![]() What is true is that it’s a lot quicker and less stressful to clean a tidy place than a messy one and, right now, we all need to be extra careful with hygiene. (If that’s what’s happening, then there is more wrong in the relationship than a cleaning column can tackle.) Everyone’s just getting along the best way they know how. Whether you are the tidy person or the messy one in a relationship, it’s very unlikely that either is doing tidy or messy to the other person just to annoy them. Sure, it’s possible that they spend all of that free time going at already clean grout with an old toothbrush, but if they try not to judge you, you must promise not to judge them in return. They spend a lot less of their lives looking for passports, car keys, insurance documents, birth and marriage certificates, pairs of socks. And perhaps when you don’t do things, others will realise it isn’t the mop fairy who comes in at night when everyone’s asleep who’s keeping the floors clean. If you want to read a book or go for a walk in the chilly sunshine instead of sorting out the cleaning cupboard, then do it. No one is judging or grading you, especially not during a pandemic, when no one’s coming into your house who doesn’t live there anyway. As my mother often says, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Being happy often requires compromise and sometimes just letting go of things that don’t matter. Start where you are, be kind to one another, create mutually agreed goals, and listen, really listen to each other. You know those people who say, “Oh I eat MASSES and never put on an ounce?” They don’t make you want to go for a run, do they? If your aim is to recruit your partner or housemate to the domestic perfection glee club, this will not get the job done. The naturally neat invariably think they have the moral high – and perfectly swept – ground. In our domestic arrangements, it is also very easy to believe the tidy person is always right. Shrug off the guilt that gnaws, if gnaw it does, and get on with your merry, messy life.īut somehow or another, many of us have to work out how to live with other people who often have different tolerances for mess, without going to war over how the towels are folded, or indeed if they are folded at all. ![]() So if you’re a messy person and you’re happy with that, embrace it. Perhaps the piled-high desk isn’t the monument to originality they insist it is? But just as often, these are happy messages from seemingly happy people, in which case I say, you crack on! I’m not your mum.įundamentally, chaos is not inherently creative, just as tidiness isn’t inherently virtuous. Sometimes these emails feel rather defensive, a bit cross, as though all is not entirely well in the wardrobe. I often get emails or messages on social media from people who claim they’re too busy to be tidy and their mess is part of their creativity, or (God help us all) their personality. ![]() In even the happiest of relationships, it is possible to disagree fundamentally on certain things, whether that is ketchup or brown sauce, gin or vodka in your martini, Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur, dishes left to dry on the drainer or immediately put away. He might also have been reflecting on the torture of living with someone who never wipes up the crumbs after making toast, or the agony of living with someone who insists that you do. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people,” he may have been writing about the terror of constantly being watched, examined and judged by others.
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