I’ve been MIA since starting my own business, I admit, but in my defense, I am a one woman show operating as a full staff and let me tell you, the social media and marketing team for this show are absolute garbage. You just can’t get good help these days.
My business has its own blog, which further explains my absence from writing for fun. Today, I’m here to plug a post that just went live over at Fresh Edit. It’s about relationships.
Before you accuse me of juggling boulders in a glass house, it’s about decluttering for couples. I am divorced, it’s true, but clutter is not the reason. I work with couples all the time, and working toward a clear space and mental clarity takes a lot of patience and trust between partners. Sometimes I’m mediating arguments. Sometimes I’m soothing hurt feelings. Occasionally I’m trying to win over the partner who thinks their spouse should just tidy up themselves and not get help from a professional. I’m not a therapist, but I play one at work.
On the personal side, I have had experience with a partner whose vision for our home did not match my own, and I bring both my successes and failures to that conversation. We got married right out of college, so we built a life together over time and learned our own styles in the process.
And my experience has expanded – when two adults have their own clutter tolerances and aesthetic preferences that have solidified in the absence of a partner, merging those two fully formed lives has an entirely new set of challenges.
If you are in a long term relationship, the arguments are “you never let me have a life-sized storm trooper in the living room” or “you have collected 47 novelty coffee mugs and they are spilling out of the cabinet”. If your relationship is new and you’ve lived alone for any period of time, the discussions are less oppression and more objection. “I don’t want to have anything on my countertops.” “I need space for my collection of Precious Moments figurines.” One can develop resentment over time, and the other can feel like a roadblock.
In my own experience, both personally and professionally, I have created a list of tips and advice that I posted yesterday through my Fresh Edit site. Decluttering your own space all alone is already fraught with emotional landmines and stress, so add in a partner who questions every decision, and you get a 100% chance of going to bed mad. That blog walks you through reminders like patience (not everyone makes decisions at the same speed), trust (you trust them with your heart, you need to trust they are making the right decisions about their clutter), and realistic expectations (if one is a minimalist and one is a collector, the end result can’t be either extreme or someone will be miserable). That advice is for couples who are already in the process of releasing items that no longer serve them, whether they’ve hired a professional or not.
For my personal blog readers, I’d like to share something different.
I am a professional that is invited into homes all over town. Please, for the love of Marie Kondo, do not invite a service provider into your home without telling your partner. I have learned to ask before I make the appointment if everyone in the home is aware I’ll be working with them. I’ve shown up and had a partner surprised and pissed off. I’ve walked in and had a wife pull me into a room to ask if I would introduce myself to her husband and tell him he really needs to declutter. I’ve had partners come home mid project and rage about their spouse and a stranger touching their stuff (it was mutual belongings like beach towels in my defense, but still). I’ve had people ask me to call their spouse on their behalf to relay information, or lie about my pricing so they won’t know what is being invested in a project. Clients tell me their wife gave permission to clean out the pantry and it turned out it was supposed to be a surprise and she liked keeping six-year-old opened olive oil just in case.
Do. Not. Do. This.
No matter who you hire or what task they are performing, don’t ever put a stranger in the crosshairs. Especially in a state where every home is full of hunting gear. I don’t want to hear raised voices near the gun safe. We can’t immediately tell the difference between a partner who will indulge their sneaky spouse and one that will start a revenge fire in the living room.
I once hired a guy from Task Rabbitt to hang an extra-long curtain rod I couldn’t manage on my own, and he told me husbands come home furious their wife would pay someone to do something simple like mount a TV, as though they’d been personally attacked and emasculated. Of course, we all know she already asked her husband to do it multiple times and he declined to complete the project, so his job was outsourced to someone more reliable. But I digress.
In all situations, flexibility is important. Sometimes a spouse will claim they are on board, and then magically become too busy. I can’t decide what does and does not spark joy for you, and on your behalf, I won’t let your partner decide, either. You can’t declutter someone else’s belongings. Even the Queen of Tidy herself agrees – Marie Kondo says even though you are certain your choices are the right ones, don’t discard things that don’t belong to you.
Equally as important is not discounting the feelings of your decluttering teammate. “I want to keep this because (insert vague nonsense)” is a reason, even if you don’t like it. You can’t veto something that’s not yours to trash. If you could, life would be simpler and easier to clean, but alas, it is forbidden. Same goes for the minimalist in your life. If she wants to live like a monk and that makes you miserable, try to find some common ground, but also keep your clutter out of sight. Some of us (helloooo) cannot focus if there are visible tasks in their line of sight. When I work from home I have to vacuum and unload the dishwasher first because I pass crumbs and dishes on my way to my desk.
Now that I’ve told you to be patient and loving, there are boundaries. Something I really struggled with as a mom of three was keeping the house clean. Every one of us has allergies, nobody wants to be stepping on toys or living in chaos, and the more we owned, the longer it took to reset the house to prepare for guests or even preparing a meal. If you are the one in charge of household management and keeping the trains running on time, you get to voice your concerns.
When we declutter, we are imagining our ideal lifestyle and removing anything that doesn’t move us toward our goals. If your goal is a peaceful home with more time for family and less time feeling like Cinderella, that is valid. Everybody is sneezing nose-fulls of dust when they walk past the toy display my kids assembled, and the solution is not “mom carefully dusts every LEGO display with a feathered wand so nothing is disturbed”. NO. Dusting is one task of five thousand. You can enclose it in a display cabinet, or you can keep it somewhere I can’t see it and clean it yourself. Shared space means compassion and shared responsibility. If you are actively making the maintenance work harder, pick up the slack yourself. If you can’t make time either, get rid of that stuff.
While the big names in my field are idealists, I am living in the world and in my own home seeing what is possible in reality. One of the tips from my blog is to lower your expectations. If you’re envisioning an empty minimalist sanctuary but you live with even ONE child, that’s not realistic. If you’ve got plans for a wall-to-wall mint condition collectable toy display but have no intention of maintaining and cleaning it, I object on your spouse’s behalf. I’m not saying you can’t have your collection, I’m saying you need to see the work you are creating and handle it on your own, because Mom’s dance card is full.
There will always be challenges. Maybe you have a beautiful chair in the corner of your bedroom with a knit throw blanket gracefully draped across the back that brings you joy. And then you meet someone whose uniform needs to be at the ready for an emergency call in the middle of the night, and the chair is the best option. Some things just…are. For me, I have to be mindful of making my carefully curated home an inhospitable environment. Like the time I bought minimalist sofas that were ridiculously uncomfortable but looked really cool in my minimalist living room. Likewise, you may wonder why your wife can’t just chill on the couch and watch a movie with you as soon as the kids go to bed. The reason is probably the Herculean task of resetting the house before she can relax. The more you own, the more jobs you have in the house.
(Guys, I’m going to save you some time here: don’t say “just do it later” or worse “it’ll all get done eventually.” Later is a time that includes new tasks so it’s spoken for, and “it’ll all get done” makes it sound like you think a tidying fairy comes overnight when in fact it’s your wife following you and the kids around with a mop…but I digress.)
(Also, walking past a mess is a disrespectful personal attack, because you are looking at chaos you caused and saying “her problem.” But I digress. This time for real.)
You can’t make decisions for someone else, but you can hear them out if they are struggling and try to take their needs into account, whether they are keeping clutter or getting rid of too much in your opinion. You’ve chosen to share your lives and that took compromise, so sharing your space is no different.
Joy check for yourself, but keep your partner’s joy in mind, too. Otherwise, your clutter may end up on the lawn.
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