Making Everyone Mad At Me Re: Cleaning

Here is a post that I believe will upset everyone regarding the doing of domestic chores. Luckily, that means it will upset your opposite number as much as it upsets you, so please do send it to your partner and be upset with me together.

In most relationships I've seen, one person does a lot more tidying and cleaning around the house, and the other does a lot less. (I have not noticed ANY underlying characteristics that correlate at 90%+ with belonging to the High Tidying and Low Tidying groups, no sir no ma'am.)

Here's the part that will annoy the Low Tidiers: you think you're doing your fair share of the cleaning/tidying, but you're not.

This is partly just the normal psychology of Work, people always notice the work they're doing and don't always notice the work other people are doing, so they over-estimate their relative share. Someone once told me "if you think you're doing half of the cleaning, you're not doing half of the cleaning. If you think you're doing 2/3 of the cleaning, you might be doing 1/2 the cleaning." And I think that's helpful, and for the major household chores it's true.

But I think there's a second component for cleaning specifically: the Low Tidiers are only considering the focussed blocks of time spent on cleaning and tidying, whereas the High Tidiers are also doing bonus cleaning and tidying in tiny increments throughout the day. This results in a WAY disproportionate share of tidying done by the High Tidiers. (Is it possible that the High Tidiers were socialized this way since childhood, in a way that the Low Tidiers didn't even notice was happening? I cannot imagine how or why that could have occurred.)

Ok, that's the half that will upset the Low Tidiers. The High Tidiers are feeling smug right now, perhaps already having forwarded this blogpost to your loved ones (which you should).

BUT WAIT: I think most of the High Tidiers I've ever met are also wrong about cleaning.

Basically: High Tidiers tend to believe that 1) there is a correct way to perform each chore, 2) it's the way they learned to do it growing up, 3) anyone who does it differently is stupid, or slow, or useless.

I think mostly this view is substantively incorrect: e.g. most people I meet seem to believe that the correct way to load a dishwasher is how their parents did it. This is often untrue on two separate counts: some of our parents were loading dishwashers sub-optimally (shocking I know!), and also dishwasher technology has progressed a ton since we were kids. To the extent there's a right way to load a dishwasher it's a) what some grainy blue collar dishwasher repair channel on youtube tells you, and b) empirically determined by whether your dishes come out clean.

But here's the meta-problem, and the bigger problem. If you're a High Tidier, and you treat your partner like an idiot who can't even load a dishwasher right, but you still want them to do 1/2 the housework, you've changed the problem they're solving from "how do I keep this home tidy for both of us" to "how do I keep my High Tidier partner from being mad at me?" Which is really bad for both of you, because it inevitably means the Low Tidier will be turning to you for approval on all domestic tasks and how they were done, which is extremely infantilizing, and which both of you will resent.

To avoid this, though, you have to find areas of domestic life where you're actually willing for things to be done differently than you would have done them and truly accept them in your heart – not just as a suboptimal outcome you're tolerating because you don't want to fight any more – but as an alternative point on the lattice that is different but neither better nor worse than how you would do things, the way that pizza is neither better or worse than sushi, even though a slice of pizza is bad when judged as a piece of sushi.

Evaluating whether a task has been done well within its own value system is hard, because you will inevitably feel that "no I'm being completely reasonable, it doesn't have to be done MY way but it has to be done well, and this is being done badly." But if you can find some domains where you can accept value pluralism, you can fundamentally shift the dynamic of cleaning/tidying in your household, for the good of all.

p.s. not directly relevant, but still assonant: