ME! Era: Adjusting the Tidy Cycle

My husband and I have been together for 18 years in March. Not married for 18 years, but together. We have cohabitated for 17 of those years, and we've always operated on the "tidy before bed" system. Which just means before we go to bed, we tidy anything out of place: empty water bottles, empty cans, cups, blankets, shoes: anything that's not in its place gets put away before we go to bed. It's easier to spend 5 minutes tidying before bed than it is to spend an hour on a Saturday morning cleaning. Who wants to do that? 

During the day, I tend to tidy as I go (I don't put it down, I put it away) so at the end of the evening, there's not really much that's mine. It's usually just a collection of throw blankets around the living room that I fold and return to the blanket ladder, and couch pillows that I've rearranged for reading, maybe an errant empty water bottle and my flip flops left out. My husband tends to leave his bottles, cans, cups, and socks littered all over the house. I've tried teaching him to use the same cup all day, rinsing it between refills with the cup rinsing station on our sink (this is what my grandmother had us doing growing up because 5 grandkids accumulate a lot of cups if you don't enforce this), but he often sits his cup down, forgets it, and gets another. Sits his can of flavored sparkling water down, forgets it, gets another. You get the picture: most of the tidying is cleaning up his errant stuff. 

This was fine until a couple of years ago, when he started going to bed around 8:30 and he would just forgo tidying. When I'd say, "let's tidy up really quick" he'd say he was too wiped out from work and he'd take care of it in the morning.

I tried a couple of weeks of just tidying my things and leaving his for him to deal with, but waking up and coming into the living room/dining room/kitchen and seeing mess was just...unpleasant. It's a terrible way to start your day, and even then, he'd sometimes forget to tidy that morning, too, and then the mess was there when I'd come back campus. It's also awful walking into your house to find the mess from yesterday and then more mess added to it. So, I just started tidying everything by myself those nights.

But the more often he did it and the more I was cleaning up after him, the easier it became for him to just not do it. He started skipping it more and more because the magic tidy fairy handled it, and after about 6 months he just stopped making any effort of tidying up after himself completely. Shortly thereafter, I mentioned to the therapist I was seeing at the time that I resented his behavior. She suggested that I keep doing it, even without thanks, because the visible mess upset me every time I saw it. She insisted it was healthier for me to feel the single momentary frustration of picking up after him in the moment than to have the frustration hit every time I walked into the living room/dining room/kitchen. (I have a new therapist now, and in hindsight I realize this was terrible advice.)

So I carried on. 

A few months ago, I just got fed up with it. It was literally when he put a glass of water on one of my bookshelves after I've asked him repeatedly not to do that. I moved it to a different place and just stood there and glared at it. Then...I left it there, and I stopped cleaning up his things at the end of the night entirely. I only tidied mine. And after a week of it, I woke up on a Saturday morning, made myself a cup of tea while studiously ignoring the mess he'd accumulated over the week, and sat down to drink it. He said, "Hey, the house is a mess, so we need to spend some time cleaning it today."

I said, "You're welcome to do it. I've been cleaning up after myself all week."

And he said, "No you haven't. Look at all of this!"

And so I asked him, "Do I drink canned sparkling water? Do I drink anything from regular cups? Do I wear white cotton socks? I do not. I drink bottled sparkling water and tea and coffee from TWO SPECIFIC MUGS and I only own black ankle socks. Always. Every day. Do you see ANY sparkling water bottles, blankets, black socks, or my tea and coffee mugs sitting around?"

And he looked around and said, in utter astonishment, "You literally stopped cleaning up MY stuff?"

And I said, "Yes, yes I did. Because YOU stopped cleaning up after yourself and just expected me to do it for you. FOR MONTHS. Years, even. You never even thanked me. Not once. And you only noticed the labor I silently performed for you when I stopped doing it, and then you sat there and told me I needed to help you clean it. Well I'm NOT going to."

What followed was an argument where he told me I was transactional and marriage was a partnership, and I insisted I was demonstrating inequality in the household because a partnership is both parties working together, not one party working for both parties. At the end of it, he promised he'd do better. And he did for a while. Then he started slipping, and a couple of months ago he just stopped again. I found myself back to tidying up for both of us. 

That day I decided to get rid of the guest room and moved into my ME! Era, I also decided I wasn't going to keep cleaning up after him. But I still don't want to wake up and see his mess because that makes me unhappy. So, I started tidying his things as I find them. 

And by "tidying his things" I mean "picking up his errant items and putting them in his office" and more specifically: on his shelves, his table by his chaise lounge, his desk, his workout bench, his office chair. Sometimes just on his floor. This whole week his office has steadily accumulated sparkling water cans, empty cups, socks, wrappers, and anything else he leaves around the house, plus what he was already accumulating in his office. 

I haven't been sneaky about it. He's worked from home all week. Almost every time I brought something in and put it down, he was there. I would say, "You left this in the living room." And he would just say, "Ok. Thanks." Most of the time he didn't even look up from his screen. 

Of course, he didn't handle any of it, he just left everything. 

This morning he went into his office and started cleaning it. He didn't complain about it, he does it every week because he's always accumulating things in his office anyway, this week it's just more because its accumulated everything that he ignored, not just some of it. He didn't ask me to help him because it's his office and he knows that those are his messes. I may have put them in there, but I only moved them from the communal space to his private one. 

I can't even tell you how extremely satisfying this feels. 

And before you ask me, "If you were picking it up anyway, why didn't you just put it where it goes? It's the same effort!" let me disabuse you of the notion because it's not the same emotional effort. 

Cleaning up after someone because they expect you to do it causes frustration. Resentment. Even anger. It feels like a literal effort to do it every day, and the more you do it the more resentful you become. It feels like disrespectful entitlement when he leaves things in a communal space assuming I will clean up. On the other hand, picking up his errant mess and returning the responsibility of it to him feels deeply satisfying and constructive. It's also amusing. And when he doesn't take care of it after I've given it back to him, the result of his neglect is not infringing upon my personal peace or space. It's contained in his office. He can't get mad at me that it's there, he created his own mess. And at the time I bring him the abandoned items, it is not a mess. It becomes a mess because he doesn't deal with it. He ignores it. 

I imagine after a few weeks of this, I'll see a trend where he tidies his office at the end of the night because he hates cleaning on Saturdays. But if he doesn't and leaves the mess until the weekend or next month or whatever, it's no longer my burden to handle.