Frustrated Clean Freak

I wish I had some encouraging advice for you. I've had the same problem with my wife for the past 26 years. I'm a "cleany" and she's a "messy". Nothing I've tried works.

showdown,

i am on the other side. my hubby is a neat freak such as yourself and i am the slob. my half of the room is always a disaster. the only thing that worked for me was tough love. He came to me one day and said, anything that is on this floor tomorrow will get thrown away. when i lost about 1/4 of my closet and was reduced to digging through our trash to get it out (just so you know we pick up our dog poop and put it in the trash can as well), i started putting my clothes where they belong. Was i peed off, yup, but then he said to me, see how upset you are right now? that is how upset i get when i see your mess lying around.

with cleaning the rest of the house, he decided he would do that anyway because no matter what i do, he always go over what i did, so it was a waste of time. i mean i could have bleached the plates and he would still want to clean them.

The only other area of the house i am responsible for is my home office. and once a month, he is reduced to telling me, anything on that desk tomorrow is going to get thrown away, and after my clothes ordeal, you better believe i clean it that day!

now, i can't say this would work with you, but it certainly let me see the error of my ways...good luck!

Ask nicely but don't nag. She knows you don't want wet towles on the floor. And if she continues to do things that grate you, tell her that if she can't pick up after herself, you will start piling all the crap o her side of the bed, because you don't want it in shared space.

And by the way, our situation is almost exact except I am female. I want to SHOOT him sometimes. "DO I LOOK LIKE YOUR MAID?!?!?" I know what you are going though and I feel the same way about kids...good god in heaven help me then...

I wouldn't go as far as dumping clutter in the garbage can--although with sons and stepsons I was sorely tempted.

First thing in the morning I'd make a swoop through the common rooms: Living room, Dining room, kitchen and gather all clutter and put the basket in the garage. I didn't have to look at the clutter--and I hate nagging.

Most of the kids caught on with this approach. One had to have a system of fines imposed, but I understand his wife is happy that he was house-trained.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Last night, I confronted her again about how impossible it is for me to deal with the clutter. I also told her that I was going to place all the dirty dishes in a box and place them in the garage.

She exploded, saying I was 50% to blame, that I always change the rules, and I don't participate in the cleaning either.

The arguement was extremely intense, and the word divorce was mentioned. Today, she took off work to clean the kitchen and to work things out. But first thing this morning we were back to fighting.

I'm also upset she took off work. Why can't she find 15 minutes to clean a day?

This scenario really sucks for me, and I'm seriously concerned.

showdown,

i am sorry that this stinks so much for you. i have to think hard about what else my hubby did, since i realize it is somewhat extreme throwing my stuff away (although it did work, but that was in my case).

i'll get back to you on that one (i have gotten a lot better at now so i have to think what really worked).

First off, put things into perspective. This has obviously become a sore spot for both of you if the word divorce is already being mentioned in fights over dirty dishes. If you care about your marriage, step back, take a deep breath and try to talk rationaly to each other. Yelling and the blame game never solve anything. Or if you are to mad to talk rationaly right now, just take one for the team and let the messiness go until cooler heads can prevail.

Second, my wife and I are the reverse of you two. She is the neat freak and I am the (recovering) pile builder. I admit that she has had to have a lot of patients with me and I have had to make a conscience effort to change... you are right when you say compromise is a two way street.

Try changing one small thing at a time instead of the entire problem. Instead of coming at her with the dishes, the clothes on the floor, the wet towel on the floor, the garbage in the sink all at the same time, just try for one at a time. Tell her that it really bothers you when she leaves her dirty clothes on the floor and if she wouldn't mind putting them in the hamper instead.

It is a simple task that literally takes one more second to do then putting them on the floor. If she argues about it with you, just calmly point out the fact that it really isn't that much of an inconvenience and that you would really appreciate it if she did that for you. How could she argue with that?

Once that is accomplished move on to something else. It also might help to ask if there is anything you are doing that annoys her and if there is anything you can do to change. This shows you are willing to work with her.

Third, I have my office. We have an agreement that I can do whatever I want in my office and she doesn't get to complain as long as I keep my clutter confined to that area and not the rest of the house. Ironically, this has brought to light just how unorganized I am. If I left something in another part of the house she would simply move it to my office instead of putting it away for me. My desk was so covered with stuff I couldn't use it anymore... I was forced to clean. Once it was clean I found out I actually like clean better then messy and I have really started coming around to the idea of "Everything has it's place."

I still have to go to my MA meetings (Messaholics Anonymous) but I am recovering nicely and hope to one day have enough storage space to actually contain all of my mess.

Good luck with your marriage and the messes and Welcome to A2K.

where can i find those? i am in desperate need!!!

It mostly consists of me sitting in my office looking for stuff that I know is in there somewhere... but for cleaning motivation I sometimes go to my mom's (she lives by herself) garage and just look at all the stuff she has in there

I'll start by saying this is exactly why I recommend living together BEFORE marriage.

While you say that 5 months in is too early to be so frustrated, 5 months in to living together is very often a difficult time. Probably the closest I ever came to breaking up with the guy I've been with for 13 years was around then -- but we were living together, not married yet.

Another thing I recommend is for couples who are starting to live together to both move in to a new place, rather than one moving into someone else's place. There are all kinds of extra issues of territoriality, boundaries, identity, etc., etc. that complicate things.

So, too late for either of those pieces of advice.

It sounds to me like, among other things, your wife is trying to carve out her own place in your clean territory, to make herself feel at home. While I'm sure she had the best of intentions, I think it was unrealistic of her expect to go from messy to clean just like that. I think it ties in to too many issues she may have about feeling comfortable in the marriage and in her new home.

I think the "always change the rules" thing could be big. I consider myself pretty neat -- my office was famous for a place for everything and everything in its place, reach right for exactly what I need -- but my husband is certifiable. What we had fights about is that he kept moving the goal posts. We'd clean and clean and clean and the place would be glittering, but no, he wasn't satisfied. There was still more! The food in the pantry was terribly disorganized! The sheets in the linen closet were folded badly! And the door! It sometimes didn't close smoothly! Have to fix that!!!

So I felt like it was neverending. I'd go further than my comfort level to make him happy, but it didn't make him happy. There was always more.

We eventually figured that stuff out, and he knows that beyond a certain point (and that's what you have to determine), it's on him. I might get inspired to reorganize the closets on my own, but that's beyond what he can require. If the closet is driving him crazy at this particular moment, HE needs to organize it.

We also figured out eventually who has a greater affinity for what, both in terms of preferences and skills. I'm the organizer. He just gets overwhelmed. He's the bathroom cleaner. I just think it's yucky.

One overriding thing is to avoid making it about her following your orders. That's been the single biggest sticking point. I actually enjoy a lot of cleaning and much prefer having a clean house than a messy one, but I cannot STAND it when I am told to do something rather than just doing it because I think it should be done.

So my suggestions are:

- Find out what her preferences are, which things she doesn't mind as much or even likes.

- Set a minimum level of cleanliness -- this should be well BELOW your comfort level, for a while. It's not a compromise otherwise, as it sounds like by definition it will be beyond her comfort level, as well. Stick to it. If the agreed-upon level is reached and something's driving you insane, go ahead and clean it yourself, with no sniping or guilt trips.

- Give it time. You both need to adjust, and it won't happen overnight.

Good luck!

Thanks again for all the great advice.

We've been able to calm our emotions from 10 to about a 3 or 4, so we're making progress.

I agree with sozobe about my wife wanting to create a niche for herself in our home. We did live together for a couple months before marriage, but it was nothing but fighting about where to put her things.

I am older (33) and have lived by myself since college. Because of that (and my Irish/Scandinavian stubborn-ality) I tend to be quite comfortable in my own space and uncomfortable when my space is violated.

Alternatively, she is younger (25) and is (I can barely believe it) more quick tempered than myself. This makes for arguments with little or no positive progress. Feelings get hurt before an agreement is made.

I have learned this morning that she looks at cleaning differently than I do. I tend to constantly clean, she tends to wait until the piles are about to fall over and then 'power-clean'.

Compromise just seems to be a very narrow road...

It's a hard one to chart, fer sure, but eminently possible.

One other thing that occurred to me is that my husband gets in cleaning jag mode when he is stressed or feeling out of control. As in, the threshold for his comfort level has less to do with empirical things like how much dust is on the mantel and more about how much progress he's made on a big project at work. (If he hasn't made much progress on the project, that dust has GOT to go...)

If that is true for you, I could imagine that there would be a bad spiral in that you're stressed and feeling like you're not as in control of things as you'd like, which means the mess REALLY drives you crazy, which means... Meanwhile, she might have an opposite reaction to the stressors, wanting to withdraw/ escape (romance novels et al). And so it goes.

My suggestions stand, just adding a few more thoughts.

My wife is the same way, soz. She gets stressed out at inanimate things that she can not control. Dirt and laundry and the lawn is something she can control and often turns that nervous stressful energy into useful cleaning energy. Once, she gets it done she often feels much better.

Hindsight from an outsider: When you threatened to take the mountain of dirty dishes out of the kitchen and into the garage unless they were washed you were dictating how she would spend the next 20-30 minutes of her time.

This was hostile. I'd have been annoyed too.

Had you washed the dishes and then announced that in the future they'd be going out to the garage, this would have been much fairer.

Your wife took a day off work to clean because she's not a person accustomed to the multi-tasking approach of tidying and cleaning on the way to more important projects.

You don't see why she can't take just 15 minutes a day? She doesn't want to take 15 minutes a day because it is her day and right now 15 minutes a day is not her style.

A clutter free house is much more important to you than to her--therefore right now you have to expend more energy on reducing clutter than she does.

You are allowing her clutter to become your problem--and then you're demanding that she solve your problem.

Not fair.

Please don't let your marriage get in trouble over a matter like this.

When something starts getting to me in my marriage, I ask myself "Is this hill worth dying on" The vast majority of the time I realize it's not.

My husband is an organizer, he loves buying containers, keeping things on pegs, papers filed away. However, one of my terms of endearment for him is 'wolverine' as he is able to step outside to pick up the newspaper, and drag half the front yard in with him

I on the other hand, am comfortable with throwing things together in drawers, keeping receipts in a shoebox, or leaving a few bills, letters, clipping etc. stacked on the coffee table until the weekend when I can get to them. But the counters, floors and carpets have to be spic and span clean.

Once I became highly indignant because he had the NERVE to buy me a filing cabinet. In his mind he was trying to help me be able to get things in order so I could find things more easily, when actually, believe it or not, that's when I lose stuff, when I put them away.
I viewed his gift as him trying to "force" me to stop being me, and do things his way.
I did loose my top that day, I can laugh now, remembering how I told him "You can buy me all the filing cabinets you want, but you'll never force me to use them"!

I, on my part, have learned to put small washable area rugs in the areas I notice my wolverine most often chooses to inhabit. I also keep the coffee maker and area around it under a towel that I change every day, because wolverines can't pour coffee for sh*t.

We both learned a long time ago why our habits are important to us. He grew up with 10 brothers and sisters, and his things disappeared unless they were nailed down. As an adult, he works with many tools, and can't count the # of items that have gone missing over the years through the carelessness of others.

For me, I grew up being forced to do things with no explanations as to why. It raises my hackles to have someone "tell" me what to do, without telling me "why"

Maybe this is something you can explore with your wife?

Re: Frustrated Clean Freak
Iam different i think that if i truley love the person i would clean up after them. theres this girl that i had a thing for but she had a boy freind and tho she couldnt stand to see me with any one she wouldnt give him up eighter. so i gave up that i could have her and went on about my business. but if i would have ended up with her i would clean up after her as long as i had her, loving me and she stayed the same, georgous, i would be her waiter her door man, i would learn to cook, ide wash her car , i truley loved this girl, she just didnt know well i did tell her acouple times, and she got the big head but yes i would be her slave, and i know i would because i love my two daughters, and i slave for them iam like their butler why because i love them and i cant help but serve them. ive done it for a long time up until the time me and the old bubbled eyed sea monkey divoriced, and when they would spend the week end or a couple days i would serve them clean up after them, so when i love i really love maybe thats why me and the ug mo divoriced because i really didnt love her i never cleaned for her or anything , i really didnt love her. and she was jealous of my girls becaues i slaved for them and not her. and i loved to slave for them. sick or what

Well, one does get a range of comments here.

I'll start by mentioning that an old boss of mine, quite a successful fellow in his field, used to say that a clean desk is a sign of an empty mind. Heh.

Wrong, of course, but I enjoyed that opinion.

I am a very organized person who is a surface slob. I know that sounds like an oxymoron.

I organize meticulously every so often. Things clutter in the meantime. I rather like it that way.

When I was married, this all worked out fairly well, in that I would organize things, and dust, and my husband would sweep. We tended to keep things picked up, as our place was small - but not in any stern "you have to" way.

When one cooked, the other cleaned after... but sometimes the after was the next morning. No big deal - conversation, communication, rest, and other matters can be more important than every dish being in it's shelf position.

My former business partner is a clean freak, an admitted one, a person who doesn't like sitting still without a project, at all. Cleaning is a kind of therapy for her, she says, and she and her husband are both very disturbed by clutter.
I can see where you wife is coming from, Showdown, in that her cleanfreak ways somehow made me more set in mine, in my space.

Noddy24 - I was just utilizing some advice from earlier on this post. And I only threatened in an attempt to make her understand my complete despair.




Yeah, that is totally me. A bit of an overbearing type A personality with control issues. But not the exact issue with this particular situation; keeping the kitchen clean.