A quick question for the lady folk here on the boards. Are your husbands or SO’s Messy by nature? Do they leave the cap off the toothpaste, their undies on the floor in the bathroom, paper towels crinckled but not thrown away? Or their jammies on the floor next to the bed perhaps?
IANA neat nick, but I am a pragmatist, I see the matter-of-fact ways to approaching things and I go with it. I am not a pig-pen by any means, and I seriously do try and pick up my messes when I think about it, but sometimes a little chaos in casa-de-Phlosphr is not a bad thing.
My wife on the other hand has a different notion. She thinks a mess in the basement, or anywhere in the house is messing up her Chi, actually screwing with her mental Feng Shui. I sh*t you not, these words have come out of her mouth.
Anecdotes would be appreciated in ways to deal with this phenomenon…
My boyfriend is actually pretty neat. His place is always a lot cleaner than mine. I just don’t like cleaning. I’m not a slob, but I’ll put clothes, mail, toys, etc down in all sorts of places.
His response? “I have to be better at something than you. Might as well be cleaning.”
He’s exaggerating, of course. We’re pretty evenly matched. Except with cleaning.
I don’t really have any ideas for you, Phlosphr. Maybe you could hypnotize her and make her think that the house really is clean?
It’s pretty sexist of you to assume that women are neat and men are messy by nature, but since I can see things from your wife’s point of view I’ll reply. In the Vet household, the lady of the house is the slob. I on the other hand, having spent much time having my living space inspected and inspecting the living spaces of others am an unrepentant neat freak. This causes great amounts of tension because there are certain things about my personality that my wife just doesn’t understand.
The 3 things that drive me up the wall: 1 - When shoes come off, they get left where they were removed (like the middle of the floor between the kitchen and dining room) thus ensuring that I will trip over them or (more annoying) when I’m cleaning the floors I have to take them upstairs and put them away myself. 2 - Dirty dishes. In most cases, dirty dishes end up where she was sitting when she finished eating whatever was on them, like the table in the TV room or her night stand. If I’m particularly lucky, she will actually get them to the kitchen sink “to soak”. Yes, to soak in the detritus of all the other nasty remnants that are floating in the miasma of filth (an exaggeration, but I think it illustrates how I feel about messes). I’ve never understood this, because it takes exactly as much effort to put them in the dishwasher right next to the sink. 3 - Most days, Mrs. Vet is the last one out of bed. She has yet to make a bed in the nearly 10 years we’ve been married. This one is a biggie to me - getting into a neat, made-up bed at night is something that gives me a great deal of comfort and makes me feel relaxed enough to fall asleep. To add to this, on weekends, when I have time to make the bed after everyone is up, she will often take a nap in the afternoon and of course the bed doesn’t get remade.
If Mrs Vet were to make an effort to eliminate any 2 of those 3 things, my anxiety would significantly decrease and we’d have a much more peaceful home. So my advice to you is this: Find the 3 things that annoy Mrs Philosphr the most and make a determined effort to change any 2 of them. If you can pull that off, I’m sure you will find you have a happier home. In addition to this, Mrs Philosphr needs to come to a realization about what is a realistic expectation. She needs to understand that everyone has a different level of “mess tolerance”. Hers is much lower than yours. She can’t change you, she can only ask you to change your habits. If she expects an entire litany of changes, she will be disappointed.
I married a slob. It’s not a judgment and it’s not a criticism. Messes simply do not bother her. A few years ago I came to realize that I have to just accept that and learn to live within that context. At the same time though, I think that she has a responsibility to do what she can to decrease my anxiety. Hmmm, maybe it’s time for a talk in the Vet household too.
DWVET - I certainly did not want to imply a gender based misalligned view that men are one way and women are another. Iwas simply referingt omy own circumstance.
Thanks for your reply though, I believe my understanding is getting better.
GWVet has good advice. Now, I’m not a terribly neat person, but mess still bothers me and I’m trying to do better. I doubt that your wife actually believes in Feng Shui; what she’s trying to say is that clutter and chaos bother her, a lot. I find that it makes for a sort of mental weight on my shoulders, and when things are tidy I feel better, more energetic, lighter. The space and clean lines I see in a tidy house go a long way toward making me feel happy, and clutter and piles–even if I’m not paying attention–make me feel more stressed and unhappy.
My husband is, in fact, messier than I am, and I try hard to let it go and let him take care of it in his own time. Most of the housework is my job, since I’m a SAHM and on the spot, so I clean up after him a little, but his problem is not so much clothes on the floor or messy bathroom habits as it is piles of computer stuff in corners. So it’s fairly easy to ignore it and let him deal with it on his own.
In the past few years, my husband has made a serious effort to do the dishes or other chores without being asked, and to clean up his piles every so often on his own. I appreciate this hugely! It really does make me happier and less stressed.
We’re both slobs. My tolerance for mess is slightly lower than his, though, and I have a few significant pet peeves, like
taking caps off of things and then losing them
putting things “away” in the most convenient place to hand when it occurs to him to put it away. I keep telling him it doesn’t make things any easier if I still have to hunt around for something after he’s put it away somewhere and forgotten where
shoes left wherever they fall
a small number of personal things too gross to mention, although he is nearly broken of these habits, thank goodness
putting dishes on the dishrack without putting the old, dry dishes away first - I swear to you every roommate I have ever had did this and it drove me bonkers, especially when the mountain of carefully-stacked dishes would come crashing to the floor when I tried to remove the bread knife (which was right at the bottom) and which I subsequently had to clean up
using (and then losing) my stuff when he can’t find his
leaving wet towels on the floor
not putting the blender away: he uses it every day, and I put it away every day.
I second the suggestion to ask your wife to identify the 3 most critical things to her, and to really work on 2 of them.
My husband is more loveable now that he has stopped leaving personal things too gross to name lying around, for instance, and he’s getting better about the towels. I have even selected a few things of mine that he is not permitted to use, even when he loses his, and he’s been okay about that too. (At least, if he does still use them, he puts them back before I find out, which is just as good.)
Correspondingly, I think I am more loveable now that I just suck it up and do certain things myself rather than nagging him about them.
I also agree about the “mess tolerance” thing. I had a roommate who was a super neat freak, and no matter how hard I tried I could not make it neat enough for her. She never complained or even appeared to mind, but I saw how clean she was, and I tried to match it, and I quite simply couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I’m just incapable of “seeing” mess once a certain level of neatness is achieved.
I think my husband’s inherent “clutter-itis” stems from his family. My in-laws are, seriously, Martha Stewart clones. So are my SILs and BILs. I keep telling myself that Mr. Kiz is still going through adolescent rebellion, but c’mon, there are limits, not to mention age.
He insists that he knows what’s in every single toppling pile of his around here. Ooookay, then what’s with this unopened mail? Do you realize how many bill payments we miss because you seldom remember to give the bills to me? Never mind about why I’m in charge of paying them – that’s another story.
I think he’s allergic to doing laundry, but when he does it, he’s got this elaborate system of color division. Same thing with cooking, dishwashing, etc. In the time it takes him to subdivide every step, I could have the whole thing done and then some.
Me? By nature I’m fairly neat in that I have my little messes, but they don’t stay that way for long. But trying to fight against his ever-growing messes is nearing fruitlessness (is that a word?) He claims it’s because 1) our house is too small, and 2) if we start clearing out all my mother’s clutter, then we’d have room to organize and such.
Mom’s clutter is a whole other story. Depression-era child + packrat tendencies her entire life + ALZ rummaging = a mess to begin with. I truly dread the day I have to earnestly start clearing out her stuff. I don’t need hubby’s messes on top of it.
Oh, and another thing: I can’t throw anything out because “it might be important”. Hubby saves every single scrap of paper and receipt in no particular order. He’s got boxes and boxes of them both here and in storage. Trying to get him to actually go through even one box with or without me is impossible. Meanwhile he continually complains about how the messes keep growing.
Let’s see… His side of the bedroom: Neatly folded clothes in co-ordinated stacks on organized shelves. My side of the bedroom: Well, at least they aren’t on the floor. Most of the time.
So, no. Thankfully he puts up with my mess - he has his space, it is exactly how he wants it and my mess NEVER intrudes into his space. Our shared space I do my best not to clutter too much, and my space is allowed to be how I damn well want it. This works for us.
He is responsible for the primary duty of homemaking partly because he’s the one who actually gives a damn about this stuff. It bores me, but I do like having a nice living environment so he can knock himself out if he really wants to polish the kitchen sink.
My husband is more of a neat freak, while I’m more of a clean freak. He likes everything organized, neat, tidy, a place for everything and everything in its place. I can stand a little messiness or clutter, although never for long periods of time. What I can’t stand is uncleanliness, dust, dirt, grime, etc. I’m the one that scrubs everything. The walls, the floors, the furniture, the toilets, the windows/mirrors, etc. Oh he likes everything clean, but he rarely is the one that does that kind of cleaning. But he absolutely never leaves his clothes or personal belongings thrown about. He’s much too organized.
He does all of our laundry. He’s very particular and doesn’t like the way I do it, so he does all of it. And he can’t stand to have more than one load of laundry that needs to be done at any time, while I’ll pretty much let it pile up and then do it all on the weekends.
His car is also much cleaner/neater than mine.
This is a little different since we’re both students and we both work part-time so we’re pretty busy.
We’re both pretty messy. Right now, I have clothes piled up on the floor on my side of the bed. And looking on his side, he has the same. We don’t mind so much until it gets to the point where you have to hop over stuff to get to the door, then we clean up and the room slowly gets messy again. Life gets busy, and hey, sometimes after class or work, you’re just too tired to take off your pants, fold them and hang them back up (at least that’s how I reason it in my head).
You have to pick your battles, and this isn’t such a big deal to us.
Now when he uses dishes and leaves them out long enough for them to grow mold, I tell him to do the dishes. Then again, I’m guilty of the same thing when midterms roll around, so I try not to be too mean.
