How can I get my partner to be cleaner?

The Drift’s advice column #7

Welcome to the July installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

Dear Sophie,

My partner and I generally split our household chores pretty evenly — and he does the grocery shopping and more of the cooking. But I seem to see more dirt, splatters, and grime than he does, and so I often end up feeling like I’m either doing more of the cleaning or asking him to go back and redo something, like I’m some sort of taskmaster (or, gasp, mother). How can I persuade him to use the requisite elbow grease, or ideally, see things the way I see them?

Sincerely,

Scrubbing the baseboards

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Dear Scrubbing,

I have long noticed that in disputes about tidiness, compromise almost always entails the messy person getting cleaner. Being neat is seen as an inherent good in our society, and being messy an inherent negative. Unlike most other values-related questions, there’s not a lot of argument here. Perhaps I notice this bias and find it slightly strange because I, like your partner, err on the side of clothes on the chair or the floor and sometimes maybe, yes, a bit of grime here and there. Therefore, throughout my life, I have been told in various ways to become cleaner, and eventually, over time, I have made some progress in this regard; my will has been bent toward the clean world. But tidiness is not natural to me — even noticing certain types of mess requires an expenditure of energy in a way that it doesn’t seem to for others. I have to try to see things as another person would, not as I do.

Which brings me to the part of your letter that stood out to me: how do I get him to see things the way I see them? I don’t think that this should really be the goal. Because he is a different person with a different view of the world and different preferences, you can no more get him around, fully, to inhabiting your perspective than you can will him to accept exactly the same view of another person or a particular political issue. Even granting that you might be fairly close together on your standards of cleanliness, there are different types of mess that bother people: I can’t abide dishes in the sink, which my boyfriend doesn’t mind, but he hates when things clutter the surface of the sink in the bathroom, which I am not bothered by. These are all nothing more or less than preferences.

But some preferences matter more than others, and it seems that this one matters to you a lot, because it’s your home and you want to feel good in it. And you sense, correctly, that there can be gendered dimensions to expressing that preference and how you fear it will be received. You don’t want to be your boyfriend’s mother! And who does? We live in a society where the specter of the nagging woman looms large. So how can you have a conversation where you express that preference and feel heard without the experience of reenacting uncomfortable gender scripts?

There’s no straightforward answer; the crushing weight of gendered expectations is perhaps impossible for people — even queer people! — in a relationship to unburden themselves of entirely. It might help to prioritize big-picture conversations rather than specific arguments. In the heat of the moment, “you didn’t wash the dish the way I wanted you to” can feel like a nag. “Sometimes when you wash the dishes, I’m noticing that you might not put enough soap on them,” said in a moment of calm, can inaugurate a more level-headed conversation. You could try splitting the cleaning in a different way that plays to your strengths: a weekly joint deep clean, where you can focus on splatter and grime while he does the laundry? If the way he cleans doesn’t quite satisfy you even after critiques or rejiggering, perhaps you could take on more of the cleaning while he steps up around the house in another area. (You say you already do this to some degree, but the balance could shift further.) Part of having a stronger preference does mean you might have to do more work in this particular area, and you can try to balance it out elsewhere. Sometimes the work you do around the house might ebb and flow; equity is a good goal, but it doesn’t always mean fifty-fifty in all things.

Don’t keep score on elbow grease. But do try to address these little points of conflict and tension head-on: they are the stuff of daily life. You don’t have to choose between struggling to get your partner to adopt your point of view and reluctantly accepting that your house won’t be up to your standards. Instead, you can strive to create a shared understanding of what clean means, and then figure out how you’re going to achieve it as a household. The more you can avoid thinking about it in terms of being right about the grime and splatter, the more success I think you will have. This applies to a lot more than cleaning: being right is not as important as we often think. There is no universal judge who will award us points for rightness in perspective. Other people often respond negatively to rigid certainty when they can sense it; even if you feel deeply right about something in your bones, try not to approach an argument in that manner. Instead, we need to work with others to understand the way they see, and to make them understand what it is we see. That’s true whether you’re looking at a dusty bookshelf or something thornier.

If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

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Image credit: The Liberator, July 1921