Heh. When my ex and I split up, one of the first things I did (after he took almost all the furniture) was to blow some money on nice, moderately expensive home furnishings.

When he came over to pick up some of his remaining belongings, he promptly stuck out his lower lip and asked why I hadn’t ‘fixed the place up’ when he was living there. He had the residual decency to be embarassed when I said “Because you would have had a fit at my spending the money.”

It’s very easy not to notice or care about things (housework, towels) when you know damn well somebody else will take care of it.

We had a lot of fights in my house until we wrote up a chore rotation. Nobody *really* wants to do the dishes, but with four (until recently, five) people living here, it really does have to happen twice a day or else it winds up a wreck that screws up the kitchen for a week. I, a female, am definitely the messiest on in the house, and a male and a female housemate are vying for neatest — she does dishes more, he vacuums. I am completely baffled by anyone who thinks they can use already-defined categories to separate messy people from neat.

I haven’t yet figured out a way to do preventative laundry, and my boyfriend, the sneak, has stopped enabling me by doing my laundry along with his. If I married him, do you think he’d be a better wife than he is now? ;)

And the bit about matching towels and how they are folded- that’s just funny. Who really cares how you fold your towels?

It helped that I had a roommate who worked at Bed, Bath & Beyond and got a great discount.

The urge to decorate and the urge to clean are not the same thing.

I’m sorry to hear about your step-mother. That is taking “neat freak” (HER mom) to its pathological extreme. :( Does she realize that’s the reason she has an issue with extreme cleaning, or no?

She realizes it (she’s the one who told me that she used to get punished) but she’s 100% opposed to any psychological treatment, ever. Apparently being involuntarily committed as a teenager in the early 1960s is enough to put someone off psychologists for life.

My towels don’t match and I don’t even care!

I guess I’m just not a real woman after all.

Oh my God, me neither!

*sobs inconsolably, tears up feminist card in a fit of rage*

You’ve done me wrong, Women’s Lib. You’ve done me wrong.

I don’t live with my boyfriend, but we’ve talked about it extensively and already figured out that ifwhen we do live together, we’ll probably divide the household chores on a chore-by-chore basis. That is, I’ll likely do all the laundry, for instance, while he’ll take care of sweeping, mopping, and vacuuming, since doing floors wracks the hell out of my back. Since I’m also disabled and work full time (that means not enough energy and/or time to do all that slow, energy-draining manual labour), and he’s currently out of work, I’ve also contemplated hiring him to move in and run the place for me. I know it’d get done to a meticulous standard and we’d both be better off.

I know for a fact that most of the problem with guys who don’t clean well is, surprise! the patriarchy. Because the patriarchy dictates that it’s not important for boys to learn to do housework, and since nearly all the men I know grew up with either sisters who got the brunt of it, or doting, essentially nonfeminist mothers who never made them do any chores that they would have made their daughters do, nobody ever taught these guys how to really clean/do laundry/grocery shop, and nobody made them do it on a regular basis, so they never got in the habit. (My roommate’s mother still brings him groceries, and he’s been living ostensibly on his own for years, and, up until the point where we got laundry machines in the house, she’d take his wash back to her house to do it.)

It’s too bad the kind of feminist conscious-raising we currently have wasn’t in vogue 30-35 years ago or so; these guys could have really benefitted from an egalitarian upbringing. (“Yes, Jimmy, you need to know how to pick out good produce. What are you going to eat after you move out? You can’t live on Kraft Dinner all the time…”)

Yeah, I wasn’t even going to try to figure out what Hector was going for there…

I was responding to this stereotyped comment, by saying that cleaning bathrooms does not violate the male stereotype: Neighbor boy thought it was hysterical that a boy had to clean a bathroom