Socks and Marriage

Demented Michelle and I have been e-pals for about a year, and as we’ve already established, that’s about a decade in blog years. We keep pulling for each other’s literary prospects, which is what writerly e-pals do. I’m hoping the day will soon arrive when Michelle’s blog name (Demented Delusions) will be hopelessly outdated. Not demented, babe, nor delusional. Here’s Michelle.

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There’s a new TeeVee show set to debut this fall. I have no idea what it’s called, but the commercials feature two couples: Newlyweds and Un-newlyweds. For both couples, the wife is the stereotypical neat freak while the husband is the stereotypical slob. As you can imagine, the Newlywed wife is a bit more tolerant, whereas the Un-newlywed wife, after a decade of picking up dirty socks, feels the need to express her pent-up rage by stuffing them down her sleeping husband’s throat. Well, okay then. That’s a marriage that’s going to last. I’d hate to think what would happen when Un-newlywed husband retires and is home ALL the time. I hope they don’t own a gun.

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So, my husband and I have been watching these commercials and the sock stuffing incident over and over again and we are annoyed. The show is SO not realistic. First, why is it the wife who’s always so uptight about socks on the floor? Is this as far as feminism can take us in Hollywood? Can’t we have equal opportunity slobbery (new word, roll with it)? In my marriage, my husband is the neat freak. If my shoes aren’t lined up, I hear about it. If my socks are on the floor, I hear about it. At length. With wagging fingers to boot. The thing is, I am very much a live-and-let-live kind of person. Your socks are on the floor? I don’t care. I’m not going to bend over and pick them up, I leave sock removal to the dogs who consider smelly socks to be appetizers. There’s more than one dirty dish in the sink? So what? I don’t load the dishwasher until the dishes are higher than the faucet.

This means I actually never do the dishes because my husband can’t tolerate that many opportunities for mold growth in the house. I don’t even do laundry. I tried, but my husband wanted to micromanage how I sorted lights and darks to the point of actually rearranging the dirty clothes piles.

I finally screamed that, if he couldn’t leave me alone and trust my ten years of laundry experience to be sufficient insurance that I wouldn’t accidentally shred his clothes, he could do the (damn) laundry all by himself.

It took him three years of doing laundry before he finally realized ‘Hey, this sucks. If I relax my standards a little bit, my slobbery wife can share some of the work.’ I now have to help sort the clothes. Sometimes I am even forced to do actual laundry. Drat.

Anyway, none of this means, however, that I don’t clean. It’s just that my threshold is a lot lower than my husband’s. To me, if it can be cleaned up in twenty minutes, it’s not a mess. True messes require hired maids and tubs of disinfectant. I know this because my father is the slobberiest slob of them all and I cleaned up after him for years. Think dirty socks on the floor are bad? Try dirty socks plus underwear on the kitchen table next to your breakfast.

Whenever my husband ‘loses it’ over my less-than-neat ways, I remind him of my father. So long as I’m not as bad as my father, I figure I’m doing pretty good. My dirty underwear may be on the floor with my socks, but it’s never on the dining room table and I do pick it up on a weekly-ish basis. My father left stuff sitting so long, it became stiff, like a skidmark statue.

If my husband is still irate after the at-least-I’m-not-my-dad defense, I use my secret weapon-of-mass-distraction to defuse his anger: boobs. Flashing works every time. No, really. Boobs stop marital discord in its tracks. Try it sometime.

Still, despite all my slobbery flaws, I don’t rely on my boobs alone, I actually do get my hands dirty. I vacuum, I steam clean carpet, I clean bathrooms, and constantly try to find the laziest way to organize my closet that doesn’t involve throwing everything on the floor or draping things over a chair, My husband’s anality (another new word) for cleanliness does push me to a higher level of neatness because I love him and putting my shoes in precise rows seems to improve his facial tic.

Even so, I will never be one of those people whose hands are just twitching to throw a vacuum into full throttle. Nor will I be watching the Newlywed/Un-newlywed show, because, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t know anything about marriage and I don’t want to give my husband any more ideas about what he can do with those socks on the floor

— Demented Michelle