http://www.care2.com/greenliving/living-with-a-partners-clutter.html
Living with Your Mate’s Clutter
By Alex Fayle, Intent
There are many wonderful things about living with others, but dealing with their clutter is most certainly not one of them. Living with my partner (and before that, roommates) has always been a special challenge during times of emotional stress.
You see, when I’m sailing through life, everything finds its way back to its place quickly because I put everything away as soon as I use it. However, when I’m feeling chaotic, you can’t see the bedroom floor and nothing goes back where it belongs. I nest using clothes and papers.
When I lived alone, it didn’t bother me. When I was feeling this way, I’d just wade through the clothes to find the bed, knowing that I’d get out of the funk and get things cleaned up sooner or later.
Now that I live with my partner in a very tiny apartment, I can’t let the chaos take over too much.
We’re both human, though, and the chaos does hit, sometimes at the same time but usually at different moments (meaning one wants to clean while the other is in a nesting mode).
Living with others offers a challenge to staying organized because if one person is feeling chaotic, their clutter encourages others to let their own organizing slack off: If his stuff is all over the place, why should I clean up mine?
Say you’re in a chaotic moment and your partner starts ranting at you about the mess you’re leaving around. What would you do? In my case, my inner teenager comes out and I want to make the mess even worse just to get back at the unfair authority-figure ranting.
Let’s say however, that you’re more mature than I am, and recognize the ranting is not an attack on your intrinsic goodness. Instead, you use it to move yourself out of the chaos, dealing with the physical side first and letting the emotional clutter clear itself out. How wonderful, no?
But what happens if it’s your companion(s) that let the clutter take over? How do you deal with it?
Here are 3 Definitely Don’t and 3 Possibly Do actions.
Definitely Don’t:
• Don’t nag. It’ll just bring out the inner teenager and they might rebel and do things on purpose just to piss you off.
• Don’t get judgmental. People in a negative state don’t need negative reinforcement. Besides, it’s not like you’ve never had moments of clutter, hmmm???
• You can re-order the place yourself, but don’t do it with a “how great am I?” nor with a martyr attitude. Do it because you want to or not at all. A superiority complex will only cause more problems in the end.
Possibly Do:
• Live with the chaos and hope that the person will snap out of it soon. After all, you go through chaotic periods too, I’m sure.
• Suggest an order the house day and make it a big fun event. Put on music, dress up in maid outfits (or at least tie funny colored scarves on your head) and do a re-ordering.
• Re-order the place on your own and hope that the calm space will bring calm to the other person/people.
Now it’s your turn. How do you deal with the clutter in the home caused by multiple people experiencing the ups and downs of life at different rates?
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33 comments
add your comment »The only thing worse than being a neatnik married to a pack-rat/clutterbug is two pack-rats/clutterbugs married. I never learned "proper" housekeeping from my mom - it appears to be hereditary ;-) and hubby is also from a 'pilot family' - pile it here, pile it there... We go on clean-up binges periodically, but lately his depression has gotten so bad he rarely helps, so it's all on me. Nothing like a challenge to get me turned around! So in between weeks of letting things be (my own mini-depressive vacations from reality) I go on one-woman cleaning sprees, concentrating on just one area at a time. Each time I make a bit more progress, and in a year or two I might actually find the floor (just kidding!).
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I have read so many stories of wifes being clutter bugs and some have been men. I totally agree w/everyone who is frustrated with living with a pack rat. I have been living with the same man for 8 yrs and am sick of his pack rat life style. Thats one of the reasons I havent tied the knott .
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Jillian, I don't think you're hoarding animals. It looks like you have 4, right? (The birds that you feed outside don't count because they don't live with you, you help them out.) Anyway, one thing you can do is try to find out if your community has an ordinance declaring how many dogs and cats you can have.
As long as you're within these limits, just tell him when he starts ranting.
Oh, I wish there were ordinances on legal limits for old tools, newspaper articles from 1978, and size 38 men's slacks that the guy hasn't been able to fit in for decades.
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Susan and others, Dr. Amen (Daniel?) has some very interesting books about the brain. He's a psychiatrist who uses a special form of brain scan to see which areas of the brain are affected and then prescribes low dose meds. I'm really anti-meds myself but his research is fascinating. I wasn't aware that any of those brain-altering meds actually had benefits. He seems to use a very low amount and within a time--several months to several years, the patient can usually come off them. After reading some of his books I've come to the conclusion that most doctors are prescribing wrong and very randomly without knowing what they're doing.
Your Dad sounds like a perfect candidate for this. Dr. Amen does also recommend some supplements for the brain but typically a brain injury, concussion, forceps birth, etc is a cause of these issues. Of course a starving brain is going to contribute as well. Almost everyone is depleted of healthy fats. Borage, fish oil, algae and getting the toxic heavy metals out of the body and brain all contribute to better brain health. Of course not consuming toxins and avoiding chemical exposure will help too.
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I've also noticed a lot of references to ADD, and now OCD. I don't doubt that there are people with conditions along these lines but I try to be careful about throwing around these convenient labels. Seems to me there are often multiple factors contributing to behavioral issues – people are complex – and to equate hoarding or inability to organize with some tidy little drug-company acronym is to potentially overlook true root causes.
My girlfriend has a major problem with hoarding but I would not even think of assigning her some disorder to explain it. I think it comes from having a militantly controlling mother who made her kids clean up compulsively – she's unconsciously rebelling against my attempts to get things cleaned up. She's also averse to change and was raised by parents who did not have a lot of resources so she has a scarcity mindset.
And buying, storing, organizing, and fiddling with one's junk provides ongoing distraction from all the scary life issues people want to avoid. If you clear away your possessions and your bad habits and your addictions, then your deepest fears rise up to greet you. Ok, I am rambling now...
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Did you know that building up clutter is contagious? Except for my eldest son who is super-organized and never keeps anything, the rest of my family(4)hoard EVERYTHING and although I do a clear out once a year of MY things, the rest don't do anything and there is not one tidy room in the house. According to my husband, I am the worst offender as I collect animals - a ten year old boxer dog who is blind in one eye, two female cats and one male which I picked up as a newborn kitten and later found that he was schizo, blind and had convulsions. I also put out food for the birds in my garden every day. HELP! While I just close my eyes and say "OM" when my husband starts ranting, this situation is going from bad to worse and I just can't find the solution. Any ideas?
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People keep mentioning ADD, but I think OCD is also a big cause of severe packratting. My dad is incapable of throwing anything away, from my broken bikes from childhood, to grocery and to-do lists from 30 years ago. He has every magazine, piece of paper, and memo he has ever received and he is 67 years old! He has been fortunate enough to have the money to move into bigger houses and to be able to buy steel buildings and barns to store things in, but the clutter is amazing, and so much of the stuff is just ridiculous junk. This is a disease, needing medical and psychological treatment. I only hope he will be willing to seek treatment before he drives away his wonderful wife!
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Great article, an ongoing practice for me to keep myself from feeling like a nag, my partner is less tidy than me but I never saw myself as really tidy, it is easy to become polarized and it's not helpful, really great to see other peoples stories...
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My husband is a pack-rat. I am the opposite (some would say the extreme opposite). We even had a counselling session. He tries to explain it by saying he never had anything when growing up. I never had much of anything growing up either, thank the goddess.
One real test is the grocery store. Now I have to go with him to make sure he doesn't buy much. It's a pain.
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I feel for you ErikaT, my wife is the same way. Fortunately, she could see from her friend, who also has 3 storage units, what a waste of money that was. Still, our house is practically unlivable.
Today we are going to try to carve out space for our daughter and her kids coming this weekend.
Will try to keep it fun with music, not sure about the maid's outfit.
I wish there were some kind of support for those of us who are married to certified clutterbugs. It causes a lot of distress, the clutterbug seems to not even be aware they have a problem. I decided this year to put a time limit on the problem, and if we don't make some progress I just have to find other living arrangements.
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