This letter from Ask Amy in today’s Washington Post got me wondering:
The two guys I have lived with, and the majority of the guys I dated, were pretty much like this to varying extents. Little things, like cleaning the bathroom. If I didn’t clean it, I think it would probably never be done. Vacuuming - I do it about once a week; if I were not there, it probably would get done every three months at the most. If I didn’t strip the bed and wash the sheets regularly, it would never get done. I could go on and on… I am by no means a neat freak, but I don’t want to live in a gross, unsanitary house.
And on the flip side… Men, what things do women do that bug you similarly?
Bitch about me not cleaning the house to some damn OCD woman’s standards. I don’t care if the kitchen or bathroom doesn’t pass the white glove test. Nor do I think that I should care just because someone else does. You care? You clean it.
This is not anything written in stone, but I have found that those of us guys who have been in the military keep things cleaner that those who have not been in. Those who have never served never learned to clean.
Well, I don’t know about “most men.” Mr. Wanna, though, definitely.
When I moved in with him, it was his habit to change his bedsheets no more than once a month. Ditto for vacuuming carpets, and scrubbing toilets was a once or twice a year proposition. The walls had never been washed (which you could see from several feet away), and some things were so dusty as to be unredeemable.
This morning when I went into the kitchen, I found some black particles strewn on the floor in front of the trash compactor. I had just swept & mopped the afternoon before! :mad:
I am not “some OCD woman”, but I grew up in an environment where that kind of thing will attract giant disgusting cockroaches, so I can’t abide it.
My wife likes a house to be far cleaner than I do. I like to spend far less time cleaning than she does. So we compromise: I spend more time cleaning than I would like to, to get a house to a level of cleanliness that doesn’t mean anything to me except that it pleases my wife; and she accepts a lower standard of cleanliness than she’d ideally have, in order to partially accommodate my wish not to spend so much time cleaning.
On the other hand, I care a lot more about the computer than she does, so I spend a lot more time keeping the computer updated with software, running disk scans,and so forth. I hope that eventually it works out.
The “Ask Amy” writer needs to ask herself who determines what the House Rules are, and what the house rules would be if they really respected everyone’s wishes. If they’re designed primarily to please her, she shouldn’t be surprised to discover that that she’s the only one that cares much about them.
I don’t need my house spotless. Not by any means. This is what I would like:
For the entire house to be picked up, once a week. This just means any piles of stuff should be cleaned up, nothing on the floor, things in their place.
The toilet should be pretty close to white…doesn’t have to be spotless.
All the garbages emptied when full.
Vacuumed once a week. I do this, because it’s mainly my hair all over the carpet.
Dishes cleaned daily, or at most every other day.
Kitchen cleaned thoroughly once a month.
Stuff like that. Now, a lot of this stuff would be easier if we both would just keep up with it. As in, pick up clothes when you take them off and hang them up, don’t just drop them on the floor, etc.
I don’t want to nag him, but when I see him take off his nice shirt and dump it on the floor, I have to say something. If only because it’s his nice shirt, and I don’t want it trod upon!
He is actually very good about cleaning - once I remind him. He rarely does it on his own. So we’ve compromised. Sunday morning is chores. I don’t remind him, don’t nag him, I just start cleaning myself, and that way he gets reminded. And the house gets cleaned.
As for stuff he does that genuinely annoys me - hawk lugies. (However you spell that). The thing is, when he was a kid, someone nearly broke his nose and if he blows his nose too hard he gets an instant, bloody, horrible nosebleed. So I understand why he does it, and don’t complain, but it sure does gross me out.
The only thing that really bugs me about my SO’s cleaning is that I have to constantly remind and nag him to do something, and he gets mad at me for nagging. The kicker is, he ASKED me to nag him because, as he said, “Otherwise I’ll never get it done.”! :smack: But he’s such a sweetie I can’t stay mad at him.
I’ve been married twice, and neither husband did/does housework. First husband was once off work for two years, while I worked full-time (with four kids), and he never lifted a finger in the house. We were married for 27 years. His mom and sisters did everything for him when he was growing up, including ironing his clothes.
Second husband kept his place up pretty good when we were dating, including changing sheets and cleaning the toilet, but he’s done neither of these things in the ten years that we’ve been married. He’ll occasionally take a feather duster to the cobwebs in the corners, but that’s it. (I don’t know why cobwebs bother him so much.)
Two of my three sons are slobs and the one who lives alone is a clean freak. If he had to help clean up someone else’s mess, or if he had someone to clean up after him, he might not be so tidy.
Yeah, it’s the nagging thing that really pisses me off, too. They (some men) passive-aggressively set you up to nag, so they can then make you be the “bad wife.”
This scenario happens over & over at our house:
He asks me: “what can I do to help you? You work so hard, and I want you to have some time to rest/be with me.”
So I say, “It would be helpful if you would vacuum the bedroom.” And he says he will.
I go about my chores, and I can’t help but notice that he’s still sitting in front of the TV. (I feel really resentful when I’m working my ass off and he’s sitting in front of the TV.) I need the bedroom vacuumed before I can do certain tasks of my own, so I ask, “when are you going to vacuum?” His answer: “when I’m done watching this game.”
I find a way to work around the unvaccumed bedroom issue. Later, when I walk by again, he’s still sitting in front of the damn TV. Watching a different show.
Finally, when the only thing left to do is vacuum the damn bedroom, I do it.
I used to nag him, but it just made us both unhappy. This way, I’m the only one that’s unhappy. Fair, huh?
I’ve lived in this apartment since August, and I’ve cleaned the bathroom exactly twice. Both times I knew family members were coming to visit who would have problems with the state of the place. I don’t think I’ve vacuumed unless I’ve spilled something on the carpet. And the sheets don’t get washed unless a guest is staying and I give up the bed. So I guess I’m pretty typical.
I don’t clean as frequently as my wife, but when I do, I clean much more thoroughly than her. She’s content for things to be straightened up and basically cleaner than when she started, but I figure that if I’m going to do it, the place is going to shine when I’m done. So, I guess I’m less bothered about uncleanliness (uncleanliness? whatever) in the first place, but frankly I take more pride in the job (when I do it) than any of the women I’ve ever been with.
For instance, when I build something in my house, I can enjoy it forever because I built it to last. But I don’t like cleaning (or raking leaves, or gardening, etc) because in a few days or a week, it just needs to be done again, and it’s as if I had never done it at all. It’s the constant need for it to be done over and over again that bothers me, so I turn a blind eye to it. But when I’ve decided enough is enough and it’s time to do the job, I like to do it 110%.
I think women in general take more pride out of the way their house is kept than men. It may be a stereotype and I am sure there are plenty of exceptions, but when a house is a mess inside people are more likely to think badly of the woman, the same way when a woman does not groom herself people say she has let herself go. Men are not judged on appearance in their tasks but more on what they can provide / produce. Men get judged for not being able to provide whereas women usually don’t.
I think in part I am more compelled to keep a clean house than my husband because I know other people may judge me for it, not him, even though no one I know would outwardly come out and say anything to me. One of the first things people notice about a house is the way it is kept and I guess my pride keeps me from letting things go too much. We do expect a single man to live like a slob, no one thinks he is a failure as a man for it or for not knowing how to do laundry the same way no one is suprised when a woman does not know how to change her oil. We often laugh or kid a guy about a messy apartment like we would a teenager. A woman who lives like a slob is more likely to raise eyebrows, right or wrong as it may be.
Another reason may just be no one ever expected him to clean or his mother may have done it all and he was just never raised to notice things like that. Changing the sheets seems to be a common one - most single guys I knew in college just didn’t do it. I think that is one of those things that mom always does and they never notice. Women often know more about hygenic issues that come with it too - I know my husband was never worried about a dust mite because he lived in blissful ignorance about them, but once I heard about them I can’t let the sheets go for more than a week without getting icked out. Men don’t seem to care about sleeping in microscopic bugs but I do!
I am lucky that my husband is pretty good about cleaning and he does not complain if I ask him to help me more, but like most couples I know the majority of the cleaning and housework is done by me just because I am the first to notice it.
I’m with the guys on this one. Who the heck wants to spend their weekends cleaning?!?
In the Athena household, we get around this by having a cleaning woman come in once a week and clean. I realize this isn’t economically possible for some people, but I’m also constantly amazed at how many people would rather let their relationship go to shit over cleaning than spend the money it take to get a cleaning lady in. It’s not horribly expensive; even when I lived in a more expensive area it only cost ~$100 to get someone in twice a month to do the basics.
That said, Mr. Athena and I aren’t typical; He’s much tidier than I am, but I like things cleaner than him. For example, I don’t mind if there’s bottles and hairdriers and such lying about the bathroom sink, as long as the sink is clean. He’s more or less the opposite, except every once in a while he gets concerned about things that I don’t care about. Currently he’s fixated on dust and pet hair under the bed and couch and such. I don’t get two shits about that. So far, all he’s done is bitch, though. He doesn’t ever actually clean the stuff himself.
In fact, that’s pretty common around here: he bitches at me to tidy up or clean stuff I don’t care about, and I ignore him. If he’d take the initiative and start doing it, I’d help him. But bitching alone falls on deaf ears.
My husband is much more apt to clean than I am. We’re both fairly untidy in terms of leaving stuff lying around/on the floor/etc. He’s more likely than I to suddenly get the “cleaning bug” and start scrubbing things, picking stuff up off the table, etc. (That’s how both of us clean, we get in the mood to clean and just start cleaning anything within range, until we come down from that mood within an hour or so.) And if anyone in the house makes a comment about something being messy, it’s him.
As for a woman taking pride in how the house is kept and not wanting others to judge her for a messy home, we take care of that issue by rarely having people over. When we do, we both go into a cleaning frenzy the day before.
Whenever I vacuum, I show him the canister (it’s clear) so he can see how much dirt and crap we were walking around on. It’s just disgusting to think about how much nastiness we’d be walking around in if I didn’t vacuum regularly. Most people like to be able to walk in their house barefoot, right?
About the bathroom. When I first moved in, the counter and sink were just covered in grime and nastiness. It took me literally two minutes to spray cleaner and scrub it down and rinse it off. It looked so much better. Don’t get me started on the shower, toilet, and floor. This is where you clean yourself every day,why would you want to be in a dirty, unsanitary environment? And it’s NOT THAT HARD! It takes only minutes!!
The rare times he does wash the dishes, he doesn’t do the WHOLE job. Part of doing the dishes is rinsing food and gunk out of the sink, wiping down the counters, wiping the stove. He never does that stuff.
Why can’t guys see the gunk all over the counters or on the stovetop? And why can’t they see the huge dustbunnies collecting in the corners? I think they have selective blindness on these issues
The first two guys I was with would make a huge mess, sit down to watch TV, then bitch to me about the house not being clean. My roommate did the same thing, and I wasn’t dating her. :smack:
The third guy is far more anal about cleanliness than I am, and needs to have things neat and tidy before he does anything relaxing. Whether I cleaned the house or not, it’s just automatic for him to begin cleaning when he gets home from work.
I married that one.
I keep the place as clean and tidy as possible, so the poor dear gets a break, but sometimes, I’m convinced, he just needs to do something with his hands that feels constructive. I also make sure to have his dinner ready, and give him a massage every night, too. Hard work gets *rewarded * around here.
