
I defended the system: “You move and angle your body under the shower instead of angling the shower around your body.”
“It’s like moving a paper under a pencil to draw instead of moving the pencil,” my husband answered and went to look for a hand-held shower head on Amazon.
Indeed, given that most American kitchen faucets come with a pull-out hose these days, it’s strange that our showers still don’t.
American public restrooms are creepy
Let’s start with the word “restroom.”
“Who’s resting in there?” my husband wondered after I gently reminded him that in America, we don’t “go to the toilet.” Instead, we “use the restroom.”
Then he moved on to talking about bathroom stalls.
“Why is there no privacy in the bathroom?” my husband asked me.
“Sure, there is privacy,” I defended America once again, “In the stalls!”
But I quickly realized he was right: the doors in our bathroom stalls were a joke: thin and with massive gaps at the top, the bottom, and the side. I once used a public restroom in Central Park where a door was so short that my face was fully visible when I stood up. Even better — it looked out straight into the park through the open entryway. Here I was, peeing in Central Park on full display.
European bathroom stalls, on the other hand, are fully enclosed and private, as you would expect in a public restroom.
“So the American government doesn’t even trust its people to poop without doing something stupid?” my husband laughed.
He had a good point: once again in the U.S., we’re treated like children who need to be watched every step of the way.
But hey, at least I get to pass the toilet paper to a girl stranded in the stall next to me.
We can’t be trusted to turn right on red
My husband learned what right on red meant the hard way — after being aggressively honked at by an angry local in Los Angeles. Coming from Europe and then New York (where right on red is illegal), he was flabbergasted that a thing like that could be allowed.
“People simply can not be trusted with such liberty!” my husband protested after being nearly run over by a car turning right on red without as much as slowing down.
After countless crossings on foot (and with a stroller) of a busy intersection by our old house in Los Angeles, I began to see his point. Many cars didn’t bother slowing down, let alone stopping, before turning whether on green or red. That intersection was one of the reasons we eventually moved.
“This country has no respect for pedestrians,” my husband concluded.
“We are just freaks in the land of cars,” he sighed.
As a former New Yorker, I couldn’t agree more.
Not everyone is special
After three years in the U.S., my husband already noticed that just about everyone in our country is made to believe they’re “special.”
This couldn’t be more different from his home country of Denmark where a common belief is that no one is special. The sentiment dates back to the old but still relevant “Law of Jante” which has prevailed in Scandinavia for decades. It’s somewhat of a social code consisting of ten rules, with the very first being: “You’re not to think you are anything special,” followed by “You’re not to think you are as good as we are.” This alone explains a lot about my husband and his heritage.
“Too many special people is not a good thing for society as a whole,” he explains.
Indeed, focusing on the common good instead of over-promoting individuality worked wonders for Scandinavia. Yet mention this to an American, and they run for cover screaming “socialism.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary,” my husband concluded.