Thanks. At this point I have moved to another state and moved on with my life. I love my husband and would have supported him had he appeared to be willing to accept some sort of help for the issues in his life. I think unfortunately it was a bit of the disordered thinking preventing him from seeing that he needed help, but I did my best to get him in front of people who he might be willing to listen to, and it seemed like he was willing to see me as needing help but not look at his own issues. I have little hope that he will ever get any help as he has put himself in a bubble where everyone reinforces his own twisted ideas about himself, and he saw everything I did as oppositional. I participate in a facebook group for spouses of people with PTSD and this is sadly very common. I had to accept that I could not get him into care and decided to focus on myself. It’s been 8 months since I moved away and I barely recognize the person I was 8 months ago.
Good reminder of how much housework needs to be done over the course of a week:
Great story.
Probably doesn’t have to be said at this point, but: don’t read the comments.
I can’t keep up. If I try, I get post-exertional migraines and lymph pain, and fall back due to the sickness.
Here’s what I don’t get – how did her husband make it to marrying age without knowing this stuff? My grandfathers knew what work was to be done; they just didn’t do it because it was women’s work (to be fair, my maternal grandfather tried to help a few times and my grandmother shut him down for invading her turf).
Men in the cultural West typically live alone or with roommates for a few years before marriage. None of the cleaning should be news.
There’s a difference between “knowing that work needs to be done from time to time” and “knowing what work needs to be done today.” For some of the stuff on the list (make beds, dishwasher/wash dishes, pack up toys) it’d be obvious that they need to be done daily to keep the house in a certain state.
For others… it wouldn’t be obvious to me that a floor that had been mopped on Monday would need to be mopped again on Wednesday, and then again on Friday. Or that the fridge needs to be cleaned and the windows washed every week. Or that every floor needs to be… okay, for the hard floors, I get sweeping daily, but vacuuming the carpets every day seems excessive.
Having lived alone for years, I’ve done each and every entry on that list at some point (other than perhaps going to every corner of the house and specifically tracking down all of the cobwebs to be cleaned up; I should probably do that at some point). But, even when I have the energy and the compulsion to be cleaning, the only tasks I would do as often as her list implies would be dishes, tidying, cleaning the kitchen, and making up the bed.
Corrected per bachelor workmanship standard 420-365-LAZ.
Yeah, but that’s college. Live in a frat house, trash the place, go back to mommy and daddy during the breaks.
I don’t know what dorm life is like, because I’ve never lived in one.
Actually, I was one of those weirdos who lived off campus and didn’t participate in dorm or frat life at all. I knew what housework needed to be done but couldn’t be arsed to do it.
But for me, the cycle of get an apartment–>try to clean it–>give up and get a cleaner–>eventually even give that up–>trash the place–>move, continues to this day.
To a large extent that’s still me to this day (though I’m working on it).
I think you’re underestimating how the mess, clutter, and DIRT accumulates exponentially when there’s more than one person in a home, and especially if one or more kids are involved.
Oh, certainly, to some extent. It’s been years since I lived with anyone else at all, and the last time I lived in a house with kids, I was one of the kids. And I certainly get “pack up toys” being in there so often.
That said… I’ve already mentioned cobwebs, which is, in my opinion, the most egregious example, so… windows. I’ve lived in my current place for three years, and, looking closely at them: yes, there are enough smudges that it might just barely be worth cleaning them. After three years. When I lived with my mother in an apartment, we washed the insides whenever they had people on a platform washing the outsides, which was twice a year.
To put it mildly, cleaning windows weekly seems unwarranted. With kids, maybe there’d be more spot-cleaning to do, but cleaning all of them? And I would not expect any husband who has not already memorized the schedule and does not have a list in front of him saying “the windows must be cleaned every Wednesday” to know that’s something his wife would want done today.
So, yes, I’m sure that if I lived with more people, and especially with kids, I’d come to a different conclusion about how often certain things need to be done to keep the place ship-shape. I could never, ever see a world, though, where vacuuming is something that needs to be done more often than cleaning the bathroom.
ETA: to forestall any assumptions, this was in Seattle.
The tech Bromirates?
Oh, I’m sure I was, from time to time (there’s one story my mother likes to tell where I was smashing Christmas bulbs as a way to play with the cat, and a PB&J fits perfectly in a VCR: ask me how I know)… But not every week, and not every floor/window.
My mom has three cats and a set of French doors that open to the backyard. There is an ever-present smudge about 6 inches wide from one side of the glass to the other, because nose prints.
Everything about this advice column reeks.
I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article, at first, but some of the things mentioned in the replies just didn’t make sense (e.g. mopping three times a week?!?!?!), so I went back and read it, and I feel like you all kinda’ buried the lede. 
Or maybe rather, sometimes things make a lot more sense when I RTFA. To wit:
“I actually have clinically diagnosed OCD so this isn’t overkill in my head, […]”
In this context, the discussions around what constitutes a reasonable cleaning routine are making a lot more sense. OTOH, it seems a folly to compare ourselves to that standard; I mean, no matter how much of a clean-freak you are, no one can really compete with OCD. That’s just not even a fair fight.
I was nodding along with the comments about young men being slobs; in my experience, most knew better and just didn’t care, but there was a surprisingly large contingent that had seriously never cleaned a toilet or did their own laundry.
But I’ve never seen anything like the devastation wrought by younger children, especially on vehicles.
I once carpooled with my sister’s family, and her two young boys, several hours home from a family holiday thing. They’d borrowed my parents’ minivan, and when we got home and stopped to gas up the car and throw out the trash, I was just gobsmacked at the scope of the mess. They’d only had the van for a couple days. For my road-trips, it’s usually just cups and snack wrappers and the like. But this time we had a literal big bag full of trash, and ten tons of other stuff that had to be gathered and accounted for before we could drop off the car.
I found a half-eaten egg mcmuffin stuffed between the seat cushions, ffs. 
