Ever won a cleaning stand off?

[idontcarewhatanyonesaysithinkyourealright]

Hi All,

I just want to discuss something I see on here often. I did end up leaving a husband who would not share the household tasks. Best decision ever, the constant anxiety of wondering what mess his very presence has left and how long it will take from my day to rectify, that’s all gone and life is a million times better. It's a complete lack of respect to make mess for someone else to clean and a relationship where this is a tenet is already functionally over.

My question is, I oftentimes see the advice ‘just don’t do it’ with a view to him one day going ‘oh look this all still needs doing, I can't live like this’ and does it all himself?

Can I ask, has that ever happened?
Also, has anyone ever actually done this?

The thing I always think about this advice is if I could live in such mess I wouldn't be this frustrated.
If you give such advice do you think the days to weeks of trying to function in the mess would even be bearable? I can't see how, and the clean up afterwards would be astronomical.
So, has anyone ever attempted and won a cleaning standoff?

It took me 4 hours to clean and tidy my already pretty clean and tidy home the other day. If I had ever left my husband to it I would have literally had to move house after such an attempt.

My husband and I used to be evenly matched with family related chores. We work the same number of hours and generally spent the same amount of effort keeping our home in a reasonable state clean but not MIL clean! and looking after the children.

He's morphed into a lazy selfish man that doesn't even clear away the mess he makes, let alone helping with the rest of family related chores and activities. Having a standoff doesn't work because he simply doesn't care and my children and I deserve better than to live in a pig sty so I get it done with age appropriate help from the children.

Currently trying to work out how we can get him to leave because that's the only way I can afford to stay in this area for school...just about. But like a few threads I've read on here recently there's a refusal to acknowledge the issue and definitely a refusal to co-operate. LTB is easy to say when there's no impact on your children's education opportunities.

@Natty13 oh please share where this Utopia is!

LTB is easy to say when there's no impact on your children's education opportunities

The reason he's changed into Mr lazy selfish is because the presence of children gives him extra power/ leverage and he can't resist using it.

I’ve just made my peace with it. I’d rather tidy up as I go along and live in a pleasant environment. We have a cleaner. DH pays for most things, is very good about accommodating my medical needs and does things like all the driving when we go abroad.

He’s pretty messy and I’d rather not be a nag or feel resentment so I just do it. I draw the line at dirty toilets.

The only time this had a result of sorts for me was when I decided to stop dusting the TV stand.
The TV is OH's main pastime - he has it on nearly all the time he is in the house, which is most of the time since he retired

Anyway, as the remote is kept on that stand next to the TV overnight, meaning OH regularly stands there right by it, I thought he might eventually notice the dust if I let it build up.
After a few weeks I wrote 'dust me' in it.. It stayed like that for several more weeks but one day I noticed it had actually been cleaned, though nothing was ever said!

Oh, I've just remembered another thing.
These days we sleep in separate bedrooms. I soon decided that I wasn't going to carry on changing what was now 'his bed' for him. It took about six months and a hint from me before he remembered that it wasn't going to change itself any more. He still regularly leaves it for way too long (one / two months), but as long as I don't have to sleep in it, that's his problem now!

This, why would you be doing this man’s laundry??

I had a stand off re scraping my DP’s plates after dinner.

I hate washing up with a passion, but the least he could do is scrape his leftovers into the bin and rinse, thus avoiding food becoming welded to the crockery.

Despite constantly reminding him to scrape his plates, even begging , he still didn’t get the memo. So anything that hadn’t been scraped didn’t get washed up.

After 4 or 5 days I cracked as we were down to the last bowls. I think I washed something ridiculous like 7 pasta bowls, 5 cereal bowls and a couple of dinner plates 😩 He still doesn’t scrape his plates…..

You can't win a standaoff against someone who maintains the standoff by doing fuck all.

You're essentially challenging a lazy git to be a lazy git.

This is not a route to victory.

Honestly not the case for us - this new attitude only emerged during lockdown. I would have expected a response like that to happen before 12 years of parenting, but you're right in as much as he knows I'm pretty powerless because of the children and my wanting to keep them in their current schools.

Thats why it’s such terrible advice. It’s doomed to fail. The laziest one always wins.

I tried everything and in the end left. I thought that would be the ultimate stand off but just had to tell him to sort his house as it was like an unruly teen had been left unchecked for months when I last visited.

Don’t get me wrong, I find keeping on top of thing’s difficult (awaiting an adhd diagnosis and I have a bad habit of doom-piling), but I didn’t realise how messy and unhygienic he was until I left. Even having the kids 90% of the time, it still less chaotic and easier to clean and tidy.

you need to up your game
wash your plates clean
his plates, wash them but only to the level that you wash yours, ie they'll still have old food stuck to them
serve his food on the ones with old food stuck on them

The only way to win a stand off is to make it something that affects them and not you. That's true for children and partners. You can do it with their laundry, or their own room, but most things will affect you as much or more so you can't win with them.

Because I don't like living in mess or dirt and if everything is tidy I can get to deep cleaning things. I gave my house a once over, it needed it, I wasn't cleaning things that were clean. I was organising, changing sheets, dusting, wiping down, dishes... it all took a lot of time and I had a day off.

I would find living in mess ridiculous, we're all different.

close to the beginning of our marriage, pre DCs and both working very full-on jobs we moved to a new place and i said "great, there's space for a dishwasher". To DH saying "we don't need one".

So - outside of the things that i use that need handwashing (one tea cup, and occasionally a dinner service that we don't use often at all) and the time our dishwasher broke down and we couldn't replace it for 2 weeks - i have never done washing up by hand since.

It took until i got out a stack of paper plates for my dinner, and the knife and fork from my SOP kit (army) and ate the one pot dinner I'd cooked in our remaining clean saucepan - we had a stand off and he occasionally washed things he wanted to use (I kept a load of paper cups - i am nothing if not petty). And one day i got home from a long shift to find... a diswasher being installed.

it did get annoying, and it did get a bit grim when he just decided not to wash up, but the hard phase was literally 2 days when he worked long days and i went to McD or something.

After 4 or 5 days I cracked as we were down to the last bowls. I think I washed something ridiculous like 7 pasta bowls, 5 cereal bowls and a couple of dinner plates 😩 He still doesn’t scrape his plates…..

i hadn't read this far (my bad). Paper plates/bowls is what i'd have done. And hidden the pile of them so he couldn't use them. Petty? you bet. Appropriate for someone who has been asked several billion times? absolutely

I’ve just admitted defeat, but paper plates is a good shout. He’d also got through 14 forks and 10 knives out of the 16 we had……

I have always found the 'just don't do it' response immensely frustrating

Partly because I don't want to have to wait to find out what threshold of dirty/messy/nightmare we need to reach before my partner finally acts

But also because I don't want to be with someone who 'can't see' mess, is unwilling to address it even when they do (or will only do so in a poor and limited way), yet happily reaps the benefits of having it all cleaned for them.

I would leave as well. I totally agree about it being disrespectful - I just can't understand men who will go ahead and make so much mess, knowing that they are planning to leave it there for someone else to clean.

Yes. Took six months and involved mould.

I can't believe how many entitled lazy men there are out there. And that they are mostly getting away with it. And the household dynamics being modelled will carry all this on to the next generation.

You don’t need to rinse plates before they go in the dishwasher. What a waste of time!

We don’t have a dishwasher and no space to put one in either - I’ve tried 😭😭

Sorry, off topic but this reply is so Mumsnet, just the bare assumption everyone owns a dishwasher…

the person who wants it done should do it.

I do it but these days I’m not really resentful about it, My DH does all the food shopping, most of the cooking and all the driving. When the DCs were little they went to his school so the bulk of packed lunch making/ early morning child wrangling fell on him. I actually find it quite soothing now it’s just the two of us.