Dear Eric: My husband and I are in the middle age of life and have had a very happy marriage of almost 30 years.
He adeptly manages the household, and I support our family financially by running my own successful small business. But we have a significantly different view of what constitutes a “clean house”.
We were both raised by immigrant parents from different cultures and whereas my childhood family’s culture prized cleanliness and orderliness, my husband’s culture put very little value on these principles. Thus, while our current house is by no means a pigsty, it is very often rife with dust, grime, and clutter, and I am often embarrassed when comparing the inside of our house to those of our friends.
We do well financially and could easily afford a weekly visit from a housekeeper, and I have begged my husband to allow us to hire one, but his culture also shuns “strangers” entering the house for security reasons, even if it were a trusted worker.
Is there any hope for our household to ever live up to my standard of cleanliness, or will I just have to grit my teeth and put my best face on when we have guests visit?
– Depressed About Disorder
Dear Disorder: I don’t see why his culture should win out in this dirty dustup. It’s your house, too, and your own expectations and your cultural traditions should be honored, too. Moreover, if you’re bringing in the money to pay for it, your husband’s veto should have no power.
Now, maybe that’s not how your marriage works, but you should at least have an equal say. The state of your house is causing you anxiety; this is a shared burden, not one you have to grit your teeth and bear.
A few options: frame the cleanliness issue as one that directly impacts the health of your marriage and ask him how you can work together to address it. Or hire a friend who cleans houses, thereby creating a loophole in the “strangers” embargo. Or tell him to just ignore the cleaning you arrange like he ignores the grime.
Dear Eric: I live in an area that in the summer gets over 100 degrees. So, even our mornings are hot. I have an acquaintance who is a lovely person. My issue is her clothes. She wears very short skirts or dresses. When she bends to pick up her dog’s business you can see her underwear. I personally don’t care. I can easily divert my eyes. But others might be offended, or she could get “cat called”. Should I say something to her?
– Short Question
Dear Short Question: No, please don’t. Though you have good intentions, commenting on the length of her clothes is more likely to make her self-conscious than it is to help her. Were it a single dress that was very short, I could see the logic in giving her a quick FYI. But this is her style and, presumably, it’s comfortable for her. Better to have a friend who accepts her – and protects her against catcalls, should they happen – than a friend whom she suspects is judging her.
Dear Eric: I would recommend that “Moving On”, who wants to dispose of her unwanted old yearbooks, consider the needs of others beyond her and her husband.
Yearbooks are valuable sources of information of times past, not just for the people who attended the high school but also relatives, people doing genealogical research, later students at the school, professional historians and such.
Yearbooks as valuable sources are evidenced by the sale of yearbooks online, collections of yearbooks in libraries, digital libraries of yearbooks stored at state and local libraries. I myself worked with the local historical society of my hometown to scan and post as many yearbooks as we could locate, yet for all of our effort, we still have not located yearbooks from the last 40 years.
– Yearbook Collector
Dear Collector: You’re right. Many of you wrote about how much you treasure the yearbooks of loved ones. (And one person wrote about how yearbooks at a local library have been useful for FBI investigations. Never would have guessed.) Donating and digitizing are good options for those looking to declutter.
Dear Eric: Re: “Moving On”, please donate them to local historical societies or even the school that issued them. They might not have all copies in their archives or libraries.
For example, I help out at the Montebello Historical Society. We are trying to collect Montebello High School yearbooks. Many important local people are in them. We would welcome such a donation to our archives.
– Looking in Montebello
Dear Montebello: Thanks for this. I hope that any readers who have Montebello yearbooks to donate reach out to you.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110.)
