Here’s something I noticed: you don’t “have access to his two incomes”.
Why the fuck not? You’ve been married to this guy for 36 years, keeping house for him, raising your kids, and you don’t have proper access to the family cash?
His psychological issues apart, he’s basically treating you like shit.
The only question is which of you is going to have the mental breakdown first and end up sectioned? Which would be one solution to your impasse.
That’s a good point. This is a weird damn relationship.
Daniel
Hang on a sec - I missed the ‘two incomes’ part. Does he work two jobs?
As Sam wrote, there’s more than one issue here.
First off, does your husband expect you to do all the work you described in the OP? If he wants a neat house but makes no contribution to keeping it neat, then I agree he’s being a dick.
Or is it a case that he isn’t concerned about the neatness of the house? Maybe he figures he has no obligation to contribute to standards he has no interest in maintaining.
He might not even agree with those standards. While you’re thinking he’s too much of an Oscar, he might be thinking you’re too much of a Felix. Maybe he’s been holding his tongue all these years.
Overall, the OP is giving me the impression that you assume as a given that your opinion is the only correct one and that the only problem is getting him to agree with you. But I think you need to take a step back and consider the issue from his standpoint. He probably believes his opinion is worth as much as yours.
So the two of you need to discuss this issue and listen to each other. Then you can see if you can work something out that both of you can accept.
From the OP, it sounds like he works four days a week. One of his incomes might be a trust fund or inheritance of some kind that isn’t being put into the family income pool. Which still doesn’t make a lot of sense - as far as I know, spouses are legally responsible for their spouse’s debt, so you are legally entitled to their incomes, as well.
Leaving widdleytinks’s character out of it, I just want to make sure everyone takes into account the fact that, the way she describes it, the house looks like this. Or worse: the woman who owns the house in the link does appear to make some effort to organize. Anyway, when that link shows up on SDMB, which it does fairly regularly, it’s generally regarded as outlandish. And the term OCD comes into play then, too.
That’s pretty much what my dad’s house (and two garages and one shed) looked like when he died last April. He couldn’t do stairs for a few years, so only the main floor of his house was crammed full of junk. Yes, it definitely is a disorder. But it can be treated, if the person hoarding has any interest in getting better. My husband has hoarder tendencies, and maybe the best thing for him was to see (and smell) my dad’s house.
OMG-that house in that link…
I just spent 10 hours ripping apart the basement main room and cleaning it, as well as moving furniture and getting the new computer set up.
If I weren’t so dogged tired from that–I would immediately start on another room.
I NEVER want to have my house look like that, ever.
(this happened to a neighbor lady back in my childhood house–she had boxes of garbage --the paper stuff-piled high to the ceiling. There were paths to go from room to room…when she died, the buyers had the house gutted -the silver fish alone would have broken that sale for me!).
I am attached to stuff, but my sisters’ cured me of any hoarding. They were hoarders (one was mentally ill)–once you’ve cleaned up the mess left by someone like that, it pretty much cures you of it (barring an OCD type disorder).
Wow, this is bringing back some memories… my grandmother was a hoarder, had a single wide mobile home with one tiny path running down the middle. She would have a heart attack and the paramedics would find her sitting out on the front steps so they wouldn’t have to come in and look for her in the mess. We finally said “enough” and cleaned it all out. We found an aquarium with lines of evaporation down the sides and fossilized dried fish in the bottom. We found a couple of dead sparrows that apparently flew in one day, couldn’t get out and died then got mummified into the carpet. We found drifts of cat hair clumped on the curtains–and grandma hadn’t had a cat in at least twenty years. We found the kitchen covered in drifts of dead ants sprayed together with Raid–she actually washed dishes in the shower. I have no idea where she washed herself since the shower was full of old crusty dishes. There were boxes and bags of cleaning products, obviously wishful thinking on her part since they’d never been opened or used. Pill bottles dating back to the fifties, newspapers ditto, mail the same. Her double bed had a tiny clear space she apparently slept in.
When we got done the trash pile measured fifteen x fifteen x ten feet high. We filled up a couple of dumpsters with it all–and this was just the unsalvageable trash, mind you, there was an even larger pile of nominally useful items. It took us days to go through it all and we almost lost our minds during the experience due to the surreality of it and the anticipation of the fit she was going to throw. We found her a nice apartment, furnished it and moved her in… I bought her a couple of nice plants. She lived there for a couple years until she finally died of the cancer/emphysema/heart disease that had been ravaging her for some time. We wouldn’t let the apartment get nasty, we’d take it in turns to either go over and clean or hire someone depending on how far away we lived and our economic circumstances. I still have one of the plants I gave her, I’ve had it since she died in 1984, it’s really huge now and I take cuttings off the “grandma plant” and give it to people.
It was a lesson to me–I tend to be the person people dump their stuff on for safekeeping since I’m stable and responsible and unlikely to pawn or throw their crap out. I don’t let people do this anymore, and I tend to keep my own stuff to a minimum. Aside from books, if I haven’t seen or used it in six months to a year I just sell it or dump it, and I’m remarkably resistant to bringing new crap in.
Hoarders kinda scare me, there’s something so freaking weird about the whole thing that I can’t get used to. I wouldn’t live with one if you paid me large amounts of money to do so, just because living with that level of crappiness and clutter would drive me to suicide.
That being said, the OP needs to make some decisions about how she wants to live. If you have a partner with behaviors that you don’t find congenial, you can bring it up to them and ask for their assistance in making you more comfortable. If they aren’t receptive to this, it’s up to you to either deal with the situation and shut up, or get the hell out. We’re all responsible for ourselves and we don’t have control over others. We can only amend our own behavior, and own it. Getting all up in a rage over a spouse’s habits and behavior is counterproductive and shows a lack of personal responsibility that’s just as disturbing as the hoarding behavior. They both sound pretty dysfunctional to my mind.
I have OCD and I always appreciate the hoarder threads. It helps me keep my clutter down to a minimum. My worst is my books-I love my books.
I know what you mean - there’s something so unhealthy about that kind of behaviour. It’s like the surroundings that they live in mimic what’s going on inside them, and it’s kind of heartbreaking and frightening.
Heh - this just made me realize that after reading this thread, I finally got around to getting my mound of recycling into the car* to drop off today. Maybe we need a monthly “hoarder” thread. 
*Yes, we have to drive all our recycling to the community bins ourselves. Yes, it sucks badly. No, we don’t live in a small community, and yes, they should pick it up at the curb.
Yep, I think I’ll be cleaning out my drawers this week. I tend to accumulate a lot of magazines. I have a system-I’m allowed ONE box of stuff. Every year, I go through my old stuff, get rid of most of it. If there’s a special article I want to keep for whatever reason (something on embroidery patterns, or whatever), I rip it out and put it in a scrap book.
Hang on a second. Not everyone who hoards things is sick, just like not everyone who gets depressed from time to time is clinically depressed. There are degrees here. Psychiatrists would probably tell you that a line is crossed into dysfunction when the hoarding takes over your life and damages your ability to function in the world. Grandma with the dead fish is on that side of the line. A guy who likes to keep his old magazines in case he wants to refer back to them and keeps his paperwork in piles instead of filing cabinets is on the other side of the line.
I have a friend who’s dad is as normal as can be. He was a school principal until he retired. His mother was a teacher. Lovely people. They are both hoarders. Their house is always messy, with piles of books and magazines and papers on every horizontal surface. Their garage hasn’t seen a car in 30 years, because it’s packed to the rafters with stuff. In fact, their garage is so piled with old junk that my friend’s dad invented an elaborate system of hooks and pulleys on the roof so he could retrieve stuff that was otherwise unreachable.
They both like it that way. They like being surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of their lives. It gives them comfort. Are they sick? Are the neat freaks who live in houses that look like museums ‘better’ people?
So let’s not go too far in deciding what is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘frightening’.
The real problem arises when one person is the neat freak and the other is the hoarder. But there are no moral judgements here. It’s just an incompatibiity of lifestyle choices.
This is sorta my system for dealing with it, switching out “box” for “bag”. And I tend to get rid of it on a “good” day - sometimes I just feel ok about getting rid of it, and i’ll chuck it all out in a bin (trash can) far away from my house (otherwise I get the urge to go back and get my junk).
She probably won’t be back, but I’d love to tell the OP that she wrote a great rant. Just some advice for her- get a LJ or Myspace or something. It’s not possible to post anything to this board without tons of well meaning posters giving advice, including the always popular “leave his ass!” Fuck it. I hear you, and I hope things improve or you can deal with it better now that you’ve gotten it off your chest.
Hang in there. It’s a shitty situation.
Hey, I just said that the level of hoarding that my grandmother went to, along with the lady in that series of photos linked to a few posts back is scary. Not everybody feels the same way, of course, and everybody has their own threshold. I’m a borderline hoarder myself when it comes to books and sentimental stuff, but I know how to keep it in limits. I live in a 700sf house with no garage, so a healthy dose of reality about how much crap I can keep is a good idea. If it ever got to the point where I had hundreds of boxes full of stuff I’d bought but never used or looked at I’d be thinking there was something really wrong with me–and I’d probably be right. If I had no room on my bed to sleep, no chair to sit in, had to move fifty boxes every time I wanted to do laundry and had boxes and boxes of inedible timed out food in the kitchen but nothing for dinner I certainly hope someone would come along and give me a reality check about the dysfunctionality of my lifestyle. Hoarding at that level speaks of sickness, not comfort. There IS no comfort in a house like that! It’s dirty, cluttered, unlivable and horrifying to anyone who comes over–do you think it’s coincidence that the eBay lady covers all her windows? I bet she doesn’t allow anyone to come over and is terrified of the idea of anyone seeing the state her house is in… she knows she’s ill but can’t deal with it.
Your friends with the pulley systems just have a lot of stuff–the fact that they have a way of getting to it says that they use it and kinda know where things are. It’s the people who haven’t seen areas of their own houses for ten to twenty years because boxes of unknown shit are piled up there and nothing shy of a tractor can shift it who are over the line into pathology.
I dread the day when we’ll start cleaning out my mother’s house in earnest.
Before the ALZ, she was a hoarder. She grew up during the Depression. Neither she nor her brothers could bear to part with anything, particularly clothing. Didn’t matter if it was an item never to be worn – off it went into the bowels of the bottom dresser drawer. Mom also had a “thing” for office supplies, furniture (she hated empty spaces with a passion – quick, buy something to put in that corner! I don’t care what it is!), kitchen gadgets, and, of course, books.
When I was growing up, and even as an adult, I never realized how quite skilled she was in hiding most of it until the ALZ took hold. In the early-to-mid stages there is a phenomenon called “rummaging” which is exactly what it means – pulling everything out, examining it, then leaving it wherever you happen to be. If somebody else comes along and tries to clean/throw out/put it away, the one with ALZ will, in most cases, have what’s called a catastrophic reaction. In fact, that’s the first thing I thought of when I read the OP ::shudder::
It’s a horrible way to live. I’m no Martha Stewart, but I like things to be fairly tidy. I’ve bitten my lip so much over trying to contain Mom’s stuff that I’m surprised I haven’t chewed it off. I’m slowly starting to throw out or donate stuff I know she hasn’t rummaged through in awhile, while trying to keep track of the stuff I know is either valuable and/or sentimental.
I hope the OP’s calmed down. She needed to rant. I hope she’s OK.
I disagree with this, mostly with the word “hoarding” - anybody who is hoarding has a problem. People who have messy, cluttered houses but aren’t hoarding do not have a problem. Like other areas of OCD, I think the reaction to getting rid of the stuff indicates whether it is a problem or not. If your friends like having lots of stuff around, but they can actually get rid of some of it without anxiety, then I agree that they don’t have a problem. If they keep stuff because they need to keep stuff to keep the anxiety away, then they have a problem.
And a system of pulleys to access stuff in a full garage doesn’t tell me that they don’t have a problem - it tells me that they would rather do something complicated and labour intensive than do the obvious, logical thing, which is get rid of piles of stuff.
Isn’t that rather ill-defined, though? Is it ‘hoarding’ to keep every magazine you ever read? Perhaps you consider them a resource, like a library. I think a lot of people who have clutter have convinced themselves that it’s good clutter, liable to come in useful sometime, or just something they like to have around to anchor their lives.
I agree that if it changes into unthinking visceral need to keep EVERYTHING, then there’s a problem.
See, when you say things like “The obvious, logical thing”, you’re basically putting down people who want to live this way. It’s only logical and obvious to YOU, because you do not value this stuff in the same way that they do. Packrats LIKE having this stuff. It has value to them. It may be boxes of kid’s clothing they’ll never look at again, but just the thought that all these remnants of their lives are still around them give them comfort. And one day they’ll pull out one of those musty old boxes, go through my friend’s old shoes and school shirts, and reconnect with their past a little bit.
Just be careful not to convince yourself that the ‘right’ thing to do is to get rid of clutter and live a more antiseptic life. That’s great for you. Not everyone feels that way. My friend’s parents bought that house *because it had a garage they could use as storage. They bought the house in part because it would fit all their stuff. They see their house as a place to keep their treasured stuff, whereas you see your stuff getting in the way of keeping a neat house. Different perspectives in thinking.