A few years ago, James Delingpole and I were two-fifths of ‘The Manalysts’ a clique of agony uncles employed by a women’s magazine. The idea was to provide five answers to each problem from five disparate standpoints. James was the trenchant intellectual, I was (supposedly) the metrosexual adman and the other three were a practising psychotherapist, a blokey builder from Essex and a gloriously camp hairdresser.
The great fallacy about untidy people is that we’re always losing things
A fair few of our correspondents were, unsurprisingly, complaining about a boyfriend or husband’s untidiness but I remember being struck by how many wrote in to bemoan the very opposite – the strain of living with someone tyrannically tidy.
It’s always assumed that tidy equals good and to a certain extent, that’s true: tidy mind, tidy sum, Keep Britain Tidy – but quite often, tidiness can tip into tyranny. Yes, yes, we all know how awful it must be to live with a slob or a slattern but the stress of a partner who constantly tidies away your possessions – and with them, your sanity – should not be underestimated.
When it comes to the phrase ‘clean and tidy’, I’m the very much first but not the second. Left alone, I would not be slumped motionless in front of Sky Sports under a pile of roaches, beer cans and pizza boxes. I cannot bear unwashed dishes or unmade beds and each day, I leave the house as scrubbed, flossed and fragrant as I did as an optimistic teenager heading for the school disco.
Extreme tidiness, however, is a different matter because it’s such a time-consuming and inefficient way to live. The great fallacy about untidy people is that we’re always losing things. On the contrary, our minds are messy but accurate maps of exactly where things are. Or were.
Tidy people mess with those maps and mess with our minds. By moving our possessions, they are in effect, moving Wembley to Wiltshire. No, it’s worse than that, they’re wiping Wembley off the map. We know it must be somewhere but we now have no idea where. So we’re forced to waste years of our lives searching for things that have been tidied up, put in a mysterious place, known only as ‘away’.
If you write for a living and use books for reference, do not – whatever you do – leave one on the floor or on a sofa. You may come back to find it gone, subsumed into an already bursting bookshelf and rendered invisible. But you need it at that very moment so, rather than spend any more time looking for it with no guarantee of success, you may find yourself racing round to Waterstones to buy another copy.
Thank God CDs have been supplanted by Spotify. During their brief reign as music’s prime platform, I lost count of how many of mine went missing. Admittedly, l often left loose discs strewn across the floor. Such strewing risked them being swiftly and ruthlessly shut into the nearest empty case, regardless of whether it’s the right one or not. I haven’t seen Queen’s Greatest Hits for about 25 years but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
The tidy must have everything neatly stowed away into tightly packed cupboards. God help you if you need something from that cupboard. There are usually only two ways of accessing it: Either by patiently removing every impediment first or by taking your chances and trying to reach it like a fairground-grabbing claw. This invariably means everything tumbling out onto the floor and, in the midst of your nervous breakdown, you can never quite pack it all back in again.
So you start to develop increasingly deranged coping strategies. I have a friend who lives with a compulsive washer and ironer. He likes his clothes clean, obviously, but prefers them soft and unironed. So once they’re washed and dried, he hides them in a holdall in the boot of his car, safe from the red-hot hiss of a savage steam iron. Another hides his clothes so far back in his wardrobe that they’re practically in Narnia. Otherwise, they’ll be found and subjected to a hot wash and spin cycle. It’s a constant battle, apparently, to prevent much-loved garments from turning limp, grey and shapeless long before their time.
If you’re constantly lectured about the correct way to stack a dishwasher or are sitting reading this with your legs permanently raised six inches above the carpet so your cohabitant can vacuum beneath them, you’ll know what a serious problem this is. Your home, the one place where you should be able to relax, is the one place where you can’t. A ceaseless swirl of cleaning and tidying means you exist in a state of permanent anxiety.
Unfortunately, this state will remain permanent for two reasons. The first is guilt. We’re all hardwired to believe that tidy equals good so, even in extreme circumstances, we still feel slightly guilty and slightly grubby complaining about a neat and tidy partner. The other reason is behavioural change. If you’re untidy, you can easily make an effort to become less so. Obsessively tidy people, however, make no effort to change because they cannot see that what they’re doing might be wrong. Theirs is the freshly swept path of righteousness and nothing will persuade them otherwise.
The comedian Kane Brown put it brilliantly, ‘My partner has OCD!’, he yelled, ‘But she wants me to have OCD too!’ It causes so much domestic conflict that I’m afraid there’s only one thing for it: we’ll have to re-form The Manalysts.
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