THE DEEPER SIDE
OF DIRTY LAUNDRY

by Laura Christian

    My husband and I knew each other for over a year before we got married and knew each other’s thinking patterns inside and out, or so I thought.  In just a few months of being married though, I have found many situations where I realize I have no clue what he is thinking at all.  Just last week the issue of picking up dirty laundry shed some light onto yet another difference in how he and I view the world.

    I like things fairly clean around the house and will pick up dirty clothes and put them in the hamper, whether or not they are mine.  My husband, on the other hand, only picks up his dirty clothes and leaves mine laying there—even though he likes things picked up as well.  At first, this bothered me.  I could not understand why he wasn’t returning the favor that I was obviously doing for him.  However, I didn’t bring up this topic for quite a while.  I knew I was fully capable of picking up my own clothes and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or demanding, so I let it go.  As time went on though, I began to realize it was bothering me that he did not seem to care enough to pick up my clothes (especially when it didn’t add a lot of extra work for him!).  So I decided to talk to him.

    His response shocked me.  By nature, my husband is far more of a loner than I am.  He likes to be by himself for extended periods of time and can find things to do to entertain himself for hours.  His picking-up-dirty-clothes philosophy is largely related to his personality.  Growing up, he did not like people picking up his stuff, because he never knew where it went if someone else put it away.  Unbeknownst to me, my husband was extending me the courtesy of not mistakenly putting my clothes in the wrong place (i.e. putting clean clothes that happened to be laying on the floor in the dirty clothes basket).  For him, leaving someone else’s mess for that person to clean up is a sign of respect.  For me, leaving someone else’s mess means that you just don’t care enough to help them out.

    After having talked about this, I now know it is better for me to leave my husband’s stuff laying around and let him pick it up himself, and he knows that he can show he cares by asking me where my stuff goes and putting it away for me.

    The point of my story is this—don’t assume you know how your significant other is thinking.  Before I talked with my husband, I could not even conceive of a reason for him to not pick up my laundry, other than he didn’t care.  If I had approached him with an attack on how much he didn’t care, I could have caused a lot of tension and hurt between us.  Instead, we were able to talk about our differences and learn how to deal with dirty laundry in a way that shows the other person we love them.

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