Walter is worried that “she may be becoming mentally unhinged in some way.” Mary’s response is all about the financial aspect, which Walter never even brought up in the first place and presumably didn’t think was a problem. This suggests to me that Mary does indeed have a problem.
My FIL was married to a Mary. It was a symptom of at least one untreated psychological problem. I honestly don’t think I could live like that. I have ADHD and I get easily overwhelmed by clutter; I try to retain the bare minimum of what I need so cleaning is as easy as possible. After they divorced he got rid of everything. They had six Christmas trees. Most of the crap was kept in their enormous basement, but he said the general state of the house when they didn’t have guests was for there to be open boxes all over the place and she would stay up into the early hours shuffling shit around. I really could not take that. She was a rather generous hoarder, though, so I’m not sure if that’s hoarding proper. She was always trying to give you stuff. One Christmas she raided her closets and piled on us all these extravagant things. Not a situation where she thought ahead of time about what we might like but more that while everyone was opening gifts she was treating her closet like a shopping mall and running back and forth getting rid of things she didn’t want.
She also believed her dead FIL’s spirit was visiting her nightly from hell. Weird lady.
I guess I just don’t automatically correlate a rich woman’s shopping with another woman’s neurosis. There are men with thousands of sneakers who no one is pushing to get dragged off to the therapist.
Your FIL’s wife sounds like she definitely has issues though.
Honestly, if that actually happens, it sounds even more bizarre than owning 1000s of pairs of woman’s shoes. Women tend to wear different shoes with different outfits, and for different occasions. While no one nees 5,000 pair, at least you can justify some variation. I can’t imagine a need for more than abut five or 10 pairs of sneakers, at most. I have two, one for every day wear, and one pair for tennis.
Borderline Personality Disorder at a bare minimum. During the divorce she became a crazy stalker, wrote fraudulent checks in my FIL’s name and was later determined to have stolen a large amount of money from him starting from the beginning of their 17 year marriage. She called the cops on him and claimed he had cocaine and child porn. Really out there. I was sad to end the relationship because we didn’t see a lot of that behavior until the very end. Not that my FIL was the consummate partner either. It was definitely a case of each partner being willing to ignore the other partner’s red flags.
I think it’s possible to buy a lot of shit and not be crazy, but I don’t think it’s healthy behaviour generally, man or woman. And if the presence of all that stuff is having a negative effect on your partner, it’s important to address the issue whether it’s neurosis or something else.
So, if someone offered you these 21 pair (total value about $7.5M), you’d refuse, because there are too many for you.
If Mary has an enormous, but curated, collection, with some unique high end footwear and some complete collections of lines including rarities, and she displays them, is she a hoarder? Is a man with a million dollars worth of sneakers on display a hoarder?
I’ve seen them. Whole closets of the latest designer sneakers. Displayed like art. They’re not for wearing so much as display.
I don’t knock it, but neither do I knock the woman who likes having a lot of shoes.
If they have that value, I’d sell them in an instant. I don’t need sneakers that I’m not going to wear.
I get that people have different interests. Some might not appreciate my collection of antique porcelain owls. Sneakers seems like a very strange item to collect, but I guess it’s pretty harmless if the collector can afford it. Whatever brings them joy is fine with me.
Antique porcelain owls? Is that a whoosh? Never heard of that as a collectible thing.
yeah, I just made that up. 
Don’t be so dismissive…
$3,000
This.
I collect puzzles. I may have various disorders, but the puzzle collection is not a problem. I have zero interest in collecting shoes, but it’s a pretty common interesting. My immediate reaction is that she likes shoes.
Now, her husband seems concerned. But it’s not clear from the statements that his concerns are grounded in anything. Maybe she’s nuts and she can’t get into bed without negotiating piles of unsorted footwear. Or maybe she has a nicely curated collection of shoes, and he’s a controlling asshole. Or something in between.
On the weather poll, you left out an option for
“TV networks giving worldwide coverage to what used to be local stories”.
I don’t understand the relationship between whether the basement is finished and whether I’d change clothes down there. Part of mine is, and part isn’t, and it’s the finished part i would feel uncomfortable changing in, because it’s the part someone would be more likely to walk into.
Yeah, it just struck me as an odd question. Are we talking just changing in the basement once, or on a regular basis? Is there a reason I’m supposed to change down there? Am I doing so on a dare or to win a bet? If there’s a reason for me to change down there, especially if it’s just once, then sure, why not? If there is no good reason, then I’m sure I could find a more comfortable place to change.
If my husband hoards anything, it’s action figures. It’s not neurotic he just really likes the X-Men. He has probably around 500 action figures and has no intention to slow down. I don’t really care for action figures all over my house so we have had to negotiate designated spaces for his, and he stores the rest. My interests are not visible like his. I’m into writing, puzzles which I only own five at a time, crypto crosswords and reading Kindle books. But now that I think about it, I guess he tolerates my weird sea creature art and octopus apron and tentacled stuff all over the house, so it’s a trade off. It’s possible to take it too far, though, and every partner is going to have a different threshold.
Yes, but if she has far more shoes than she can every wear, chances are that she is hoarding. If she is also planning to open a women’s shoe museum, it’s probably still hoarding.
I just have a problem with stuff in general. My dad’s house was a royal nuisance to clean out. When my uncle died, it was a year before the stuff was cleared out – there were a couple thousand pieces of various flatware we just dropped off at the metal recycler. Quite frankly, I am relieved not to be the person who ha to clean up after me.
Yeah. I’d have to haul the change of clothes down there, and there’s no good place to put them, though I could bring them down in a box and put the box on a slightly grubby table. And then I’d have to haul the ones I’d changed out of back up. I voted “it’s unfinished, but sure” but I’m having trouble thinking of any reason why I would change clothes in the basement; I just don’t think it would be horribly uncomfortable to do so.
One thing I learned from estate saleing is that anything can be collected