How to break free of that cleanliness-defines-my-worth mindset? I don't think I am in that trap, and it is a combination of being AuDHD and simply not being able to; living alone for over a decade; and my grandmother's funeral.
At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.
People get the exact amount of vote in my life choices that they experience the consequences. If someone who doesn't live in my house doesn't like the state of it, they can set up visits elsewhere or they can contribute to paying a housecleaning service. That's it. Only give people power when they also have the responsibility.
I am so sorry for your losses. The way your grandmother treated you and how that helped you realize you want more for yourself makes me think of the Mary Oliver line - “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
I remember my mom commenting on other women's homes, like "she's not much of a housekeeper" and that would be why we go into freakout mode when she's coming. Your grandmother is next level, and that's appalling.
I am gobsmacked by your grandmother saying that to you. How twisted does someone have to be to arrive at a place where that seems like an appropriate thing to say to a grieving person? Presumably at some point in her formative years she was made to feel that her self-worth was bound up in her housekeeping, and that is sad, but the way she allowed it to stunt her!
I take a lot of pride in my home. One of my dreams was to renovate a house and, of all my dreams, it’s one of the few non-kid based dreams that came true. That said, I hope it’s not all I’m remembered for (I’m also a terrible housekeeper in my daily life, and my kids have been raised with that mess, so I think I’m in the clear). Your grandmother was cruel and misguided. I’m sorry. You deserved so much more in your grief.
This is not exactly what you are talking about, but in our household, what I feel like I struggle most with allocating is admin work! My (male) partner does a lot of cooking and cleaning (and is frankly more bothered by mess than I am). But I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood 😅
You're not wrong, everything has become a fight with administration. When we have discourse about caregiving, the two things I wish we were talking about in addition to paid care are transportation and all the fucking phone calls. Getting the service you need on a regular basis, that you are already getting half the time, takes several calls every week multiplied by dozens of agencies, doctors, insurance, whatever. I feel like Annie Lowery is the only one writing about it, but it's the most salient feature of my constant anxiety and anger.
I think I saw it in an article about emotional labour and all of the additional admin tasks that come along with running a household and it really resonated with me.
this is my relationship dynamic, too and I feel grateful for it, but I would happily trade off doing dishes if I felt like I could count on him to, like, get estimates from a few different plumbers in a timely fashion.
Didn’t AHP do a piece about this a while ago? I feel like someone did…. That this constant admin fight is a trickle-down of cost-cutting at businesses. “Running lean” is the new thing, and businesses are always trying to eke out the absolute least they can pay staff while generating a sufficient amount of profit. Staff is usually overworked, and it’s hard to track and measure “how quickly did you return the customer’s call” or whatever. Their performance isn’t graded on that, and it’s not a priority for their supervisors.
I have seen this up close, when I joined a team in my technical field. One of the things I prided myself on was answering customer tickets correctly and completely the first time, doing all the research myself so that I didn’t just shunt them to someone else who maybe would know the answer, maybe wouldn’t. Eventually I realized that my manager just didn’t care if questions got answered quickly or customers were happy with the experience. My peers were outperforming me because they knew he didn’t value that work, and their time was freed up to deliver on stuff he DID value. As much as it pains me, I’ve had to train myself to deliver worse service so that I can focus on the other stuff. I feel bad for the customer, but my hands are tied. Without customers making it clear to my boss’s boss that this level of service is unacceptable, it will continue to be the standard.
I really feel this too- my husband does a lot of cooking and we aren’t super clean- we clean the kitchen and the sink and do laundry but we rarely clean the tub or mop and we always have a laundry pile. We vacuum every couple weeks. But all the admin stuff and family calendar with our families’ events and childcare puzzles and school events plus school emails and all the medical appointments feel like another 30 hours a week. I only work part time and I feel like I’m working at least 65 hours a week. I have maybe an hour of leisure time after our kids are in bed. My husband stays up significantly later and gets a lot of time alone because he doesn’t get up at 6 am and take the kids to school- he’s awake but he doesn’t have to get ready until after we are gone and it’s a huge difference.
as the one who gets to get ready after others are gone - it DOES make a HUGE difference. Just affirming you. That bit is lopsided enough to specifically try and balance out elsewhere.
When he does our meal planning and prep it feels balanced but he comes and goes with it- I get burnt out too and we both fall off on things we have agreed are important to us but it is still disappointing when it feels unbalanced because I like to think we are good at balancing domestic labor tasks. He lived with male roommates, fraternity brothers and his own brothers prior to living with me and while I didn’t like the decor of the house he shared with his brothers, I felt like it was clean enough and well taken care of- I was surprised how many care tasks seemed to fall to me after we had kids and falling into the mindset of me being more naturally inclined toward care tasks.
I feel this way about the scheduling of appointments for this kind of stuff. Like, the contractor didn't do what they were supposed to, sooooo....who has to be home for when they come back? Who has to go into work late when the pest control people come? Who has to take their lunch break to let in the person to check the furnace? Me. It's basically always me. (Granted, some of this is because my husband often travels for work, and I'm lucky to have a really flexible job, but I definitely get the feeling that even if those things weren't true, it would still be me.) I am not a fan of this part of adulthood.
I hear you. I definitely feel there is a curse of being the one with the more flexibel job, who naturally spends more time in the home office. It is easier for me to arrange to be there when an important package arrives, when the latest contractor needs to be let in, and sometimes that makes me feel like my real work is less valued, because well you can do it in the evening/late, so it must not be that important, and while you are at it, why not fold laundry during your break. Haha, ok now I am rambling. I am just in the process of getting myself a co-working space, so i can also be out of the house more (because of course if I am here more, I also notice "little stuff" more). This article and this conversation has been so eye-opening to me.
I’m a single dog mom, home owner of a very old fixer upper, and landlord as I rent out part of my house and so have to be more on top of upkeep and cleaning more than I might otherwise and it is A LOT! I previously owned a house with my ex and so thought I was prepared but when you’re doing absolutely everything yourself (including making every single small decision about every single thing)…well I was not prepared for how much work it actually was! And don’t get me started on how hard it was to go through IUIs/IVF alone, almost unbearable. So I am used to and able to do a lot alone but I definitely miss someone around to help take my car for an oil change, make home upkeep appointments and be home for them, rake the yard and shovel snow, etc, as well as grocery shop and cook and of course clean. We’d naturally split work along stereotypical gender roles but I felt it was pretty even. And man doing it all yourself can be soooooo overwhelming, at this point I’d kill for a partner around to help with some of it
I owned a house before I got married and was used to doing everything but was shocked how little that changed after my husband moved in. We've bought into the lie that it's the same amount of work for 1 person vs 2 but that's not the case.
Thank you for articulating this - my male partner is much cleaner than I am, he does all the cooking and meal planning, and I am so thankful for that. But maybe as atonement for the guilt I feel for not being evolutionarily disposed to keeping home (as AHP mentions in the article), I try to take on all the other management duties (scheduling cars for inspection, arguing with contractors, etc.) which I am also not evolutionarily predisposed to (ADHD is a b-word). But it makes me feel more equal in a household that doesn’t mirror the “typical” male/female roles of cleaning/caretaking.
Oh my goodness, YES — part of the reason I have become the Executive Partner (thanks Erin for that term!) is because I *don’t* care as much about cleaning, and there is absolutely a guilt component of it for me too. Since I am not a “good clean housewife,” I can at least take care of this mental load… but it is actually SOO much, and like you, sense that I have some neurodivergence that means I have to work really hard to keep track of it all 🤪
My question to folks this is resonating with: I can see clearly how cleanliness policing has been passed down to women from our grandmother's, but how come in most m/f relationships I'm familiar with the woman also does most of the admin while working full time? What forces are pulling these strings?
This is a fascinating question. In my own relationship, I think it's because I have a stronger attention to detail driven by anxiety. My husband is always like, eh this is good enough, and I'm like, no we need to actually get recommendations for our child's dentist not pick the first one in the google search return! I'm sure some of this is also socialized and passed down generationally, but I think some of it is also personality type.
I read a quote last night that was "most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity". 😅 This is me and my husband has ADHD, it can be so hard to get on the same page about life tasks, they just FEEL completely different to us
For me it's because I want it done and off my physical to do list and out of my mind! If I let my husband do all the 'admin' stuff, bills would not get paid until we got a reminder, kids would skip the dentist, eye doctor, medical doctor etc., dogs would never get vet well visits etc. The stuff would just never get done until it became an emergency and then I would still have to do it but with late fees!!!
That's exactly what I mean, though! I'm guessing both of our husbands hold down a job that they are ok at, but why are we the default household business spouses? I'd have a similar result in my home if I didn't project manage everything.
Oh the truth of this! I also feel like this stuff has expanded exponentially and I am constantly drowning in paperwork and correspondence I will literally never be able to keep up with. It's exhausting and makes me want to run away from society.
Oh my goodness I made basically the same comment further down. I could have written this myself. I definitely have some "striving" tendencies that make me take on nonessential stuff, but if you just pare it down to staying basically housed, clothed, hygienic, and following all tax laws... It's just so much more than anyone can handle! And my husband and I have very different relationships to invisible admin work (it's pretty invisible to him).
I relate to this so hard and I wish neither of us experienced this at all. I also work a job where I don't have access to phone service during business hours (and the job is teaching to be clear). I feel like I am SWAMPED by paperwork all the damn time.
This speaks to me so much. I was raised in a clean house, and my mom to this day cannot leave the house or do anything else if it is messy. I’m definitely stamped by that. It’s so important to reflect on clean culture and what things we can let go of. I am a work in progress and it’s constantly on my mind.
On the other hand, is it maybe more complicated (or is that my mom in my head still talking)? You mention taking care of health hazards as the obvious baseline, but isn’t there pleasure in entering a space that is cared for and collectively maintained?
I don’t mean to defend over-cleaning, like eat off the kitchen floors clean, of the kind that was invented with the 19c housewife. But my definition of luxury is not gold and chandeliers, it’s being taken care of for a moment, including in terms of entering a cared for space. That may be my conditioning rooted deep in my psyche (mom!). But I guess I just caution that there’s a risk to a political tactic of “doing less” in terms of ending up under-appreciating necessary care and maintenance work (which will still need doing, and still be gender unequal, even if we challenge clean culture). Not to romanticize that work, or to say anyone should enjoy it, but to be able to critique clean culture and still appreciate that some of that work is important and has to be done. Kind of both/and? Once you tally up the necessary maintenance work, it’s still quite a lot to do, even if you let go of ridiculous high standards. There is gender inequality not as a result of identity, as you point out, but because of material interests - care and maintenance work is absolutely necessary, and profits depend upon undervaluing it. I worry “doing less” buys into what men are always saying - can’t you just not care so much. But someone has to care a little.
An anecdote that sticks with me - on a trip of mom friends sharing a house, we all commented on how relaxing it was to share the house with women. Everyone took initiative and picked up after themselves a bit. But mostly we were on vacay and relaxed. The house stayed relatively tidy (not perfect) and none of us felt like it took work at all. Leaving at the end was a breeze (whereas it is usually so stressful when it’s those same women with me, along with all our kids and partners, and it’s hard to relax because of so many people there who are not caring for the space, but still making messes). This was even with some of the moms being women who don’t buy into clean culture and don’t keep super clean homes. I realize this is anecdotal and many women would enjoy a girls trip of crumbs and glorious mess. Maybe we were all stamped by clean moms. And yet here’s an example where keeping a welcoming space was all just so … easy.
The real kicker - I found I could relax MORE about messes, and do LESS as you say, because I trusted that the other women were going to generally be responsible for their shit. So if there were crumbs and some dirty dishes, it didn’t phase me. Someone would at some point come along and take care of it (maybe me, but in a way that felt fair to my contribution of the mess). For me, it’s really the unfairness. The resentment comes from cleaning up after other people. So doing less wouldn’t necessarily help because I would still have to manage this feeling that I was leaving less untidied mess behind than others, no matter how much the standards adjust downwards. So difficult…
I think both/and is definitely what I'm going for — because for me, doing less is still doing a good amount of cleaning. I don't feel like any of us need the encouragement to make a space comfortable, or to scrub jam off the floor, or vacuum floating dog hair, or change the sheets every few weeks, because that encouragement is *everywhere.* Instead, we need the counternnarrative we so rarely receive: less, less, less.
This last sentence! This is it! I have aggressively divested from certain tasks - I don’t do my husband’s laundry, the floor is maybe mopped 1x/month (barring spills), etc. But it doesn’t feel liberatory, because I still live with the material and psychological consequences, and he still does not.
Yes!! I also grew up in a clean house and it's nice! It's nice to sit down on a couch and not have it covered in crumbs or dog hair. I like when my kitchen is clean! The issue is the push/pull of having your own standards and imposing them on the people you live with. If my husband doesn't care/can't see the mildew in the shower and I do, or he doesn't think cleaning the sink is a part of doing dishes and I do, then either I'm the asshole who is constantly correcting or shaming or nagging, or I'm the asshole who's coming in and doing it myself and wondering why I'm always having to do it.
It's also hard with kids because it's not just about what my standards are for how/what they clean--I'm raising them to go out into the world with other people. My husband comes from a family where cleanliness isn't much of an issue; if either of his parents had any discordance around how often things should be cleaned, what the state of their house was, etc, that was settled long before I got on the scene. But that also means that their son had never cleaned a bathroom by the time he went to college. It's fine if my kids grow up and live with people who don't worry about having clean spaces, but on the chance that that's not the case, I want them to at least be equipped to be an equal partner with someone who does.
Yeah I struggle with this one. I am certain that it’s true that for some people, freedom from society’s expectations of cleanliness would be a massive relief!
But for me…I think 90% (or more!) of my striving for cleanliness is my own desire to live in a clean world! Neither my parents nor my in-laws care about cleanliness, so it certainly wasn’t and isn’t an expectation for our most frequent visitors, but I find myself SO much happier in my own home when I can walk barefoot without stepping on crumbs, when I can go to cook and find the kitchen counters already clean, when things are put away in their place. I would obviously love it if this were easy to maintain and if my husband did a better job of not letting it become a mess in the first place, but I am also glad to pay someone a good wage to help me achieve this goal!!
Yeah - this is so true. I’m raising two boys and I want them to know how to clean a toilet, keep their room tidy, change their sheets, cook and clean the kitchen. Not just to know how but to take part in it as their contribution to maintaining a house.
I see this line of thinking a lot and I think it's absolutely correct — everyone should know how to do these things, regardless of gender. But knowing how to do these things and feeling like your value is based on your ability to do these things is two different things, and that's where I think we need to also work on our larger scale understandings.
I totally agree, but I also wish for a world where everyone values themselves in part by how they try to meet others’ needs, and not just by earning money.
I said this to my kids last night too- I want you to know if you don’t wash a dish then it can attract insects or mold! When I had a roommate for the first time, I knew how to do laundry and wash dishes and pick up after myself- I washed my sheets every week in college and while we didn’t vacuum much, our room was always ok and our apartment together stayed relatively clean too. My sister and I had very similar standards of clean and only had one fight in our 2 years living together when she didn’t take out the trash before leaving for the weekend when I was on a family trip with my then boyfriend and we got fruit flies.
This is such a great conversation. My husband's standard of clean is just as high, maybe even higher than mine, but I think I just get to things faster, because I deprioritize my stuff. So my biggest takeaway on the doing less advice here, is specifically doing less right away.
I think you articulate the nuance of the tension that I feel. My husband and I are often at odds about cleaning the way that AHP and others discuss here (I definitely 'see' the dirty and feel way more uncomfortable about it than he does), but I also feel like... if we live in a material culture that requires us to trade our life energy for objects, it only feels right to take proper care of these things. I'm a frugal person who doesn't like spending more than I need to, nor do I want to participate in 'throw-away' culture. But cleaning is a necessary part of this -- I have to give the shower curtain liner a quick spray once a week if I don't want to have to replace it every month.
My husband always wants me to 'relax' more, but for him, that means sitting in some state of zen-like peace, oblivious of the world around me. But isn't reality--this ignores the fact that feeling kitty litter under my feet and searching through piles of clutter is extremely *unrelaxing* for me. Like, I gotta get the physical conditions in a state so that I CAN relax. Yeah, I love sitting on the couch with the newest New Yorker, but a) there has to be space on the couch to do this, and b) I also love being able do my weekday morning routines of coffee and oatmeal prep without searching for stuff in the kitchen. The latter is much less 'self-actualization-y' but it's also a fact of my life 5 days a week.
For me, the most important thing to interrogate is the sense of obligation or guilt that I feel about the appearances of clean. Like, cleaning serves a very basic and logical function for me, and is a necessary component in my ability to enjoy my day-to-day existence, but beyond that, I *also* feel a compulsion to DEEP CLEAN the house before someone comes to visit. That's where we get into questionable territory.
I have noticed this on mom trips!! We are so good at alternating the work of cooking and cleaning and keeping each other company while we do these mundane tasks that I don’t feel the stress of staying in a house on a family trip. I don’t think I’m a particularly clean person but I do clean up after myself and don’t let messes pile up. But our next mom trip I still invited everyone to go to a women’s retreat at my kids’ summer camp location where a chef would feed us family style meals and we could walk the beautiful trails and drink coffee on the porch by the lake. Everyone jumped at that chance!
This is so bonkers because I am not a natural housekeeper and being in a group setting totally puts me on alert to not be the "bad roommate". I want everyone else to feel good about the shared experience but I'm non-stop policing myself to kind of hide my normal slovenly behavior. So hopefully the other girls on the trip are thinking, "It's so relaxing when everyone works together and I don't have to clean up after my kids/spouse!" but meanwhile I'm a nervous wreck about whether I need to clean my hair off the shower drain before leaving the bathroom.
Ha, this is very much my feeling as well! It helps that I don't have kids and tend to feel that my husband is an adult who can clean up after himself, so I don't worry so much at home. But I also feel like I never learned some of the cleanliness things that other women did, so worry when I'm outside of my home that I'm grossing others out just b/c I don't realize something I should be doing. Silly example: one day at work, I came out of the bathroom stall and washed my hands, and noticed that the woman next to me, after she washed her hands and dried them, wiped down the drips on the counter she'd created. Since that day, I do the same thing, even though I've never seen anyone else do it or mention that you should do it. I just feel sort of at sea much of the time!
This is a good reminder for me. Thank you for sharing. Cleaning is so weird right, how we are all so particular and different about how spaces feel to us in our bodies.
"I found I could relax MORE about messes, and do LESS as you say, because I trusted that the other women were going to generally be responsible for their shit."
Yes! The cleaning up after other people and my visceral aversion to having to deal with other people's messes when they are capable of doing it themselves. I do it, but it is one of my least favorite things. "How much mess will this make" is a key component of my decision-making so when people make a big mess that they expect me to clean up it drives me batty.
I have noticed the same thing you mentioned about trips with women! A trip with my two best girlfriends a few years ago and earlier this year with my mom and sisters felt so easy because everyone took care of their own messes and contributed to cooking and cleaning, noticing what needed doing and jumping in to help until it was done. Amazing!
Yes I was thinking this, especially given the comparison to other socialised norms that are politicised. We fetishise skinny bodies, but I also had a real health improvement after I lost 3-4 kg (I was about to go on statins). Women spend a lot more time getting ready in the morning to look good, but when I slip into neglect of my appearance I feel like I am betraying myself. As with cleaning- the patriachy socialises us to overvalue cleaning and yet cleaning for your space is also care.
I agree so much. Funny anecdote, apparently my grand-mother would always clean the house before going on a trip, just in case something happened to her, and someone else would need to enter the apartment, so they wouldn't find a mess....
Back to being serious, one thing I am thinking is that when I have a cleaning urge to clean something that is valuable TO ME, before cleaning up AFTER SOMEONE else. I am going to put this in action and start with cleaning my desk trolly.
Mason Currey has an excellent collection of mini-biographies of famous women, specifically on how they got work done. The title does it no justice: "Daily Rituals: Women at Work." It both sounds and looks like a Chicken Soup for the Soul sort of read, but it is not. It can be quite dark and is a stirring reminder page after page that being exceptional in this world often requires you to shut yourself away from so many other daily rituals of just... being alive in this world -- like sleeping! Or talking to other humans! Or figuring out food for yourself and others! I suspect this is true for all men everywhere, and if I read some of these same vignettes but replace the female artist with a man, it just seems like every upper middle class or wealthy man. They all get to cut out so much of the work of being alive because someone else is doing it for them, but it doesn't seem extreme or exceptional.
For example -- From the section on Edna St Vincent Millay: "When a visiting reporter asked Millay how she managed such a large and complicated household, Millay explained that she had nothing to do with it: "Eugen does all that kind of thing...I don't interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is anything I don't like, I tell him, I have no time for it. I don't want to know what I'm going to eat. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, 'What a charming dinner!' It's this concern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman's time and interest."
Or this quote from Doris Lessing: "No one can write with a child around.... It's no good. You just get cross." (See me: pandemic years).
This got me thinking about a jealousy I often felt towards men who had acquired so many interests / skills / hobbies that I never felt I had the time to acquire. It started to dawn on me that if I spent less of my youth obsessing about my appearance and relationship dynamics I would have had more time to do what I want. Similar with cleaning. I mean I still like a clean house, but what else could I do?
Oh yes putting this book on my list now. If I can offer one in response - The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Similar idea. Sounds like a nice little book about family. Absolutely not. It's about great artists, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Alice Neel, among others, and how they responded and interacted with the idea of childcare when it was diametrically opposed to their true labor: creativity, art, and philosophy. It's deeply discomforting, not all the stories are nice or correct, and it rearranged my brain when I had my first. I still think about it constantly.
One related thought I had while reading this piece. On instagram and tiktok, there are a lot of influencers/creators in their 20s-early 30s that show apartment cleaning, doing the 'closing shift', (tidying up before bed), and it just dawned on me, THAT THEY ARE ALL WOMEN. I have not seen any men showing how they clean and tidy up their house at the end of the day. I'm now thinking about how this gets into the subconscious of young women- i.e. not just seeing "I should workout", but how cleaning (and having the right organization products, obviously bought on amazon) can also be a function of what we see on social media.
This is funny, because I deliberately follow a dad-cleaning influencer to diversify that part of my feed. Check out @tidydad. He’s very wholesome, and it’s helpful to watch a man take care of his space
I am a cyclist (F) and I found myself watching a former pro cyclist wash his bike over and over. You can count on men to clean their cars and gear - immaculately.
I have seen some men doing household cleaning videos, but they are largely gay men or gay-coded? A couple videos deep in the profile, you’ll catch the male partner walking through the frame. I’ve seen a few that are straight men doing it in a “hey guys, here’s how to make your wife/girlfriend happy/impressed” style and the comments section is usually horrifying
Okay, I upgraded to paid just to comment here! I'm teaching a history of medicine course this semester and we just read an excerpt from Nancy Tomes' article "Moralizing the Microbe" (1997), where she argues that the application of germ theory to tuberculosis at the end of the 19th century launched a health crusade that linked cleanliness with morality. Once Americans understood that diseases like TB (one of the deadliest American diseases by 1900) were caused by germs, they completely shifted their relationship to cleaning and sanitation. Gone were shared drinking cups and spitting in public (the fact that people used to do that constantly shocks my high school students).
In particular, what stood out to me was how Progressive reformers linked TB prevention with a religious crusade, and how the home naturally became a focus of prevention. TB tended to spread between family members due to prolonged contact, so the home now needed to be much cleaner to prevent this contagion. While she doesn't state this in the excerpt we read, you could argue that this links cleanliness in the home more explicitly to a woman's duty: it's a woman's MORAL duty to keep her home clean, because otherwise her family could contract TB. I'm curious to know if this kind of link between cleanliness, morality, and gender existed prior to the acceptance of germ theory, or if it really took off post-Koch.
This is fascinating, and it makes me feel a little hopeful. We’ve learned over the past four years that many viruses are airborne, and that sanitizing surfaces likely isn’t as helpful as cleaning the air (by opening windows or using air purifiers/filters). Theoretically, if we could make some progress with regard to indoor air quality standards, we might be able to decouple morality from household cleaning.
I grew up in St. Paul where I, and a lot of my friends, had parents who worked at the University of Minnesota in some capacity. We didn't realize it at the time (we joke about it now), but we all grew up in houses where cleanliness was NOT a priority. Our parents were all feminists and busy and we didn't know any different. They were active in their communities and had many passions beyond keeping their houses clean.
Later in life I lived in Johnson County, KS for 10 years. Women had a lot of their identities wrapped up in their homes. You would almost never step into a house without the woman uttering the words "Sorry it's such a mess!". And of course, it was always spotless. But to me, those houses lacked soul. There were never the books, artifacts, art projects, random objects strewn about that made me want to sit and enjoy myself. There was no warmth there. I agree with what others have said - I love entering a messy house and knowing someone is comfortable enough to be themself around me. But more than that - that they have a life and interests beyond just keeping their house spotless.
I also grew up in St. Paul, and also never internalized the idea that it was important or my job to keep my house clean. Maybe it's a local cultural thing? I live in Atlanta now, and the culture around having a clean and well decorated home is so different, and I agree, homes feel so cold and impersonal.
Oh I think it's much less a Twin Cities thing and much more a "did you find meaning in your life outside of your ability to keep a house clean" thing! (Signed, the Granddaughter of an Obsessive Cleaner in White Bear Lake)
🙋🏼♀️ Grew up in the Twin Cities— dad’s work was mechanical engineering & mom stayed home with me & my siblings until I was in middle school, then held a variety of office administrative assistant positions to support family trips & our activities. Cleaning & having a clean home was a priority in our family— although probably more so for my dad than my mom. I have memories of him being the one to fuss at us about the things we left around the house/picking up, etc. His grandmother (my great-grandmother- lived in ND) kept plastic on her couches, so they wouldn’t get dirty. My dad is a neat freak & perfectionist (eldest in his family), but his dad was overbearing & an alcoholic, although no one has ever called him that, except for me when he had passed & I was well grown by that time- married & had started my own family. My mom stills knows very little about my dad’s childhood. It’s simply wild to me- I think my generation (born in ‘79) is doing some of the hardest work for our families— healing from the past & creating new ways of being (without clear models) for our families.
There’s so many times now I wish I could have adult conversations with my grandmothers & great-grandmothers— all lived well into my teenage years & it was only two years ago that I lost my last grandma.
I would guess it's an academic thing. Or maybe a hippie thing? Rejecting previous generations expectations? My mom was a sociology professor who did a lot of research and writing on gender roles and cleaning was a pretty low priority thing growing up. Sometimes I wish I cared more about a clean house. Mine is a mess! :) But I prioritize other things.
I never like to come onto a post and be like MY RELATIONSHIP ISN'T LIKE THIS, but this post does have me thinking about my own total lack of interest in cleaning and my partner's obsession with it to the point of neglecting his work (music practicing, writing his dissertation, etc.). My dad came to stay with us for a couple of days for Rosh Hashanah last week, and rather than get his own work done, my partner deep cleaned the house. I was like...was the house dirty? I didn't even see it if it was, and my dad certainly didn't (though the clean sheets were nice and probably something I would have done myself). For me, other things are and have always been more important. I'm a singer and a professor and if I have music to learn, writing to do, assignments to grade (well, okay, sometimes this one can get me cleaning!), rehearsal to attend, etc., cleaning is at the very, very bottom of the priority list.
My mother has been on my case since I was a kid to keep things neat, a lot of like, one day you'll grow up and learn to keep your space clean. I'm 36 and it still hasn't happened. And it's making me wonder if maybe it's one of these eldest daughter rebellions--like, I'm not allowed to misbehave in any other way but I am never going to clean on a regular basis or particularly care if things are tidy. I feel a little bad that my office at work is a little chaotic, but my students tell me it feels cozy and real, and comfortable for them.
I have a similar situation in my house, and I often question if the fact that my partner is so obsessively clean frees me from needing to care in a way that I might otherwise not have done if I’d married someone messier.
This is what I think is often lost in this discussions, as we muddle through the why we do it/it must be done.....all the other ways we could be allocating our time.
I absolutely agree. I will clean if something really needs it, and I cook a lot so I try to clean up the kitchen before I start something new, but the time I would spend cleaning as much as my partner does is time that I can use for my own projects, learning music, research, job applications (blurgh) or resting, reading, watching mindless TV, etc.
I also have a male partner who self-identifies as the "clean one" (I think we are *both* the clean one, lol, although I do concede that I'm more okay with stacks of books, laundry left on the rack, etc. than he is)...I think a lot of his attention to house care comes from being raised by a SAHM who vacuumed daily and generally set very high standards. This leads to frequent conversations where I have to reframe what 'normal' looks like! When he feels swamped by our small house and says 'I don't know how other people keep up with all this' I have to point out: they often don't. OR they hire cleaners. He struggles to comprehend either possibility.
Oh, absolutely. He's also obsessed with car maintenance and will take my car for car washes where I'm like...dude, it's just going to get dirty again in thirty seconds. But it means that I almost never need to think about it.
The truth about cleaning, though, is that even when I was single I didn't care. Is it nice to live with somebody who has a Sam's Club membership and remembers to stock up on toilet paper? Sure. Did it bother me that every so often I ran out of toilet paper and had to use tissues? Not really.
Every once in a while, we do this little thought experiment in our house, like if he left for a week, what would the house be like when he got home? And I am convinced that our child and I would have eaten takeout/mac & cheese/whatever goes in the air fryer 4 days and leftovers 3 days; the dishes would be undone until the sink was full; and I'd spend the two hours before he got home frantically scanning the house to make it look like I cared for the whole week but really only put thought into it at the last minute.
Yes a therapist once pointed out to me that I have become very good at things that my partner doesn’t do/care about. It’s not that you actually like those things independently, but rather that you’re filling a gap
39yo eldest daughter and the only thing that has made me care about housecleaning is living with a partner whose mental health is affected by clutter. My car is now the site of my ongoing refusal to be tidy. The waist deep pile of sh*t in the backseat truly does not bother me in the least and it's nice to be able to ferret out another pair of shoes or a change of clothes in a pinch.
42 here, and my mother has similarly been on my case my entire life. She keeps hoping it will become important to me one day and just can’t accept that this is the adult me, I’m done growing, I’ve become the person already. It’s definitely some sort of rebellion that I live happily in clutter she couldn’t stand. She spent the last two weeks gently and not so gently reminding me that I need to straighten up the common spaces of our home (my younger musician brother-in-law is staying with us this week; he doesn't care, we don’t care, who is this for?). She continues to insist I should care, but is unwilling to go any deeper on the subject. Endlessly frustrating.
Right!! My dad could not care less if we clean the house for him—-and also, because my partner cleans a lot, it is always clean enough for guests. Always. But even if it’s not, my dad is always like, you’re living your life, your stuff is here, that’s just how it is.
And the yard. Our next-door neighbors have an immaculate house and a (viciously? pointedly? hungrily? edited to add: not really my business) landscaped yard. It takes vigilant mental exercise not to feel like less—poorer, lazier, uglier, unwanted—as neighbors with an average house and a funky but fine yard. We’re a happy, loving, curious, supportive, also funky family, and with all my heart I know we have what matters. And. When you live next to people who are exceptionally talented at and wealthy enough for mainstream, WASPy, clean culture appearance, and you have no particular talent at appearances in general (and you’re a little lonely, and you do make less money), the cultural judgement presses in pretty hard. Plus if they ever sell they’ll get a higher price, probably.
My city encourages residents to install rain gardens in their extensions (the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street). The proviso is that you have to tend it and make sure it doesn’t become an obstacle. There is also a No Mow May community that leaves their lawns to grow so that pollinators can get a start on the season. Both groups have lawn signs so that people understand what the growth means. Anyone with too manicured a lawn here is seen as wasteful of resources such as water and fertilizer.
We don’t live in a HOA neighborhood but we had neighbors complain that our mulch wasn’t properly spread out after we had a tree fall and had to mulch the stump. They called the city on us and the city said they weren’t going to fine us but they suggested we handle it since the neighbors were clearly irritated by us! I have told my husband many times I think we need to hire landscapers because our yard is an endless and exhausting project in a neighborhood full of retirees with immaculate yards. I genuinely wonder what is going on with all these people that their yard is such a hobby for them.
They’ve been slightly nicer since we had cute kids but they have always been weird! Our neighbor to the left is Vietnamese and talks to my husband but never to me, occasionally speaks to my kids- it feels like he is legitimately mowing or trimming multiple days a week, I work from home and I can’t get over how much yard work he does in his late 60s! My in-laws also live on our street and are always doing yard work too. They aren’t retired but they are out there at least 3 days a week picking up sticks and pinecones with the wheelbarrow.
My retired neighbor leaf-blows his patio, lawn, driveway and the street in front of his house daily. It boggles the mind, but also, he's not working so I guess he has plenty of time to individually move every leaf as it falls. I choose to believe that this has nothing to do with me, is not my business, and should be ignored until I struggle to fill the hours of my day at which point I'll buy a leaf-blower.
The yard! Yes. We live in a neighborhood with mostly retirees, who apparently have All The Time to sculpt and mow and trim their almost 3/4 yards. Be gone, grass which dares to poke its head above the others!
Whereas us, we like letting the grass grow a bit, and we don't spray alleged weeds, because we like to nurture all sorts of animals and bugs.
No one has said anything to us. But I grew up with my parents having a regular lawn mowing and lawn maintenance schedule, and so I feel eyeballs on my current yard, and it's ridiculously hard to shake the feeling that I too need to have the unnaturally carpet-like expanse of lawn. I don't succumb to it but it's like the _need_ to flows in my bloodstream.
Whoever sold this idea of what a yard should be is a vile being.
The carpet-lawn as a life requirement surely must be a tool of oppression!!! Landscaping body hair, landscaping yard grass... I guess growth is just kind of terrifying??
I live in a small town, and most of my immediate neighbors are only here in the summer. We do not mow our yard or rake leaves - we did the first year we lived here, but then the next year we got a sudden early snow and didn’t do it, and it was fine so we stopped. If the path from the garage to the house or the area around the mailbox gets overgrown, my spouse goes out with the trimmer for ten minutes. Every year the lake association reminds us in their newsletter that it’s beneficial to let the leaves lie…and we are the only ones who do. Everyone else has a lawn service…and the cacophony of leaf blowers is a scourge! We live in the woods! On purpose! There are always going to be leaves here!
I feel this so strongly. We have neighbors that have an aggressively well kept front yard and I see how much time they spend maintaining it and it makes me feel totally less than for our meh yard and care of it (I do daydream of a vegetable garden and beautiful flower beds but not in this season of life). I do however know that this couple has, like, soap opera levels of drama/ cheating in their marriage, so I kinda console myself with that (is that terrible? Probably).
Do we have the same neighbors??? ARE WE THE SAME PERSON???? My neighbors have different struggles, and since we moved to text-only interaction, I don’t really know what’s up, but for a while, we saw a lot of tough, heartbreaking shit go down. But I feel fondly for them, too, and admire their skills. It’s so complicated.
I'll never forget when we moved into our first house in a new-ish suburb, 30+ years ago and less than two weeks later, our next-door neighbour pointedly asked us when we were going to mow the lawn. (!!!) It WAS getting a little long, but hey buddy, we just moved in (from a small one-bedroom apartment), we just took on a huge mortgage, we have a LOT of stuff we need to buy for this place, and a lawnmower is on the list but we just haven't gotten around to it yet -- can you give us a break??
I used to try to plant flowers, etc., but we often went away for a few weeks in the summer, and by the time we got back, they'd be dead because they hadn't been watered. I gave up after a while. We always tried to keep the yard mowed and tidy, but a showplace, it was not.
This is us too. Also with snow removal in the wintertime. Our neighbors are out shoveling immediately when it snows, have a nice smooth and snow free driveway all winter even though we live in a VERY SNOWY PLACE! Our driveway on the other hand is often rutted and icy but we generally move snow around and can get in and out of our cars. Every winter I am always reminding myself that it is JUST FINE if our driveway is not immaculate. Such a silly insecurity but it really lives rent free in my head.
I feel like consumerism has just leveled up the expectations so much. Houses are bigger, people have a lot more stuff, and yet there's no stuff out anywhere in the influencers kitchens, and the timeline for decor to be considered outdated has sped up dramatically. Think of the vast kitchens with the walls of cabinets hiding all the stuff that has to come out each time its used and then return to its lair.
An ex's mother stopped over to our house. She commented that, perhaps, I should vacuum and dust more often. I told her I worked 60 hours a week, her son worked 35 hours a week, and also lived in the home. He had much more time than I to clean so she should talk to him. She got VERY red and left immediately.
Re: the data showing that women spend twice as much time cleaning even when they're only 18 years old -- the gender disparity in time spent on household tasks actually starts much younger, around the age of 7. Making matters worse, kids as young as 3 have said they think gender inequality in domestic labor is fair. Bleh. I dug into this research a few months ago for my newsletter: https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/domestic-inequality-starts-in-childhood
I saw a friend I haven't seen in a while the other day and she said "Well, you know me, I can't sit still. I've always got to be working" and it struck me that I've only ever heard women say some variation of this.
I (unfortunately or fortunately) do not subscribe to this, but I realized I have never, ever heard a man say he's always got to be cleaning or something while at home. My mother-in-law was like this, too. If she wasn't asleep, she was multi-tasking.
I think it's probably socialization, but I'm curious if anyone has other reasons.
I think this is true of men as well! Especially thinking about the men I know with ADHD diagnoses. However, to previous points I know AHP has raised about golf, I think the men tend to have their "I can't sit still" tasks mostly outside of the house. One couple I know, the man in his late 60s absolutely cannot sit still and does most tasks in & outside the house, but his main hobby is repairing an old boat he found. Not exactly something social or indoors!
I feel grateful that my husband has made clear that our house and standard of living (which are acceptable to us and definitely not living in squalor) are so messy that his mother -- who lives in a condo with a white couch and white carpet and a weekly cleaner -- will never, ever visit. Because she knows she can't handle being in a house that isn't clean to her standards & wants to preserve her relationship with her son. So I am freed from that judgement!
But I *do* wrestle with growing up in an objectively dirty house. Both of my parents had mental health issues that cycled between treatment and relapse and the kids never really learned how to or were made to chip in. So our house just stayed disgusting and by the time I was old enough to care about it & realize it was bad, things seemed to far gone to make any meaningful change (what can you do, at 15, with no internet to research, when the cat urine has soaked into the floorboards?).
And I have really held onto that shame of having friends over or bringing a college boyfriend home for Christmas and seeing our house from an outsider's perspective and just being horrified at the state of things and equally horrified that they were uncomfortable in my home. So my goal is to never live like that again and *that* is what drives most of my cleaning and house maintenance. The look on my college boyfriend's face at seeing where he had to take a shower is burned into my brain and I never want to see anyone look like that in my home, ever.
But also: my husband definitely doesn't have this sense of "filth will make our guests uncomfortable" and actually, genuinely doesn't believe me that this is a real reaction people have to being in a dirty house.
My husband grew up in the same kind of family—his mother suffered from severe mental illness, and his dad focused on working (he was the sole income provider) and on being there for the kids. I remember going to his parents’ house for the first time and not wanting to come in contact with any surfaces. It was disgusting, and unfortunately it fed into my already complicated relationship with housekeeping.
I want people to be comfortable in my home—and since I spend a lot of time here, I want to be comfortable. I grew up with women who had grown up on farms—where there was real dirt! I think the focus on having a clean house was probably misplaced status anxiety since they were the first generation to move from rural poverty to relatively affluent suburban living so they didn’t want to appear backward or “country” or horror of horrors—-poor. I absorbed the idea that the cleanliness and attractiveness of your home was somehow a measure of your worth as a human being, and they looked down on people who had dirty houses or who “didn’t keep up their yards.”
I have a lot of conflicting feelings on this subject—on one hand I can see where I put too much energy into keeping up appearances, and on the other hand I can see how living in a gross house is damaging too.
Yes. I think about this, too, as my partner has (diagnosed) ADHD and an incredibly demanding job and 50-50 custody, during which he invests his focus on being an incredible father to his children. But his house is "disgusting" (his words, though I share the sentiment) in these ways, too, and I worry a little for his kids as they get older and have to navigate these kinds of things. We plan to cohabitate, and getting this figured out is already a priority for us --something we're looking at together in therapy. (We thankfully have SUCH a wonderful couples counselor who has expertise in ADHD!) I know it will mean meeting halfway (as I find solace in cleaner spaces); it's going to be a journey!
As the one(F) w/ Adhd in my relationship, just want to gently suggest if it’s financially possible for you to hire a cleaner when you cohabitate, I highly recommend it! This may be something you suggest to your partner even now, it might actually help him manage adhd (bc the overwhelm of a problem can be debilitating!)
Not exactly on point, but I’d love some analysis of “cleanTok” (ok I’m old so I only watch it on insta) particularly GoCleanCo. She doesn’t just promote ultra cleanliness, but is also an “Amazon ambassador” who peddles various wares - not just cleaning items, but beauty products, protein drinks etc—and is kind of an influencer of the airspace aesthetic. I’m equally soothed by it (if I do/buy this one thing my chaotic life will have order!), repelled by it (the consumerism!), and annoyed by it (why can’t I get practical cleaning tips without feeling bad for never wearing lipstick??). I’d love help unpacking this, particularly the cleanliness/consumerism connection and how the consumerism can exist with a space that is completely devoid of clutter.
I watch those fridge bin videos with an attitude of "look! This is how people with time, money, energy to care (and no cares for how much plastic they use) live!" Which, if I'm very honest, is probably equal parts judgmental and aspirational (hmm).
I haven't heard about the QAnon connection specifically, but other right-wing stuff. Believe me, we have our share of that stuff here too (unfortunately). The GoCleanCo lady lives in Alberta, which is the Trumpiest of all our provinces. Enough said.
That said, I am a fan, although I don't tune in as often as I once did. I started following her on Instagram early in the pandemic when she had something like 30,000 followers -- she now has over 2 million, I think. I've picked up some good tips and how-to info from her, and I bought and love the squeegie/window cleaning system she promoted. The cleaning (before/after) videos are kind of mesmerizing. ;)
But yes, I could do without all the Amazon influencer stuff.
Growing up, my (late) mother—the world's best!—was not the world's best housekeeper. In the 1960s, she went to grad school, then became a college teacher (also the best!). So to preserve her time for us kids (and work/school), she hired a weekly housecleaner. That meant our house was clean (from a dirt/hygiene perspective) but still cluttered (the books, the years of New Yorkers), which was okay. That approach saved my mom's sanity. Years later, when I was a newlywed in our first home, I spent 2 days cleaning and decluttering before her first visit. After she and my stepdad walked in, she looked around at my sparkling and pristine home, took me gently by the shoulders, and said, "What have you done with my daughter?!" 🤣 I never went crazy about it pre-Mom visit again. (Having said that, my MIL *did/does* judge my home by its order, so I do fall prey to the old expectations, while her son—my husband—doesn't. Go figure.)
How to break free of that cleanliness-defines-my-worth mindset? I don't think I am in that trap, and it is a combination of being AuDHD and simply not being able to; living alone for over a decade; and my grandmother's funeral.
At my grandmother's funeral, literally every single speaker talked about how much she loved her...house. How much care she put into it, how it was the joy of her life and source of her identity. When I was a kid, there was "clean" and there was "grandma clean". And after my mother died and I was rocked by grief, my grandmother attempted to console me by suggesting it wasn't that big of a loss because my mom (her daughter-in-law) wasn't a good housekeeper. (My mom was working full time, had four kids at home, and was literally dying.) I was so angry with my grandmother I barely every spoke to her again, and then at her funeral listening to everyone talk about her love of her house (!!) drove home what a waste of a life that was. She could have been kind. She could have been kind to my mom, who'd lost her own mother and was struggling. She could have been kind to me, her grand-daughter who was grieving. She could have had a life that meant something, but instead she focused on her house, which she saw as an extension of herself, and serviced her own pride and vanity. What a WASTE.
People get the exact amount of vote in my life choices that they experience the consequences. If someone who doesn't live in my house doesn't like the state of it, they can set up visits elsewhere or they can contribute to paying a housecleaning service. That's it. Only give people power when they also have the responsibility.
I am so sorry for your losses. The way your grandmother treated you and how that helped you realize you want more for yourself makes me think of the Mary Oliver line - “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
I remember my mom commenting on other women's homes, like "she's not much of a housekeeper" and that would be why we go into freakout mode when she's coming. Your grandmother is next level, and that's appalling.
I am gobsmacked by your grandmother saying that to you. How twisted does someone have to be to arrive at a place where that seems like an appropriate thing to say to a grieving person? Presumably at some point in her formative years she was made to feel that her self-worth was bound up in her housekeeping, and that is sad, but the way she allowed it to stunt her!
I take a lot of pride in my home. One of my dreams was to renovate a house and, of all my dreams, it’s one of the few non-kid based dreams that came true. That said, I hope it’s not all I’m remembered for (I’m also a terrible housekeeper in my daily life, and my kids have been raised with that mess, so I think I’m in the clear). Your grandmother was cruel and misguided. I’m sorry. You deserved so much more in your grief.
This is not exactly what you are talking about, but in our household, what I feel like I struggle most with allocating is admin work! My (male) partner does a lot of cooking and cleaning (and is frankly more bothered by mess than I am). But I feel like I am constantly drowning in a sea of paperwork/phone calls/emails - fighting with our health and dental insurance, calling contractors/plumbers/etc to do things for our house, filling out new tax paperwork. Not to mention fielding the barrage of spam emails/calls. I feel like this kind of stuff has expanded exponentially and I can’t tell if it’s just me, but it feels like every single one of these is a fight - someone sent the wrong paperwork to us, so I have to fill it out again; the insurance company makes a mistake on the claim and I have to file an appeal and follow up on it; contractor says they’re going to do something, doesn’t do it completely, and I have to fight to get them to come finish the job they agreed to. I get that we are all stretched so thin & distracted, but I am exhausted by trying to keep up with the apparently “essential” stuff of modern American adulthood 😅
You're not wrong, everything has become a fight with administration. When we have discourse about caregiving, the two things I wish we were talking about in addition to paid care are transportation and all the fucking phone calls. Getting the service you need on a regular basis, that you are already getting half the time, takes several calls every week multiplied by dozens of agencies, doctors, insurance, whatever. I feel like Annie Lowery is the only one writing about it, but it's the most salient feature of my constant anxiety and anger.
ALL!!!! the fucking phone calls!!! Why are there so many???? Rage inducing.
Oh the Executive Parent/Partner role is a hard one.
Love this term so much Erin!!
I think I saw it in an article about emotional labour and all of the additional admin tasks that come along with running a household and it really resonated with me.
this is my relationship dynamic, too and I feel grateful for it, but I would happily trade off doing dishes if I felt like I could count on him to, like, get estimates from a few different plumbers in a timely fashion.
Didn’t AHP do a piece about this a while ago? I feel like someone did…. That this constant admin fight is a trickle-down of cost-cutting at businesses. “Running lean” is the new thing, and businesses are always trying to eke out the absolute least they can pay staff while generating a sufficient amount of profit. Staff is usually overworked, and it’s hard to track and measure “how quickly did you return the customer’s call” or whatever. Their performance isn’t graded on that, and it’s not a priority for their supervisors.
I have seen this up close, when I joined a team in my technical field. One of the things I prided myself on was answering customer tickets correctly and completely the first time, doing all the research myself so that I didn’t just shunt them to someone else who maybe would know the answer, maybe wouldn’t. Eventually I realized that my manager just didn’t care if questions got answered quickly or customers were happy with the experience. My peers were outperforming me because they knew he didn’t value that work, and their time was freed up to deliver on stuff he DID value. As much as it pains me, I’ve had to train myself to deliver worse service so that I can focus on the other stuff. I feel bad for the customer, but my hands are tied. Without customers making it clear to my boss’s boss that this level of service is unacceptable, it will continue to be the standard.
I really feel this too- my husband does a lot of cooking and we aren’t super clean- we clean the kitchen and the sink and do laundry but we rarely clean the tub or mop and we always have a laundry pile. We vacuum every couple weeks. But all the admin stuff and family calendar with our families’ events and childcare puzzles and school events plus school emails and all the medical appointments feel like another 30 hours a week. I only work part time and I feel like I’m working at least 65 hours a week. I have maybe an hour of leisure time after our kids are in bed. My husband stays up significantly later and gets a lot of time alone because he doesn’t get up at 6 am and take the kids to school- he’s awake but he doesn’t have to get ready until after we are gone and it’s a huge difference.
as the one who gets to get ready after others are gone - it DOES make a HUGE difference. Just affirming you. That bit is lopsided enough to specifically try and balance out elsewhere.
When he does our meal planning and prep it feels balanced but he comes and goes with it- I get burnt out too and we both fall off on things we have agreed are important to us but it is still disappointing when it feels unbalanced because I like to think we are good at balancing domestic labor tasks. He lived with male roommates, fraternity brothers and his own brothers prior to living with me and while I didn’t like the decor of the house he shared with his brothers, I felt like it was clean enough and well taken care of- I was surprised how many care tasks seemed to fall to me after we had kids and falling into the mindset of me being more naturally inclined toward care tasks.
I feel this way about the scheduling of appointments for this kind of stuff. Like, the contractor didn't do what they were supposed to, sooooo....who has to be home for when they come back? Who has to go into work late when the pest control people come? Who has to take their lunch break to let in the person to check the furnace? Me. It's basically always me. (Granted, some of this is because my husband often travels for work, and I'm lucky to have a really flexible job, but I definitely get the feeling that even if those things weren't true, it would still be me.) I am not a fan of this part of adulthood.
I hear you. I definitely feel there is a curse of being the one with the more flexibel job, who naturally spends more time in the home office. It is easier for me to arrange to be there when an important package arrives, when the latest contractor needs to be let in, and sometimes that makes me feel like my real work is less valued, because well you can do it in the evening/late, so it must not be that important, and while you are at it, why not fold laundry during your break. Haha, ok now I am rambling. I am just in the process of getting myself a co-working space, so i can also be out of the house more (because of course if I am here more, I also notice "little stuff" more). This article and this conversation has been so eye-opening to me.
I’m a single dog mom, home owner of a very old fixer upper, and landlord as I rent out part of my house and so have to be more on top of upkeep and cleaning more than I might otherwise and it is A LOT! I previously owned a house with my ex and so thought I was prepared but when you’re doing absolutely everything yourself (including making every single small decision about every single thing)…well I was not prepared for how much work it actually was! And don’t get me started on how hard it was to go through IUIs/IVF alone, almost unbearable. So I am used to and able to do a lot alone but I definitely miss someone around to help take my car for an oil change, make home upkeep appointments and be home for them, rake the yard and shovel snow, etc, as well as grocery shop and cook and of course clean. We’d naturally split work along stereotypical gender roles but I felt it was pretty even. And man doing it all yourself can be soooooo overwhelming, at this point I’d kill for a partner around to help with some of it
Solo living requires a shit ton of tiny decisions. It can be overwhelming even when it's just regular stuff.
I owned a house before I got married and was used to doing everything but was shocked how little that changed after my husband moved in. We've bought into the lie that it's the same amount of work for 1 person vs 2 but that's not the case.
Thank you for articulating this - my male partner is much cleaner than I am, he does all the cooking and meal planning, and I am so thankful for that. But maybe as atonement for the guilt I feel for not being evolutionarily disposed to keeping home (as AHP mentions in the article), I try to take on all the other management duties (scheduling cars for inspection, arguing with contractors, etc.) which I am also not evolutionarily predisposed to (ADHD is a b-word). But it makes me feel more equal in a household that doesn’t mirror the “typical” male/female roles of cleaning/caretaking.
Oh my goodness, YES — part of the reason I have become the Executive Partner (thanks Erin for that term!) is because I *don’t* care as much about cleaning, and there is absolutely a guilt component of it for me too. Since I am not a “good clean housewife,” I can at least take care of this mental load… but it is actually SOO much, and like you, sense that I have some neurodivergence that means I have to work really hard to keep track of it all 🤪
Ok, I am so glad to find out I'm not alone in this dynamic (or these feelings)! There's more than one of us!
My question to folks this is resonating with: I can see clearly how cleanliness policing has been passed down to women from our grandmother's, but how come in most m/f relationships I'm familiar with the woman also does most of the admin while working full time? What forces are pulling these strings?
This is a fascinating question. In my own relationship, I think it's because I have a stronger attention to detail driven by anxiety. My husband is always like, eh this is good enough, and I'm like, no we need to actually get recommendations for our child's dentist not pick the first one in the google search return! I'm sure some of this is also socialized and passed down generationally, but I think some of it is also personality type.
I read a quote last night that was "most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity". 😅 This is me and my husband has ADHD, it can be so hard to get on the same page about life tasks, they just FEEL completely different to us
I always tell people who ask me about being a lawyer that it is a great way to use your generalized anxiety disorder for profit.
Ooof! I’ve thought about becoming a lawyer and wow this resonates
For me it's because I want it done and off my physical to do list and out of my mind! If I let my husband do all the 'admin' stuff, bills would not get paid until we got a reminder, kids would skip the dentist, eye doctor, medical doctor etc., dogs would never get vet well visits etc. The stuff would just never get done until it became an emergency and then I would still have to do it but with late fees!!!
That's exactly what I mean, though! I'm guessing both of our husbands hold down a job that they are ok at, but why are we the default household business spouses? I'd have a similar result in my home if I didn't project manage everything.
Oh the truth of this! I also feel like this stuff has expanded exponentially and I am constantly drowning in paperwork and correspondence I will literally never be able to keep up with. It's exhausting and makes me want to run away from society.
This was all so much less and easier in our 20. Feeling a little nostalgic.
You're dealing with Executive Function Theft. It's so exhausting. I'm sorry. https://hedgehoglibrarian.com/2023/08/14/executive-function-theft/
Oh my goodness I made basically the same comment further down. I could have written this myself. I definitely have some "striving" tendencies that make me take on nonessential stuff, but if you just pare it down to staying basically housed, clothed, hygienic, and following all tax laws... It's just so much more than anyone can handle! And my husband and I have very different relationships to invisible admin work (it's pretty invisible to him).
True and extra true as a single homeowner. I live by Trello boards and phone notes/tasks to survive—same exact tools as my paid job.
I relate to this so hard and I wish neither of us experienced this at all. I also work a job where I don't have access to phone service during business hours (and the job is teaching to be clear). I feel like I am SWAMPED by paperwork all the damn time.
This speaks to me so much. I was raised in a clean house, and my mom to this day cannot leave the house or do anything else if it is messy. I’m definitely stamped by that. It’s so important to reflect on clean culture and what things we can let go of. I am a work in progress and it’s constantly on my mind.
On the other hand, is it maybe more complicated (or is that my mom in my head still talking)? You mention taking care of health hazards as the obvious baseline, but isn’t there pleasure in entering a space that is cared for and collectively maintained?
I don’t mean to defend over-cleaning, like eat off the kitchen floors clean, of the kind that was invented with the 19c housewife. But my definition of luxury is not gold and chandeliers, it’s being taken care of for a moment, including in terms of entering a cared for space. That may be my conditioning rooted deep in my psyche (mom!). But I guess I just caution that there’s a risk to a political tactic of “doing less” in terms of ending up under-appreciating necessary care and maintenance work (which will still need doing, and still be gender unequal, even if we challenge clean culture). Not to romanticize that work, or to say anyone should enjoy it, but to be able to critique clean culture and still appreciate that some of that work is important and has to be done. Kind of both/and? Once you tally up the necessary maintenance work, it’s still quite a lot to do, even if you let go of ridiculous high standards. There is gender inequality not as a result of identity, as you point out, but because of material interests - care and maintenance work is absolutely necessary, and profits depend upon undervaluing it. I worry “doing less” buys into what men are always saying - can’t you just not care so much. But someone has to care a little.
An anecdote that sticks with me - on a trip of mom friends sharing a house, we all commented on how relaxing it was to share the house with women. Everyone took initiative and picked up after themselves a bit. But mostly we were on vacay and relaxed. The house stayed relatively tidy (not perfect) and none of us felt like it took work at all. Leaving at the end was a breeze (whereas it is usually so stressful when it’s those same women with me, along with all our kids and partners, and it’s hard to relax because of so many people there who are not caring for the space, but still making messes). This was even with some of the moms being women who don’t buy into clean culture and don’t keep super clean homes. I realize this is anecdotal and many women would enjoy a girls trip of crumbs and glorious mess. Maybe we were all stamped by clean moms. And yet here’s an example where keeping a welcoming space was all just so … easy.
The real kicker - I found I could relax MORE about messes, and do LESS as you say, because I trusted that the other women were going to generally be responsible for their shit. So if there were crumbs and some dirty dishes, it didn’t phase me. Someone would at some point come along and take care of it (maybe me, but in a way that felt fair to my contribution of the mess). For me, it’s really the unfairness. The resentment comes from cleaning up after other people. So doing less wouldn’t necessarily help because I would still have to manage this feeling that I was leaving less untidied mess behind than others, no matter how much the standards adjust downwards. So difficult…
I think both/and is definitely what I'm going for — because for me, doing less is still doing a good amount of cleaning. I don't feel like any of us need the encouragement to make a space comfortable, or to scrub jam off the floor, or vacuum floating dog hair, or change the sheets every few weeks, because that encouragement is *everywhere.* Instead, we need the counternnarrative we so rarely receive: less, less, less.
This last sentence! This is it! I have aggressively divested from certain tasks - I don’t do my husband’s laundry, the floor is maybe mopped 1x/month (barring spills), etc. But it doesn’t feel liberatory, because I still live with the material and psychological consequences, and he still does not.
I feel this in my bones.
Yes!! I also grew up in a clean house and it's nice! It's nice to sit down on a couch and not have it covered in crumbs or dog hair. I like when my kitchen is clean! The issue is the push/pull of having your own standards and imposing them on the people you live with. If my husband doesn't care/can't see the mildew in the shower and I do, or he doesn't think cleaning the sink is a part of doing dishes and I do, then either I'm the asshole who is constantly correcting or shaming or nagging, or I'm the asshole who's coming in and doing it myself and wondering why I'm always having to do it.
It's also hard with kids because it's not just about what my standards are for how/what they clean--I'm raising them to go out into the world with other people. My husband comes from a family where cleanliness isn't much of an issue; if either of his parents had any discordance around how often things should be cleaned, what the state of their house was, etc, that was settled long before I got on the scene. But that also means that their son had never cleaned a bathroom by the time he went to college. It's fine if my kids grow up and live with people who don't worry about having clean spaces, but on the chance that that's not the case, I want them to at least be equipped to be an equal partner with someone who does.
Yeah I struggle with this one. I am certain that it’s true that for some people, freedom from society’s expectations of cleanliness would be a massive relief!
But for me…I think 90% (or more!) of my striving for cleanliness is my own desire to live in a clean world! Neither my parents nor my in-laws care about cleanliness, so it certainly wasn’t and isn’t an expectation for our most frequent visitors, but I find myself SO much happier in my own home when I can walk barefoot without stepping on crumbs, when I can go to cook and find the kitchen counters already clean, when things are put away in their place. I would obviously love it if this were easy to maintain and if my husband did a better job of not letting it become a mess in the first place, but I am also glad to pay someone a good wage to help me achieve this goal!!
Yeah - this is so true. I’m raising two boys and I want them to know how to clean a toilet, keep their room tidy, change their sheets, cook and clean the kitchen. Not just to know how but to take part in it as their contribution to maintaining a house.
I see this line of thinking a lot and I think it's absolutely correct — everyone should know how to do these things, regardless of gender. But knowing how to do these things and feeling like your value is based on your ability to do these things is two different things, and that's where I think we need to also work on our larger scale understandings.
I totally agree, but I also wish for a world where everyone values themselves in part by how they try to meet others’ needs, and not just by earning money.
THIS!!! Knowing how to do something but never doing it is almost worse because then it feels like you are deliberately choosing not to!!!
I said this to my kids last night too- I want you to know if you don’t wash a dish then it can attract insects or mold! When I had a roommate for the first time, I knew how to do laundry and wash dishes and pick up after myself- I washed my sheets every week in college and while we didn’t vacuum much, our room was always ok and our apartment together stayed relatively clean too. My sister and I had very similar standards of clean and only had one fight in our 2 years living together when she didn’t take out the trash before leaving for the weekend when I was on a family trip with my then boyfriend and we got fruit flies.
This is such a great conversation. My husband's standard of clean is just as high, maybe even higher than mine, but I think I just get to things faster, because I deprioritize my stuff. So my biggest takeaway on the doing less advice here, is specifically doing less right away.
I think you articulate the nuance of the tension that I feel. My husband and I are often at odds about cleaning the way that AHP and others discuss here (I definitely 'see' the dirty and feel way more uncomfortable about it than he does), but I also feel like... if we live in a material culture that requires us to trade our life energy for objects, it only feels right to take proper care of these things. I'm a frugal person who doesn't like spending more than I need to, nor do I want to participate in 'throw-away' culture. But cleaning is a necessary part of this -- I have to give the shower curtain liner a quick spray once a week if I don't want to have to replace it every month.
My husband always wants me to 'relax' more, but for him, that means sitting in some state of zen-like peace, oblivious of the world around me. But isn't reality--this ignores the fact that feeling kitty litter under my feet and searching through piles of clutter is extremely *unrelaxing* for me. Like, I gotta get the physical conditions in a state so that I CAN relax. Yeah, I love sitting on the couch with the newest New Yorker, but a) there has to be space on the couch to do this, and b) I also love being able do my weekday morning routines of coffee and oatmeal prep without searching for stuff in the kitchen. The latter is much less 'self-actualization-y' but it's also a fact of my life 5 days a week.
For me, the most important thing to interrogate is the sense of obligation or guilt that I feel about the appearances of clean. Like, cleaning serves a very basic and logical function for me, and is a necessary component in my ability to enjoy my day-to-day existence, but beyond that, I *also* feel a compulsion to DEEP CLEAN the house before someone comes to visit. That's where we get into questionable territory.
I have noticed this on mom trips!! We are so good at alternating the work of cooking and cleaning and keeping each other company while we do these mundane tasks that I don’t feel the stress of staying in a house on a family trip. I don’t think I’m a particularly clean person but I do clean up after myself and don’t let messes pile up. But our next mom trip I still invited everyone to go to a women’s retreat at my kids’ summer camp location where a chef would feed us family style meals and we could walk the beautiful trails and drink coffee on the porch by the lake. Everyone jumped at that chance!
This is so bonkers because I am not a natural housekeeper and being in a group setting totally puts me on alert to not be the "bad roommate". I want everyone else to feel good about the shared experience but I'm non-stop policing myself to kind of hide my normal slovenly behavior. So hopefully the other girls on the trip are thinking, "It's so relaxing when everyone works together and I don't have to clean up after my kids/spouse!" but meanwhile I'm a nervous wreck about whether I need to clean my hair off the shower drain before leaving the bathroom.
Ha, this is very much my feeling as well! It helps that I don't have kids and tend to feel that my husband is an adult who can clean up after himself, so I don't worry so much at home. But I also feel like I never learned some of the cleanliness things that other women did, so worry when I'm outside of my home that I'm grossing others out just b/c I don't realize something I should be doing. Silly example: one day at work, I came out of the bathroom stall and washed my hands, and noticed that the woman next to me, after she washed her hands and dried them, wiped down the drips on the counter she'd created. Since that day, I do the same thing, even though I've never seen anyone else do it or mention that you should do it. I just feel sort of at sea much of the time!
This is a good reminder for me. Thank you for sharing. Cleaning is so weird right, how we are all so particular and different about how spaces feel to us in our bodies.
"I found I could relax MORE about messes, and do LESS as you say, because I trusted that the other women were going to generally be responsible for their shit."
This is so well said! And makes so much sense!
Yes! The cleaning up after other people and my visceral aversion to having to deal with other people's messes when they are capable of doing it themselves. I do it, but it is one of my least favorite things. "How much mess will this make" is a key component of my decision-making so when people make a big mess that they expect me to clean up it drives me batty.
I have noticed the same thing you mentioned about trips with women! A trip with my two best girlfriends a few years ago and earlier this year with my mom and sisters felt so easy because everyone took care of their own messes and contributed to cooking and cleaning, noticing what needed doing and jumping in to help until it was done. Amazing!
Yes I was thinking this, especially given the comparison to other socialised norms that are politicised. We fetishise skinny bodies, but I also had a real health improvement after I lost 3-4 kg (I was about to go on statins). Women spend a lot more time getting ready in the morning to look good, but when I slip into neglect of my appearance I feel like I am betraying myself. As with cleaning- the patriachy socialises us to overvalue cleaning and yet cleaning for your space is also care.
I agree so much. Funny anecdote, apparently my grand-mother would always clean the house before going on a trip, just in case something happened to her, and someone else would need to enter the apartment, so they wouldn't find a mess....
Back to being serious, one thing I am thinking is that when I have a cleaning urge to clean something that is valuable TO ME, before cleaning up AFTER SOMEONE else. I am going to put this in action and start with cleaning my desk trolly.
Mason Currey has an excellent collection of mini-biographies of famous women, specifically on how they got work done. The title does it no justice: "Daily Rituals: Women at Work." It both sounds and looks like a Chicken Soup for the Soul sort of read, but it is not. It can be quite dark and is a stirring reminder page after page that being exceptional in this world often requires you to shut yourself away from so many other daily rituals of just... being alive in this world -- like sleeping! Or talking to other humans! Or figuring out food for yourself and others! I suspect this is true for all men everywhere, and if I read some of these same vignettes but replace the female artist with a man, it just seems like every upper middle class or wealthy man. They all get to cut out so much of the work of being alive because someone else is doing it for them, but it doesn't seem extreme or exceptional.
For example -- From the section on Edna St Vincent Millay: "When a visiting reporter asked Millay how she managed such a large and complicated household, Millay explained that she had nothing to do with it: "Eugen does all that kind of thing...I don't interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is anything I don't like, I tell him, I have no time for it. I don't want to know what I'm going to eat. I want to go into my dining room as if it were a restaurant, and say, 'What a charming dinner!' It's this concern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman's time and interest."
Or this quote from Doris Lessing: "No one can write with a child around.... It's no good. You just get cross." (See me: pandemic years).
This got me thinking about a jealousy I often felt towards men who had acquired so many interests / skills / hobbies that I never felt I had the time to acquire. It started to dawn on me that if I spent less of my youth obsessing about my appearance and relationship dynamics I would have had more time to do what I want. Similar with cleaning. I mean I still like a clean house, but what else could I do?
Oh yes putting this book on my list now. If I can offer one in response - The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Similar idea. Sounds like a nice little book about family. Absolutely not. It's about great artists, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Alice Neel, among others, and how they responded and interacted with the idea of childcare when it was diametrically opposed to their true labor: creativity, art, and philosophy. It's deeply discomforting, not all the stories are nice or correct, and it rearranged my brain when I had my first. I still think about it constantly.
Sorry. I misspoke when I said "all men everywhere."
Not ALL men.
One related thought I had while reading this piece. On instagram and tiktok, there are a lot of influencers/creators in their 20s-early 30s that show apartment cleaning, doing the 'closing shift', (tidying up before bed), and it just dawned on me, THAT THEY ARE ALL WOMEN. I have not seen any men showing how they clean and tidy up their house at the end of the day. I'm now thinking about how this gets into the subconscious of young women- i.e. not just seeing "I should workout", but how cleaning (and having the right organization products, obviously bought on amazon) can also be a function of what we see on social media.
This is funny, because I deliberately follow a dad-cleaning influencer to diversify that part of my feed. Check out @tidydad. He’s very wholesome, and it’s helpful to watch a man take care of his space
I am a cyclist (F) and I found myself watching a former pro cyclist wash his bike over and over. You can count on men to clean their cars and gear - immaculately.
I have seen some men doing household cleaning videos, but they are largely gay men or gay-coded? A couple videos deep in the profile, you’ll catch the male partner walking through the frame. I’ve seen a few that are straight men doing it in a “hey guys, here’s how to make your wife/girlfriend happy/impressed” style and the comments section is usually horrifying
Okay, I upgraded to paid just to comment here! I'm teaching a history of medicine course this semester and we just read an excerpt from Nancy Tomes' article "Moralizing the Microbe" (1997), where she argues that the application of germ theory to tuberculosis at the end of the 19th century launched a health crusade that linked cleanliness with morality. Once Americans understood that diseases like TB (one of the deadliest American diseases by 1900) were caused by germs, they completely shifted their relationship to cleaning and sanitation. Gone were shared drinking cups and spitting in public (the fact that people used to do that constantly shocks my high school students).
In particular, what stood out to me was how Progressive reformers linked TB prevention with a religious crusade, and how the home naturally became a focus of prevention. TB tended to spread between family members due to prolonged contact, so the home now needed to be much cleaner to prevent this contagion. While she doesn't state this in the excerpt we read, you could argue that this links cleanliness in the home more explicitly to a woman's duty: it's a woman's MORAL duty to keep her home clean, because otherwise her family could contract TB. I'm curious to know if this kind of link between cleanliness, morality, and gender existed prior to the acceptance of germ theory, or if it really took off post-Koch.
This is fascinating, and it makes me feel a little hopeful. We’ve learned over the past four years that many viruses are airborne, and that sanitizing surfaces likely isn’t as helpful as cleaning the air (by opening windows or using air purifiers/filters). Theoretically, if we could make some progress with regard to indoor air quality standards, we might be able to decouple morality from household cleaning.
Yes! I hadn't thought about that, but I love that possibility.
So interesting!!
I grew up in St. Paul where I, and a lot of my friends, had parents who worked at the University of Minnesota in some capacity. We didn't realize it at the time (we joke about it now), but we all grew up in houses where cleanliness was NOT a priority. Our parents were all feminists and busy and we didn't know any different. They were active in their communities and had many passions beyond keeping their houses clean.
Later in life I lived in Johnson County, KS for 10 years. Women had a lot of their identities wrapped up in their homes. You would almost never step into a house without the woman uttering the words "Sorry it's such a mess!". And of course, it was always spotless. But to me, those houses lacked soul. There were never the books, artifacts, art projects, random objects strewn about that made me want to sit and enjoy myself. There was no warmth there. I agree with what others have said - I love entering a messy house and knowing someone is comfortable enough to be themself around me. But more than that - that they have a life and interests beyond just keeping their house spotless.
I also grew up in St. Paul, and also never internalized the idea that it was important or my job to keep my house clean. Maybe it's a local cultural thing? I live in Atlanta now, and the culture around having a clean and well decorated home is so different, and I agree, homes feel so cold and impersonal.
Oh I think it's much less a Twin Cities thing and much more a "did you find meaning in your life outside of your ability to keep a house clean" thing! (Signed, the Granddaughter of an Obsessive Cleaner in White Bear Lake)
🙋🏼♀️ Grew up in the Twin Cities— dad’s work was mechanical engineering & mom stayed home with me & my siblings until I was in middle school, then held a variety of office administrative assistant positions to support family trips & our activities. Cleaning & having a clean home was a priority in our family— although probably more so for my dad than my mom. I have memories of him being the one to fuss at us about the things we left around the house/picking up, etc. His grandmother (my great-grandmother- lived in ND) kept plastic on her couches, so they wouldn’t get dirty. My dad is a neat freak & perfectionist (eldest in his family), but his dad was overbearing & an alcoholic, although no one has ever called him that, except for me when he had passed & I was well grown by that time- married & had started my own family. My mom stills knows very little about my dad’s childhood. It’s simply wild to me- I think my generation (born in ‘79) is doing some of the hardest work for our families— healing from the past & creating new ways of being (without clear models) for our families.
There’s so many times now I wish I could have adult conversations with my grandmothers & great-grandmothers— all lived well into my teenage years & it was only two years ago that I lost my last grandma.
Co-signed by a descendent of the epitome of "a place for everything and everything in its place" and picking up before the cleaners came.
A descendent of Minnesotans, I meant to add 😊
I would guess it's an academic thing. Or maybe a hippie thing? Rejecting previous generations expectations? My mom was a sociology professor who did a lot of research and writing on gender roles and cleaning was a pretty low priority thing growing up. Sometimes I wish I cared more about a clean house. Mine is a mess! :) But I prioritize other things.
I never like to come onto a post and be like MY RELATIONSHIP ISN'T LIKE THIS, but this post does have me thinking about my own total lack of interest in cleaning and my partner's obsession with it to the point of neglecting his work (music practicing, writing his dissertation, etc.). My dad came to stay with us for a couple of days for Rosh Hashanah last week, and rather than get his own work done, my partner deep cleaned the house. I was like...was the house dirty? I didn't even see it if it was, and my dad certainly didn't (though the clean sheets were nice and probably something I would have done myself). For me, other things are and have always been more important. I'm a singer and a professor and if I have music to learn, writing to do, assignments to grade (well, okay, sometimes this one can get me cleaning!), rehearsal to attend, etc., cleaning is at the very, very bottom of the priority list.
My mother has been on my case since I was a kid to keep things neat, a lot of like, one day you'll grow up and learn to keep your space clean. I'm 36 and it still hasn't happened. And it's making me wonder if maybe it's one of these eldest daughter rebellions--like, I'm not allowed to misbehave in any other way but I am never going to clean on a regular basis or particularly care if things are tidy. I feel a little bad that my office at work is a little chaotic, but my students tell me it feels cozy and real, and comfortable for them.
I have a similar situation in my house, and I often question if the fact that my partner is so obsessively clean frees me from needing to care in a way that I might otherwise not have done if I’d married someone messier.
This is what I think is often lost in this discussions, as we muddle through the why we do it/it must be done.....all the other ways we could be allocating our time.
I absolutely agree. I will clean if something really needs it, and I cook a lot so I try to clean up the kitchen before I start something new, but the time I would spend cleaning as much as my partner does is time that I can use for my own projects, learning music, research, job applications (blurgh) or resting, reading, watching mindless TV, etc.
I also have a male partner who self-identifies as the "clean one" (I think we are *both* the clean one, lol, although I do concede that I'm more okay with stacks of books, laundry left on the rack, etc. than he is)...I think a lot of his attention to house care comes from being raised by a SAHM who vacuumed daily and generally set very high standards. This leads to frequent conversations where I have to reframe what 'normal' looks like! When he feels swamped by our small house and says 'I don't know how other people keep up with all this' I have to point out: they often don't. OR they hire cleaners. He struggles to comprehend either possibility.
Oh, absolutely. He's also obsessed with car maintenance and will take my car for car washes where I'm like...dude, it's just going to get dirty again in thirty seconds. But it means that I almost never need to think about it.
The truth about cleaning, though, is that even when I was single I didn't care. Is it nice to live with somebody who has a Sam's Club membership and remembers to stock up on toilet paper? Sure. Did it bother me that every so often I ran out of toilet paper and had to use tissues? Not really.
Every once in a while, we do this little thought experiment in our house, like if he left for a week, what would the house be like when he got home? And I am convinced that our child and I would have eaten takeout/mac & cheese/whatever goes in the air fryer 4 days and leftovers 3 days; the dishes would be undone until the sink was full; and I'd spend the two hours before he got home frantically scanning the house to make it look like I cared for the whole week but really only put thought into it at the last minute.
Yes a therapist once pointed out to me that I have become very good at things that my partner doesn’t do/care about. It’s not that you actually like those things independently, but rather that you’re filling a gap
39yo eldest daughter and the only thing that has made me care about housecleaning is living with a partner whose mental health is affected by clutter. My car is now the site of my ongoing refusal to be tidy. The waist deep pile of sh*t in the backseat truly does not bother me in the least and it's nice to be able to ferret out another pair of shoes or a change of clothes in a pinch.
As someone who knows and loves many messy car people, I love the image of you "ferreting out" something useful to you or people around you!
42 here, and my mother has similarly been on my case my entire life. She keeps hoping it will become important to me one day and just can’t accept that this is the adult me, I’m done growing, I’ve become the person already. It’s definitely some sort of rebellion that I live happily in clutter she couldn’t stand. She spent the last two weeks gently and not so gently reminding me that I need to straighten up the common spaces of our home (my younger musician brother-in-law is staying with us this week; he doesn't care, we don’t care, who is this for?). She continues to insist I should care, but is unwilling to go any deeper on the subject. Endlessly frustrating.
Right!! My dad could not care less if we clean the house for him—-and also, because my partner cleans a lot, it is always clean enough for guests. Always. But even if it’s not, my dad is always like, you’re living your life, your stuff is here, that’s just how it is.
And the yard. Our next-door neighbors have an immaculate house and a (viciously? pointedly? hungrily? edited to add: not really my business) landscaped yard. It takes vigilant mental exercise not to feel like less—poorer, lazier, uglier, unwanted—as neighbors with an average house and a funky but fine yard. We’re a happy, loving, curious, supportive, also funky family, and with all my heart I know we have what matters. And. When you live next to people who are exceptionally talented at and wealthy enough for mainstream, WASPy, clean culture appearance, and you have no particular talent at appearances in general (and you’re a little lonely, and you do make less money), the cultural judgement presses in pretty hard. Plus if they ever sell they’ll get a higher price, probably.
My city encourages residents to install rain gardens in their extensions (the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street). The proviso is that you have to tend it and make sure it doesn’t become an obstacle. There is also a No Mow May community that leaves their lawns to grow so that pollinators can get a start on the season. Both groups have lawn signs so that people understand what the growth means. Anyone with too manicured a lawn here is seen as wasteful of resources such as water and fertilizer.
That's pretty cool! I like the lawn signs -- it makes the project a collective effort. Very neat.
We don’t live in a HOA neighborhood but we had neighbors complain that our mulch wasn’t properly spread out after we had a tree fall and had to mulch the stump. They called the city on us and the city said they weren’t going to fine us but they suggested we handle it since the neighbors were clearly irritated by us! I have told my husband many times I think we need to hire landscapers because our yard is an endless and exhausting project in a neighborhood full of retirees with immaculate yards. I genuinely wonder what is going on with all these people that their yard is such a hobby for them.
I can't believe they called the city on you!!! You're being haunted by your neighbors!
They’ve been slightly nicer since we had cute kids but they have always been weird! Our neighbor to the left is Vietnamese and talks to my husband but never to me, occasionally speaks to my kids- it feels like he is legitimately mowing or trimming multiple days a week, I work from home and I can’t get over how much yard work he does in his late 60s! My in-laws also live on our street and are always doing yard work too. They aren’t retired but they are out there at least 3 days a week picking up sticks and pinecones with the wheelbarrow.
My retired neighbor leaf-blows his patio, lawn, driveway and the street in front of his house daily. It boggles the mind, but also, he's not working so I guess he has plenty of time to individually move every leaf as it falls. I choose to believe that this has nothing to do with me, is not my business, and should be ignored until I struggle to fill the hours of my day at which point I'll buy a leaf-blower.
Called the city on you over mulch!!!
The yard! Yes. We live in a neighborhood with mostly retirees, who apparently have All The Time to sculpt and mow and trim their almost 3/4 yards. Be gone, grass which dares to poke its head above the others!
Whereas us, we like letting the grass grow a bit, and we don't spray alleged weeds, because we like to nurture all sorts of animals and bugs.
No one has said anything to us. But I grew up with my parents having a regular lawn mowing and lawn maintenance schedule, and so I feel eyeballs on my current yard, and it's ridiculously hard to shake the feeling that I too need to have the unnaturally carpet-like expanse of lawn. I don't succumb to it but it's like the _need_ to flows in my bloodstream.
Whoever sold this idea of what a yard should be is a vile being.
The carpet-lawn as a life requirement surely must be a tool of oppression!!! Landscaping body hair, landscaping yard grass... I guess growth is just kind of terrifying??
Mr. Darcy.
I live in a small town, and most of my immediate neighbors are only here in the summer. We do not mow our yard or rake leaves - we did the first year we lived here, but then the next year we got a sudden early snow and didn’t do it, and it was fine so we stopped. If the path from the garage to the house or the area around the mailbox gets overgrown, my spouse goes out with the trimmer for ten minutes. Every year the lake association reminds us in their newsletter that it’s beneficial to let the leaves lie…and we are the only ones who do. Everyone else has a lawn service…and the cacophony of leaf blowers is a scourge! We live in the woods! On purpose! There are always going to be leaves here!
Dude, I have a cousin who is so obsessed with his yard and I'm like, "This is how you want to spend your one wild and precious life????"
I feel this so strongly. We have neighbors that have an aggressively well kept front yard and I see how much time they spend maintaining it and it makes me feel totally less than for our meh yard and care of it (I do daydream of a vegetable garden and beautiful flower beds but not in this season of life). I do however know that this couple has, like, soap opera levels of drama/ cheating in their marriage, so I kinda console myself with that (is that terrible? Probably).
Do we have the same neighbors??? ARE WE THE SAME PERSON???? My neighbors have different struggles, and since we moved to text-only interaction, I don’t really know what’s up, but for a while, we saw a lot of tough, heartbreaking shit go down. But I feel fondly for them, too, and admire their skills. It’s so complicated.
I'll never forget when we moved into our first house in a new-ish suburb, 30+ years ago and less than two weeks later, our next-door neighbour pointedly asked us when we were going to mow the lawn. (!!!) It WAS getting a little long, but hey buddy, we just moved in (from a small one-bedroom apartment), we just took on a huge mortgage, we have a LOT of stuff we need to buy for this place, and a lawnmower is on the list but we just haven't gotten around to it yet -- can you give us a break??
I used to try to plant flowers, etc., but we often went away for a few weeks in the summer, and by the time we got back, they'd be dead because they hadn't been watered. I gave up after a while. We always tried to keep the yard mowed and tidy, but a showplace, it was not.
These days, we live in a condo. ;)
This is us too. Also with snow removal in the wintertime. Our neighbors are out shoveling immediately when it snows, have a nice smooth and snow free driveway all winter even though we live in a VERY SNOWY PLACE! Our driveway on the other hand is often rutted and icy but we generally move snow around and can get in and out of our cars. Every winter I am always reminding myself that it is JUST FINE if our driveway is not immaculate. Such a silly insecurity but it really lives rent free in my head.
Me too, same
I feel like consumerism has just leveled up the expectations so much. Houses are bigger, people have a lot more stuff, and yet there's no stuff out anywhere in the influencers kitchens, and the timeline for decor to be considered outdated has sped up dramatically. Think of the vast kitchens with the walls of cabinets hiding all the stuff that has to come out each time its used and then return to its lair.
An ex's mother stopped over to our house. She commented that, perhaps, I should vacuum and dust more often. I told her I worked 60 hours a week, her son worked 35 hours a week, and also lived in the home. He had much more time than I to clean so she should talk to him. She got VERY red and left immediately.
Nice
Re: the data showing that women spend twice as much time cleaning even when they're only 18 years old -- the gender disparity in time spent on household tasks actually starts much younger, around the age of 7. Making matters worse, kids as young as 3 have said they think gender inequality in domestic labor is fair. Bleh. I dug into this research a few months ago for my newsletter: https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/domestic-inequality-starts-in-childhood
I saw a friend I haven't seen in a while the other day and she said "Well, you know me, I can't sit still. I've always got to be working" and it struck me that I've only ever heard women say some variation of this.
I (unfortunately or fortunately) do not subscribe to this, but I realized I have never, ever heard a man say he's always got to be cleaning or something while at home. My mother-in-law was like this, too. If she wasn't asleep, she was multi-tasking.
I think it's probably socialization, but I'm curious if anyone has other reasons.
I think this is true of men as well! Especially thinking about the men I know with ADHD diagnoses. However, to previous points I know AHP has raised about golf, I think the men tend to have their "I can't sit still" tasks mostly outside of the house. One couple I know, the man in his late 60s absolutely cannot sit still and does most tasks in & outside the house, but his main hobby is repairing an old boat he found. Not exactly something social or indoors!
I know at least two guys off the top of my head who have this same can't-sit-still energy and often put it into cleaning.
This describes my father to an absolute T.
I feel grateful that my husband has made clear that our house and standard of living (which are acceptable to us and definitely not living in squalor) are so messy that his mother -- who lives in a condo with a white couch and white carpet and a weekly cleaner -- will never, ever visit. Because she knows she can't handle being in a house that isn't clean to her standards & wants to preserve her relationship with her son. So I am freed from that judgement!
But I *do* wrestle with growing up in an objectively dirty house. Both of my parents had mental health issues that cycled between treatment and relapse and the kids never really learned how to or were made to chip in. So our house just stayed disgusting and by the time I was old enough to care about it & realize it was bad, things seemed to far gone to make any meaningful change (what can you do, at 15, with no internet to research, when the cat urine has soaked into the floorboards?).
And I have really held onto that shame of having friends over or bringing a college boyfriend home for Christmas and seeing our house from an outsider's perspective and just being horrified at the state of things and equally horrified that they were uncomfortable in my home. So my goal is to never live like that again and *that* is what drives most of my cleaning and house maintenance. The look on my college boyfriend's face at seeing where he had to take a shower is burned into my brain and I never want to see anyone look like that in my home, ever.
But also: my husband definitely doesn't have this sense of "filth will make our guests uncomfortable" and actually, genuinely doesn't believe me that this is a real reaction people have to being in a dirty house.
My husband grew up in the same kind of family—his mother suffered from severe mental illness, and his dad focused on working (he was the sole income provider) and on being there for the kids. I remember going to his parents’ house for the first time and not wanting to come in contact with any surfaces. It was disgusting, and unfortunately it fed into my already complicated relationship with housekeeping.
I want people to be comfortable in my home—and since I spend a lot of time here, I want to be comfortable. I grew up with women who had grown up on farms—where there was real dirt! I think the focus on having a clean house was probably misplaced status anxiety since they were the first generation to move from rural poverty to relatively affluent suburban living so they didn’t want to appear backward or “country” or horror of horrors—-poor. I absorbed the idea that the cleanliness and attractiveness of your home was somehow a measure of your worth as a human being, and they looked down on people who had dirty houses or who “didn’t keep up their yards.”
I have a lot of conflicting feelings on this subject—on one hand I can see where I put too much energy into keeping up appearances, and on the other hand I can see how living in a gross house is damaging too.
Yes. I think about this, too, as my partner has (diagnosed) ADHD and an incredibly demanding job and 50-50 custody, during which he invests his focus on being an incredible father to his children. But his house is "disgusting" (his words, though I share the sentiment) in these ways, too, and I worry a little for his kids as they get older and have to navigate these kinds of things. We plan to cohabitate, and getting this figured out is already a priority for us --something we're looking at together in therapy. (We thankfully have SUCH a wonderful couples counselor who has expertise in ADHD!) I know it will mean meeting halfway (as I find solace in cleaner spaces); it's going to be a journey!
As the one(F) w/ Adhd in my relationship, just want to gently suggest if it’s financially possible for you to hire a cleaner when you cohabitate, I highly recommend it! This may be something you suggest to your partner even now, it might actually help him manage adhd (bc the overwhelm of a problem can be debilitating!)
Not exactly on point, but I’d love some analysis of “cleanTok” (ok I’m old so I only watch it on insta) particularly GoCleanCo. She doesn’t just promote ultra cleanliness, but is also an “Amazon ambassador” who peddles various wares - not just cleaning items, but beauty products, protein drinks etc—and is kind of an influencer of the airspace aesthetic. I’m equally soothed by it (if I do/buy this one thing my chaotic life will have order!), repelled by it (the consumerism!), and annoyed by it (why can’t I get practical cleaning tips without feeling bad for never wearing lipstick??). I’d love help unpacking this, particularly the cleanliness/consumerism connection and how the consumerism can exist with a space that is completely devoid of clutter.
I love watching a good fridge organization video (the bins!!), but I am also repelled by the consumerism.
I watch those fridge bin videos with an attitude of "look! This is how people with time, money, energy to care (and no cares for how much plastic they use) live!" Which, if I'm very honest, is probably equal parts judgmental and aspirational (hmm).
I think she's also into QAnon? Knowing that always gives her posts a slightly menacing aura.
I would be disappointed if she weren't into QAnon. It's so on the nose for her.
Oh! Even though she's Canadian?
I haven't heard about the QAnon connection specifically, but other right-wing stuff. Believe me, we have our share of that stuff here too (unfortunately). The GoCleanCo lady lives in Alberta, which is the Trumpiest of all our provinces. Enough said.
That said, I am a fan, although I don't tune in as often as I once did. I started following her on Instagram early in the pandemic when she had something like 30,000 followers -- she now has over 2 million, I think. I've picked up some good tips and how-to info from her, and I bought and love the squeegie/window cleaning system she promoted. The cleaning (before/after) videos are kind of mesmerizing. ;)
But yes, I could do without all the Amazon influencer stuff.
Growing up, my (late) mother—the world's best!—was not the world's best housekeeper. In the 1960s, she went to grad school, then became a college teacher (also the best!). So to preserve her time for us kids (and work/school), she hired a weekly housecleaner. That meant our house was clean (from a dirt/hygiene perspective) but still cluttered (the books, the years of New Yorkers), which was okay. That approach saved my mom's sanity. Years later, when I was a newlywed in our first home, I spent 2 days cleaning and decluttering before her first visit. After she and my stepdad walked in, she looked around at my sparkling and pristine home, took me gently by the shoulders, and said, "What have you done with my daughter?!" 🤣 I never went crazy about it pre-Mom visit again. (Having said that, my MIL *did/does* judge my home by its order, so I do fall prey to the old expectations, while her son—my husband—doesn't. Go figure.)