I'm neat, they're not... and I'm starting to feel like the housewife

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neatfreak

New member
I'm in a triad where I live with my boyfriend and our girlfriend lives several hours away and visits us on occasion. They're both very laid back, and I'm pretty much the opposite. I can't stand messes, which is why I get stuck doing most of the housework - it doesn't bother boyfriend enough to do it, and I can't stand dishes in the sink if they could just be clean already.

I went away over the weekend, giving them some time to themselves. I left with the kitchen spotless... and came back to a disaster. They both said it would be clean by the end of the day. It's been 2 days and it's still there. Boyfriend says he'll do it with me, but I don't know how to eloquently express how upsetting that is to me, and how disrespected I feel.

I've brought this to his attention before, that I feel like "the housewife" because I live with him (and do his dishes. and make his meals. and do his laundry. and put it away. I should really stop doing all of that, I know) and our percentage of sexy/fun time is far less by comparison, but he always manages to soothe me by saying some BS like he trusts me to do those for him and feels relaxed enough around me to not feel like he has to do as much. I really don't care anymore. I work just as much as he does, contribute just as much to the household income as he does, and I don't want to have to do all the housework or live in squalor. I also don't want to pick up after them after their private weekends.

Is this a common situation when one person is neat and the others are... slobs? How do I resolve this without remaining slave labor and being resentful?
 
Hi neatfreak,

I agree with GalaGirl: As long as you continue to live with your boyfriend, you will be his household slave de facto, because he can win "The Mess Endurance Contest" every time.

Does he (and she) at least keep up on personal hygiene? I have my doubts, and that's something to consider when deciding whether to get physically intimate. With living in your own domicile (even if it's just a studio apartment or something like that), you'll soon enough see what his life looks like without you propping it up, and I'll bet you'll be shocked by how bad he'll let it get.

Your only other option is to just keep doing the same thing, trying to outlast his mess endurance, then going "Argh!" when he wins once again and you do his work for him again. Or even resign yourself to doing all the work, thus skipping the "Argh!" step.

You could draw up a list of daily chores so he could see exactly what he's supposed to do every day. Though I don't know if he'll follow that list and if he doesn't, what will the consequence be?

I do think it's a serious problem.
 
You have to stop doing it for him! Just clean up after yourself, designate a clean area that is yours, and defend it. If he puts his dirty dishes on your clean counter, go drop them in his lap and tell him they don't belong where he left them.

In no uncertain terms, you need to tell him exactly what you wrote here: "I work just as much as you do, contribute just as much to the household income as you do, and I don't want to have to do all the housework or live in squalor. I also don't want to pick up after you and your other girlfriend after your private weekends." Whenever he leaves a mess, pile it up on his lap or in his comfy chair - hopefully he'll get the message!

Tell him his excuses and flattery won't cut it anymore - and that you thought you signed up to live with another grown-up. Make a chore list and divide tasks among the two of you. Then tell him you are not his mother and he needs to grow up.

But you also have to think of a consequence and stick to that if he fails to follow through again. What will it be? Sleep in different rooms? No sex? Move out? Forbid the other gf to come over? Up to you to figure out how much you can tolerate and how much longer you will allow him to walk all over you.
 
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This isn't a poly problem - just a more general 'I live with a slob' problem - and I've been there too. As the significantly more slobbish one. So perhaps my perspective as an (almost) rehabilitated slovenly wretch can shed some new light on your boyfriend and his behaviour (or lack thereof).

I have lived on my own for most of my adult life, and have never been a tidy person. I grew up in a household with a mother obsessed with cleaning up after even the slightest mess. She grew up in a small house with five other sisters, so I can understand where that comes from. She is very much of the opinion that if something is not put away immediately, it's going to get out of hand real quick, so she tends to do things like literally hover behind a person and pick up their cup the second they have taken their last swig and immediately take it to the kitchen to be washed. Which drives me insane. Tidying became the key power struggle in our home. I would say that her standards of cleanliness when I was a kid borderline on the neurotic, and it was very hard to live up to them. Consequently, tidying for me became not something I did for myself, to improve my environment, but something that was required to keep the peace - something that was done for someone else's benefit, never my own. Since my efforts were inevitably never good enough anyway, I eventually stopped trying altogether. When I moved to my own place, not only did I not have the actual skills (don't roll your eyes - cleaning and avoiding the accumulation of crap about oneself requires actual skills which must be learnt) to manage my mess production, but I also had a lot of unhealthy associations with the very act of cleaning.

When my girlfriend moved in with me, we knew in advance that the disparity in our standards of tidy was going to be an issue for us. We talked about it a lot before it happened, and it was clear we would both have to adapt in order to make things work. She is very much the kind of person that is negatively affected by being surrounded by chaos - she just can't relax or knuckle down and concentrate on other stuff if there is mess all around her. I, on the other hand, can block that factor out more easily. In fact, in the beginning before she moved in, I actually struggled to even notice the mess around me. That might sound odd, but I think it's true for a lot of people. A messy person doesn't always recognise the accumulation of crap until it reaches a critical threshold. For me, that used to be at around the level when there are no clean cups/crockery left and it's impossible to fill up the kettle at the sink because everything is piled so high. I've known other people for whom it's not being able to open their doors. :(

My girlfriend made it clear from day one that she wasn't prepared to live with my cycle of: mess build up, epic cleaning session required, mess build up, epic cleaning session required. I think us both talking about that in advance really helped because she had patience, but was also really clear about what she could and couldn't handle. I was allowed a 'messy corner' where I could just dump shit. We also talked about the places it was really not okay to dump shit, and the places which needed to be clean and tidy for her sanity.

This website really helped us: http://www.unfuckyourhabitat.com - it's got lots of good suggestions for overcoming inertia in this area. I think the main thing that we got out of it was: 1) The idea to always do our cleaning together when we can, and 2) The idea to set a 5 or 10 minute timer every day and do a 'blitz'. Part of my issue was that cleaning (to achieve my mother's gold star standard) takes FOREVER and I have better things to do with my time (don't we all?). It was a revelation to me to see how much we could both get done in 5 minutes, and how it removed the need for those epic all day cleaning fests. And by making it a co-operative venture, there's no resentment either way - we try really hard to split things 50-50, which is as important to me as it is to her.

The other thing that helped was we remodelled our kitchen and installed a dishwasher. This has been a godsend because washing up is my least-favourite chore. Lets be honest: there are no 'good', 'fun', 'enjoyable' tasks when it comes to keeping things neat and tidy. However, there are 'better' and 'worse' chores, and loading a dishwasher in the most efficient manner is definitely in the 'better' camp. We found we had some compatibilities. My girlfriend hates mopping and hoovering - I actually don't mind these jobs as I worked in bars for years and there's something strangely satisfying about seeing the progress you make in mopping a dirty floor at the end of the night. I hate picking up and organising where to put things, but my girlfriend doesn't mind that so much. I like changing bedsheets, she hates it. She's into pairing socks and putting the clothes away, whereas I'd be happy to just drag things out of a 'clean' hamper and not bother. In short, we've found an equilibrium in terms of some jobs we like that suits us. For the jobs no-one likes, we take turns. We started with a rota, but we don't need that now.

I think it would be worth investigating your boyfriends relationship to cleaning and tidying. What was his home-life like? Chaotic? Unpredictable? Or super-regimented? Like with many things in life, we are often driven by unconscious motivations. For me, I associated cleaning with being subjugated. I had a nice breakthrough moment when I realised that actually, I prefer to be in an organised tidy space, and that there were good techniques that only require a little bit of effort every day which avoid the necessity of an all-consuming miserable whole day of tidying. Prior to that, it always felt overwhelming to me. My girlfriend has also been great. She encourages me (albeit with the occasional bit of justified mocking: 'Well done baby! You found the recycling box ALL ON YOUR OWN!') and tries to be understanding when I seem to lack awareness or motivation. She does prod me more than I know she'd like to, but she also recognises that we've made a lot of progress in the last two years in this domain. I'm now capable of 'seeing' mess the way my girlfriend sees it, which is a big deal, but more importantly, I don't see mess management as part of a power dynamic anymore, but as part of a co-operative venture that I get as much out of as she does. If your boyfriend is seeing this as 'not his responsibility' or 'fine as it is', then you need to get to the root cause of why that is.

Good luck, and be patient! It actually takes a hell of a lot of effort to change habits like these - in my experience it's not just as simple as 'he's lazy' or 'she expects me to wait on her hand and foot'.
 
Yes it is common. You want it clean, they don't care. House work was a constant source of contention between my ex and me. Eventually I just had to accept that since it wasn't a priority for him he wasn't going to clean. I gave up and did minimal what I was willing to do.
 
I just ask my partner to pay for cleaning services.
 
D'ope! I was gonna suggest what Candiedlove suggested. Either tell your boyfriend he has to pay you for your housecleaning services, or hire a maid and he has to pay the maid.

But tenK's post was outstanding, and actually gave me hope that you can work this out with your boyfriend -- if you can find a way to get him to form a "Team Clean" with you instead of battling it out with you being on "Team Clean" and him being on "Team Dirty."

Of course, none of these ideas will help unless your boyfriend is willing to cooperate with however you want to solve the problem.

I'm wondering how this will all turn out! Please keep us posted.
 
Hi neatfreak!

I find your post really interesting. I definitely feel that this is a common issue across all types of relationships. Some wonderful advice has been given already, particularly by tenK. I will offer my experiences and input in the hopes that it gives you something extra to think about.

I split my year between two households. In one place, I'm the messier one, and in the other place, I'm the neater one.

Life as the messier one
I have a studio apartment in the UK, which I share with my ex-boyfriend/best friend. My ex is WAY neater than I am, yet we've managed to remain very compatible roommates. We are able to compromise, and only clash once in a while. We each take on tasks that the other dislikes, we each try to do small things that mean a lot to the other, and we think of creative loopholes for ingrained habits. For instance, I bought myself a big wicker 'dumping' box. I'm never going to be a person who puts my clothes away immediately, so the box allows me to dump everything in there. When it's full, I empty it!

Now, life as the neater one.
I have a house in the US, which I share with my girlfriend, her husband, and our daughter. Aghye!! I love them all, but they create far more mess than I create in my UK apartment, and though they say it bothers them, they seem to be able to ignore it. I can't live healthily in it, it smells, and it stresses me out greatly. GF and I run a home-based business together, and the chaos/order war has been a serious problem to our productivity. GF also has fibromyalgia, so housework is a real burden for her.

I used to take on the uber-caretaker role. I'd work for hours, days, and months on the house and business space, only for all of my work to be undone. I also tried to do things as a team - suggesting rotas, "15 minute daily blitzes", and a number of other things. Nothing worked. A few months ago, I reached my limit with the mess and GF reached her limit with my 'nagging'. Finally, with some trepidation, I told GF how I was really *feeling* instead of focusing on what we 'should' be doing.

For instance, I explained that I felt taken advantage of and unimportant. I also felt that I might be enabling GF to be messy by rescuing her every time she got the house/business into a mess. To my amazement, she actually agreed with the latter. In return, GF explained that she dreaded cleaning every time I 'nagged' her about it, and she felt overwhelmed because she took my reminders as criticisms. The conversation was a revelation for us.

We came up with an alternative solution, since compromise isn't going to work for us. We've agreed that I'm not going to fix messes that GF creates, which has already prompted her to start tackling the business space on her own. We've also set a long-term plan to buy a house with space for me to build my own over-garage apartment. This way, we all get the economic and warm fuzzy benefits of living together, while I get space that isn't messy, and GF can be as messy as she likes. It's worth considering.

So, to answer your two remaining questions:
I don't know how to eloquently express how upsetting that is to me, and how disrespected I feel.
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I'd say that the best way is to avoid blaming and accusing, and simply express how *you* feel. Avoid things like "You make me feel used" "You need to tidy up around here" "You keep breaking your promises". Try saying things like "I love you and want to live with you, but I'm struggling with our approaches to housework" "I've realised that I put myself in the housewife position by taking care of everything, and I'd prefer not to do that any more" and "Is there any way we can find a solution to this that suits us both?"

How do I resolve this without remaining slave labor and being resentful?
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Aside from talking to your boyfriend, you have to accept your own part. You should absolutely stop doing his laundry and whatever else. If the dishes bother you, remember that your boyfriend isn't forcing you to do them - your own need for cleanliness is urging you to do them. Try to remember that your neatness is likely as much of an irritant to your boyfriend as his messiness is to you. Try to locate your boundaries and express them, and don't place yourself in situations and then resent your boyfriend for you putting yourself in them :)

Finally, if no compromise can be reached, think creatively about how the two of you can remain together but find a more peaceful coexistence. This could be that you each have your own bedroom, or area in the house. It could be that you consider living apart. It could even be that you convert a house into two smaller apartments.
 
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