I have a car that can fit seven people, the Toyota Highlander. During family vacations, this is the ideal size, so we don’t have to take two cars everywhere. I thought it was clean enough for my family to sit in, although I knew there were various receipts I could pick up here and there and ways I could make the car more comfortable.
For Christmas, my cousin from China wanted to see various tourist attractions in Washington, D.C., and prior to loading the car, I scanned the back of my car. I picked up receipts, vacuumed, and moved extraneous items I keep in my car (like a basketball and a pump). I suddenly started seeing messes in my car that my family might use to judge me, like too many old charging cords in the back, messy cup-holders, and cleaned all of these things within 20 minutes of my family loading the car.
A lot of these messes and items laying around everywhere have been there for months. People rarely sit in my third row seats given I rarely have more than four people in the car, so I noticed some of the mess, but did not really have an incentive to clean it.
The moment I knew people were coming over to sit in the back row and then the third row, the urgency came to not only notice the mess, but clean it. I started to pick up idle items like the basketball and pump, vacuuming the floors, moving items out of the cup holders, and wiping down the seats.
Within 20 minutes, I made it a much cleaner and more comfortable environment, and it would not have happened if I did not have people come sit in the car.
This has applied not only to my car, but to my house, to my classroom when I was a teacher, to my office when I know people are going to swing by. As someone who taught special ed for six years, there are certain ways teachers and students can behave differently and try to put on a show when the principal walks by or comes to observe. I would like to proudly claim I never did this and was the same all the time, but especially earlier in my career, I did often know what the principal would look for that I did not do every day. This included having an agenda of the lesson on the board, as one example.
But I would also be surprised at the extent many students did this. I remember my very first formal observation from my principal while I taught middle school, which went okay. In the two weeks prior, I had three students who disrupted the class frequently by cussing or throwing pencils at each other, and who I had to regularly call parents of.
I was nervous about how they would behave during this observation, but on that day, one student didn’t come to school, and the other two seemed to turn on a switch — participating, leading the class, and not cussing or throwing anything at each other. It definitely said something about my classroom management as a first year teacher, but this was a frequent occurrence for many of us new teachers. This topic was floated around by another first year teacher to her students, and her students told her some version of: “The principal can suspend us; you can’t.”
I am probably going on a tangent about dynamics in the school system, but it was another version of how human beings can put on a show and tap into another side of themselves in response to different incentives.
I distinctly remember when I realized this about myself when it came to the cleanliness of my own home. Earlier this year, a door-to-door salesman of windows, roofs, and gutters stopped by the house. They wanted to come in and give an estimate of how much new windows would cost. We had purchased something from them before, so we were very annoyed at this company for continuing to come to our house and try to sell us more things, and they were incredibly persistent and blew up our phones. We had no desire to buy windows, but we wanted to be polite.
This salesman was very nice, and although we were told this estimate would be quick, it took about an hour of our time, so we felt very inconvenienced. She sat in our living room, and I instantly noticed there were papers and clutter all over the living room table. I started picking up this mail so it could be clear and she could have a space to show us the product she was trying to sell us (which we had no interest in).
I noticed I suddenly entered into a new mode of thinking, more motivated by social judgment than by my day-to-day personal standards. I could have picked up all these papers and clutter the whole week before, but I only did it when we had a guest.
This begged the question: why am I so much cleaner and why do I keep my physical space so much more organized when I know there are people coming over?
In my relationship, cleaning and housework has been the biggest point of contention between me and my wife. For six years, it is a conflict that has gotten significantly better, but has played on repeat. My wife expresses that I did not clean something well or did not maintain the space well enough. I express some expression akin to “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” And I don’t — at various stages of our relationship and marriage, I did not genuinely do not see the problem of a living space with problems like:
- Mail all over the living room table.
- A bed that isn’t perfectly made.
- The toilet seat being up.
- Shoes left on the doorway and not on the shoe rack.
- The dishes and utensils sitting in the sink.
- The ceiling fans and windows not being dusted.
- Clothes not being folded and put away for a few days.
I also have a lot of excuses for why I don’t clean very well in the shared living space of me and my wife. For one, I am very busy. I have an hour and 40 minute commute, and then on busier weeks, I work anywhere from 60–70 hours a week and the work unfortunately does spill into nights. I also take on a big share of our mutual financial obligations.
But no matter how much strife this cleaning causes, I try to still get better.
One way I have gotten better is to tell myself “clean like people are coming over” and tap into a that incentive of social judgment. At the end of the day, I can’t just clean for other people. I had to clean for me. But for the time being, “clean like people are coming over” has made me much, much better at cleaning. This improvement is especially noted when we actually have people over, like for football games, so I can’t just trick myself mentally all the time and need to follow through.
Why is it different with just my wife versus guests? I have various theories. There is an element where I don’t always feel like I need to impress her, and I can more or less be myself at all times. With guests, they’re not over all the time, so I want to make sure they’re very comfortable and having a very good time.
I think another critical difference is that I would need to impress my wife every second of every day, which is impossible. I would only need to impress my guests once in the week or month they come by, so one incentive system is more sustainable than another.
Whenever I had people over in high school, I always liked to be a good host. The cleaning vision, as I would call it, would come over me to pick up any idle items and clutter in shared spaces so people would be comfortable and had space to eat my food. But my own space would be not as clean, unfortunately. I could have clothes on the floor and an unmade bed, and did not have the same incentive to keep my own room as clean.
Will a lot of guests care about a couple dishes in the think? No, I don’t think so. But I do think it would be a slightly more comfortable environment if there weren’t those dishes in the sink, if there weren’t mail all over the counter, if the carpets were vacuumed, and the shoes were all put away on the shoe rack.
As for just me and my wife, my living standards are gradually getting cleaner and tidier, and a lot more in alignment with my wife’s and how she would prefer the space. It might still take a while, but it’s getting there.
However, I do find a downside to this — I stayed at a hotel last week and found myself uncomfortable at broken outlets and other chipped paint in the bathroom. These were minor things that would have never made me uncomfortable before, but marriage has made me more uncomfortable in spaces others would consider unclean.
I also visited my family for the holidays. I realized something about my cleaning standards: I am now the cleanest person in my family. I noticed the unvacuumed carpets and the floor that could have used some more sweeping and mopping.
Culturally, as a Chinese-American, when I visited China when I was 14, I needed to get used to lower standards of cleanliness in living spaces, particularly in rural areas where my family is from. There were cracked tiles everywhere, insects, and the infamous squat toilets where you had to use a bucket of water and pour it to flush. A lot of this isn’t lower standards of living as much as it is poverty and different infrastructure when it comes to things like plumbing, but comparing the cleanliness of where my family lives to those standards, the house is very clean.
None of it bothered me then, so it brings me some angst that something as minor as unvacuumed carpets or unmopped floors can bother me now. I will say that a day later, these things didn’t bother me as much as the first day, so, as always, I adapted to my situation and found comfort in it, so I want to maintain the ability to adapt to and be comfortable with my surroundings no matter what.
Meanwhile, I visit my in-laws, a military family, and see the floors are always spotless, the dishes are always done every night, and every room is clean and well-maintained. I follow their rules and do my best to pitch in to maintain their standards, and sometimes my wife is both impressed and frustrated that I suddenly turn into a different person (in terms of cleaning) around her parents than I do in our daily lives.
Thus, the divergence in cleaning standards from my upbringing is a large part of why cleaning is the biggest point of contention between me and my wife.
This means that I can’t bluff and try to trick myself and apply a mental hack all the time to clean like people are coming over. At a certain point, it’s up to me. I am the one who needs to learn to be cleaner and maintain higher standards of living. And there’s a part of me that pushes back against that.
There are certain parts of living with someone where you have to maintain their standards all the time to maintain harmony. I am cleaner than I was when I was younger and have been able to adapt. But I also want to be able to adapt, to not judge and be grateful for the hospitality of others no matter what. I think a lot of things can be true at once, and I’m trying to navigate those mutual expectations.
I know that my habits and standards when it’s just my wife and me are my true colors, and that there can be some different gendered expectations navigating more modern versus traditional expectations of men and women. Now, I am trying to align that self with the side that shows when people are over.
It will take a while, but I think eventually, those two sides of me will be more or less the same.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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