Oooo…kinky!
I was thinking more like a permanent trade, but if you wanna swap on alternate Tuesdays after a bottle of wine, go for it with my hearty approval. 
Ha! To risk being slightly serious again, though, I do think that one of the behaviors that exacerbates these housekeeping disputes is exaggeration and hyperbole.
When, for example, the person who dusts and sweeps every day calls the person who dusts and sweeps once a week a “slovenly pig who’d be happier living in a garbage pile”, and the person who dusts and sweeps once a week calls the person who dusts and sweeps every day “an obsessive-compulsive germaphobe who expects a household to be maintained like a semiconductor manufacturing cleanroom”, etc. etc., that’s just trying to paint the other person as so unreasonable and extreme that their preferences can be dismissed without consideration.
That does not sound to me like a recipe for marital happiness. An important part of compromise is being able to recognize and acknowledge that the other party’s preferences are legitimate and deserving of respect, even if they’re very different from your own.
Great wisdom there. As usual from you.
We need to become a harmonious team; we (probably) cannot become identical.
How we each deal with our own flexibility and that of our mate determines how well this works. Two inflexible people will have a life of strife even if their going-in alignment is close to ideal. Conversely, two highly flexible people will have a low-stress life of ease even if they start out way different from each other.
I have this problem with turning things clockwise. When I ask, “Is the clock on the floor or on the ceiling,” people look at me like I’m nuts.
We have lots of disputes where Mr Mallard just can’t understand why I don’t understand immediately, and gets insulted when I ask questions, as if I am impugjing his communication abilities. It got a lot better when he’d spent more time with my mother and understood that I really did come from a very different culture. (Also, ask vs guess culture, 100%.)
I ran into something similar when I did a trip on a sailing ship. All the rigging was very traditional, including use of manilla rope, like this:
After setting the sails (or whatever rope handling we did) the rope was coiled and hung on pins to keep it out of the way. I was told to always coil the rope clockwise because the twisted rope fibers wouldn’t accept a counter-clockwise coil.
I thought the same way you do. If I’m looking down on the rope as I’m laying it in a coil, it’s clockwise. But if the deck was transparent, and someone downstairs was looking up as I was laying the coil, they’d see it forming in a counter-clockwise direction. Clockwise and counter-clockwise are relative to the position of the observer, so how can the twisted rope fibers know where I’m watching from?
I decided not to press the issue. I decided that CW and CCW are from the perspective of where the rope is being fed into the coil.
Sad to say, but in my direct experience with a lot of operating rooms, including those I actually operated in, this statement is too often not true.
We don’t wanna hear about yer numerous sexual conquests, you rogue. 
We’re out of toothpaste/ toilet paper/ shampoo/ mustard/ fruit cups!
I ask- no did you look in the cupboards?
Which ones?
The ones where we keep that stuff stocked.
He goes hunting, scratching his head and beard and avoids looking in correct cupboards first. Then finds it and stares intently past the item he’s looking for then begins to hum faintly an annoying tuneless tune and retrieves said item.
Still can’t find shampoo. I say look in the shower I bought two bottles a month ago. He says that’s body wash. I say look again wearing your glasses this time. Faint tuneless hum commences again.
I’ve been single for a stretch and this thread is making my blood boil because I can relate to a lot of it. I won’t even go into my shitty live-in partner who came after the divorce because she was insanely selfish and matched many of the anectodotes above.
I will tell one about my ex-wife. I’ll start by saying that she is still my best friend after twenty years post-divorce. So many things were very good. We were aligned with neatness, promptness, politics and especially sense of humor. World class banter. One of my friends said we’re still friends because of an extreme case of commit to the bit.
Anyway, what drove me nuts was the “youlljust”. Over and over and over it was like:
We should put an irrigation system in the back yard.
Yeah, some day but we can’t afford it right now.
We don’t need to pay someone, it’s easy you’ll just go to Home Depot and buy the materials and put it together.
I don’t have the first clue how to do that.
It’s not that hard.
This would end one of two ways.
- I would suggest that she do it it’s so easy which would enrage her for some reason.
- She would insist that I am the one who is “good at those things and she wanted to be left out of it” so I would do my best. Then she would nitpick the fuck out of my choices and tell me at the end that it “looked like shit”.
Related to #2, I was in charge of hiring people to fix things. In one case I hired an appliance guy to fix our dryer. It was an old dryer and it took him like three visits to get it right because he brought the wrong part and had to come back another day and then had to come back again to reinstall it. She gave me no end of shit about how I approached the whole thing.
Fast forward a few years and she is in her new condo. Wouldn’t you believe that the dryer broke and it played out very similarly but worse. She was venting (ha!) to me about it and I gently reminded her about the previous dryer. She conceded that maybe she was a little unreasonable before.
Oh, man, I feel this one. I have ceased working on any project together with my wife. She knows I am no carpenter or upholstered or painter, and when that inevitable look of disapproval comes after I say “I am doing the best I can”, I know the words on the tip of her tongue are barely being held back…“Well, that’s not good enough.” Any home improvement project is all hers now, so when she says what she wants to do, I just nod and tell her to go for it. Of course, I have to accept the outcome, but that’s a lot less painful than going thru the process and getting humiliated.
While that’s technically true, doesn’t one of those viewpoints seem much more likely to be the intended one?
If Ms. P heard someone suggest that I tackle any do it yourself project she might hurt herself stifling laughter.
This does not strike me as good faith bargaining. Lower standards should not be an excuse for dumping all of the work on someone else. If you think vacuuming needs to be done once a month, and she thinks it needs to be done every Monday and Friday, then the last Friday of every month, you should be doing the vacuuming. Same with other jobs. It’s reasonable to have different standards, it’s not reasonable to just do nothing because “She never lets it get bad enough.”
Of course, and that’s what I did. It just seemed strange to me that there could be a practical, physical consequence from something that was a contrivance of the perspective from which I was viewing it.
A related issue is that an infrequent cleaner benefits from the work of a frequent cleaner by having a much easier job than they would have had to deal with on their own preferred schedule.
If Spouse A wants the bathroom cleaned every other day, and Spouse 1 prefers cleaning it every other week, then when 1 picks up the sponge every other Saturday to tackle the bathroom, they’re not dealing with two weeks’ worth of grime and mold and whatnot, but only two days’ worth, because A has been picking up the slack.
This is how partners/spouses with greater tolerance for dirt or disorder can really have their spouses over a barrel, even without actually intending any exploitation. If they refuse to clean more often than they’d want to on their own, then their spouse either has to handle the more frequent cleaning schedule all by themselves, or put up with a level of dirt and disorder that they really don’t like. And then even the infrequent contributions that the less fussy spouse is willing to make are additionally reduced in effort and impact by the fact that the more fussy spouse has been “carrying” them with the more frequent cleanings.
Even maintaining separate residences isn’t a solution, because the more fussy spouse won’t be comfortable sharing a space they feel is too dirty or messy, so all the cohabitation happens in the more fussy spouse’s space anyway, and they’re still landed with cleaning up after both parties.
It’s a conundrum. ISTM that the only real solution is for people who have strongly incompatible cleanliness standards to avoid sharing living space at all. Certainly, nobody ought to agree to live with anyone who treats their sincere preferences about the home environment with contemptuous disregard and belittlement.
If you honestly can’t be happy compromising up or down to a housekeeping routine that your partner can be satisfied with, dump the partner. Love is important, but most people won’t go on loving somebody they really can’t stand living with.
When it comes to planning something (e.g. a vacation itinerary):
- If I planned it and something went even a little awry in the execution, my wife would spend a long time being very upset with my terrible planning.
- If my wife planned it and something went horribly wrong in the execution, my wife would say that it was an unforeseeable glitch and we’d quickly get on with our lives.
Not surprisingly, this has trained me to leave the planning to my wife (although she sometimes complains “Why am I always the one doing the planning?”).
Great point. I’d had the same thought but you said it much better than I would have.
This applies to far more than cleanliness standards. But you’re right that’s a real biggie.
My other two biggish items on that list are thermostat settings and sleep/wake hours. If you like it warm and they like it cold, or you are a night owl and they are an early bird, that’s going to put a real dent in your happiness day in and day out. It’s a corrosive drip drip drip of needing to put up with.
This is a very different sort of problem. But a real one for sure.
It is one thing for two people to have different preferences about [whatever].
It is an entirely different level of unreasonable for someone to judge something much more harshly when their partner does it than when they do the very same thing. Or have the same thing happen to them.
IMO those latter people should not be part of a couple at all. If you truly can’t be fair-minded and intellectually honest in reference to your partner, maybe you should be solo. You’ll make two people happier that way.
I’m a bit offended by the implication that my wife doesn’t deserve love and she should die alone. We both have very positive traits, but we both have issues and we do the best we can to cope (like most people in the world, I imagine).