Dear Richard Madeley: My wife’s chronic untidiness is making me resentful
Dear Richard,
My wife has many virtues, but tidiness is not one of them. She is a devotee of the ‘floordrobe’, and has never to my knowledge put a kitchen utensil away. I myself am reasonably neat but not, I think, obsessively so. Anyway, until recently we had the luxury of a weekly cleaner, which kept things manageable. However, we have both gone freelance and money will be tight for a while at least; so we’re doing the dusting and hoovering ourselves according to a fair rota.
My problem is that while my wife steers round the piles of unread magazines and cairns of footwear, I put things away so I can have an uninterrupted run at the floor. This makes my shifts more thorough than hers, but also much slower. It all adds up to a worm of discontentment in our formerly harmonious home: we’re sniping at each other; she’s shedding garments at an undiminished pace; and the house is, well, cleanish, but with a slight sense of backsliding that I wouldn’t want to get much worse. What’s the best way to get things back on track while staying on good terms?
— Pete, London NW1
Dear Pete,
You don’t tell me how old you two are but let’s assume you’re both in your 30s. Pete. If your wife hasn’t discovered how drawers, cupboards and wardrobes work by now, she ain’t going to. If she thinks kitchen utensils belong scattered across kitchen tops, that’s the way it’s going to be until the day she dies.
If she assumes that beds magically make themselves at some point during the day, you’re as likely to be able to disabuse her of that as you are to convince a flat-earther the world is round.
In other words, Pete: live with it. This is the person you married. This is the person you love. This is her flaw. What’s yours? We all have them. Some people are married to lousy drivers; some are otherwise happily shacked up with individuals who can’t cook: ask them to make toast and they burn it.
So it goes. My advice is to celebrate your wife’s ‘many virtues’ and turn a Nelsonian blind eye to her floordrobe failings. There are worse crimes in a marriage. Much worse.
