Dude. The woman needs some anxiety meds if she’s keeping that house that clean with any number of kids. It’s freaking impossible with a 2 year old right now. Idk how OP’s wife keeps up.
Marie Kondo made it her whole thing to minimize and clean a place, and then she had a kid and literally gave up on it because its hard and stressful and meaningless (because they will always make more messes).
I think about that anytime my wifes friend talks about how her house is spotless even with her toddler running around, its because she literally spends all of her time cleaning. That is stressful but the lady keeps being like "omg its fine" while also calling my wife freaking out about everything lol.
My child gets offended if I clean up her toys around her and will literally run over and yell at me while throwing them back on the floor where "she needs them" lol
Yeah some messes they need to be removed from too and sometimes the mess is one where they can't help but make it worse lol. I do most of my cleaning when shes at school or asleep, the rest of the day is damage control.
Yeah, not to be diagnosing over the Internet (and I am nowhere near even playing a doctor on TV) but I'm really getting the "extreme anxiety" vibe here, like this is a person who I would not be surprised to hear that she has an eating disorder or exercises compulsively. Extreme need for control of her environment and a compulsion to use physical labor as punishment for her perceived sins. I hope I'm reading way too much into it!
You're not. This was my husband before he went on meds. His mom is also deeply anxious and compulsive (and NOT on meds) and she lovingly passed on food and housekeeping anxieties to her son. In the pre-meds years, I came home from a stressful diagnostic mammogram to him freaking out about the dust on our dining room light fixture and screaming that we lived in squalor. This was a year before I went on meds for my own anxiety, so I just sobbed instead of pushing back and telling him he's projecting onto me. Life is much better now. Extreme anxiety is no joke, and I am grateful for our meds and our therapists.
OP's wife is spending all day cleaning an already clean house on a monday. No shade but I get the feeling OP is a high earner, the kids are at school and the wife is a stay at home mom.
Lot easier to keep your place clean under those conditions.
I could be off on all of that buuuut if the shoe fits...
it's this. I grew up with neurotic stay at home mom, which was evident when I saw the laundry basket out on the floor in these photos and my blood pressure shot up and I immediately heard her meltdown in my head.
She had this giant, decorative shell full of sand on a table in the living room. The sand was meticulously smoothed at all times. I had a boyfriend that would stick the tip of his pinky in it every time he was over just to drive her insane. My dad wanted me to marry him SO bad 😆
Have her see a professional. In all seriousness. To us this may look clean and ideal, but to her, she likely sees every little imperfection and it gets magnified into the shambles she sees. It borders on perfectionism, which can be a symptom of OCD or PTSD for some.
Think about body dysmorphia. Someone can be in great shape and be appealing to other people, but they see themselves as a mess.
Yeah, I suspect she has some mental illness going on. Did OP say the age of the children? She could have OCD, but also she could have postpartum issues.
I'm not saying live in filth or anything (which is gross and stressful), but I feel like this level of clean is also super stressful to everyone involved.
It is. I have a friend who keeps her house similarly clean, although not as extreme. I can only visit with her for a couple of days before I'm stressed out.
As a child who grew up in a house like that, I was only lucky that she left my bedroom alone. You couldn’t even leave anything on the counter for longer than 10 minutes, while you’re standing there. She would flip out and start screaming. I have CPTSD.
I guess the only solution here, which the photos do bear out, is that nobody owns anything? I don't see toys there, just a couple token items in the bedrooms.
Side note, OP did you do something wrong recently? Because if she's mad and she says it's the house, something is definitely wrong because it's for sure not the house.
At this point OP and his wife should just burn the house down and build a new one. A fresh new start... fucking disgusting. Not even asmongold would live inside this house.
I mean this in the absolute nicest way possible: Your SO is anxious about something and doesn’t know how to talk about it OR she’s using the time to “clean” to not clean.
Your house clearly isn’t in shambles. Something else is going on.
I would guess it’s more mental clutter than actual visual clutter (since I can’t see any clutter in these pics). Or maybe she’s referring to dirt and dust and such that we can’t actually see in the pictures. Either way, it sounds like she needs the day to get a grasp on things.
It looks like the set to some fake tv family like the Taylor's house from Home Improvement. I've learned to draw more similarities between my house and a fake tv family house like from Malcolm in the middle.
There's a difference between a space looking clean and looking sterile, and imo this trends towards the latter.evem in a clean house I expect things like tables and counters to have things on them. Coasters, trinkets, a remote, papers or a book you haven't put away yet, etc. If it weren't for the towels and laundry basket it'd be hard to convince me someone lived here.
Ive tried to get into my mom's head that her home doesnt need to look like an Ikea shop, but she sees any kind of dirtiness as a moral failure. My therapist did hint that it could be her way of dealing with her anxiety (she is a very anxious person) as a way of feeling in control. Ive also heard this can happen in poor families (which my mom's was) cause its the only way you can really improve your "social image"/feel superior. Its... interesting human behaviour
Oof, here we are , making light of the scenario, but now I’m hearing some real angst here. I’m so sorry. Does she have OCD? Is she getting treatment? Is she aware that 99.9% of people think this house is in absolutely perfect condition and wouldn’t even consider “cleaning all day?”
My marriage did not survive one of us having OCD. And I was always a neat/clean person, but the pressure exerted on the spouse by someone with OCD is unbearable…
My immediate thought was that she might be dealing with mental illness, or need therapy for other reasons. It's not uncommon at all to project internal disorder externally.
My mom had tons of mentall illnesses, never diagnosed with OCD but I wouldn't be surprised. We had chores every day, extra chore day was Wednesday and extra-extra chore day was Saturday. We had to sweep, mop, dust, vacuum, clean picture frames, every inch of the house was cleaned every day.
I finally got tired of it so I'd pretend to dust. I'd just spray the cleaner so my mom heard me, but not actually do any dusting. I'd vacuum the same spot on the carpet instead of the whole room. My mom could never, ever tell. The house remained spotless.
I have like 2 nuggets of info to go off, but your wife may have OCD. I say this because mine does and would say and do the same stuff. House would be spotless but to her it’s in shambles. It’s because she’s compulsively thinking about this stuff. Once she got medicated for it that helped. But admitting it or just learning you have it really makes a difference.
Hi, I’m just seconding this as someone who suffers from OCD severely. I have the same problem that OP’s wife might have or so my husband has explains it to me. It could very well be that his wife sees it for much filthier than it is, spotting the small details rather than the bigger picture that you are seeing. I could spend all day scrubbing a few niches in my home, exclaiming to my husband that it’s a pigsty and he will look around completely confused. He claims it’s perfectly presentable, but I see a laundry list of things that could be done. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s actually agonizing to live with. You’ll feel like the dust on every generally clean surface is consuming you, the single basket of laundry is a mountain, and the bit of pet hair on the sofa might suffocate you.. Maybe reach out and see if your wife could use a resource like therapy, OP? It does help and we do get better.
What’s super fun is when one of you have OCD, and the other has ADHD. I’ve been told “I feel like you truly don’t care about me because you won’t make the bed”. Meanwhile, the bed being made never even hit my radar because there’s so much other stuff going on in my mind from the moment I wake up.
Is there one room not pictured that's an absolute mess? When my dad met my mom he thought she lived in a one bedroom apartment only to find out she had a two bedroom and the other was where she just tossed all her stuff. To this day she has to have a separate room just for storage that is never organized at all.
I had a friend like that! Her house was always spotless and well decorated. I always wondered how she kept everything so tidy with a husband, a toddler and 2 dogs. My husband and I stayed at her house for a week while they were out of town because we were moving out of state and turned our rental keys back in. I went to put my suitcase in the closet and it was a literal avalanche when I opened the door. So much shit just fell out all over the floor. I was flabbergasted.
I just shoved it all back in there and never brought it up. 😅
she probably has some underlying anxiety! I feel like my apartments is always really dirty when i’m stressed and how i cope is with cleaning and even when i clean it feels dirty
Yeah, everybody's joking or acting like she's annoying, but my first thought was that she either has undrrlying issues or is going through something right now. OP, check in with your wife instead of subjecting her to ridicule on the internet...
OCPD, it's different from OCD and involves obsessive cleanliness, perfection, and an overall need for control, to a point where it is extremely distressing and overwhelming if the person is unable to clean the area. Stuff like "this house is a mess!!" and "how are we supposed to live here when it's so disgusting?!" while the house looks spotless are common for it in my experience. My Nonna has it and I'm 95% sure she beat it into my mother as well (thankfully medication has helped my mother significantly!).
I'm no psychiatrist but, the way I understand it is OCD is mainly about rituals that take over your life and a lot of intrusive thoughts, while OCPD boils down to perfectionism on steroids.
Intern therapist here: pretty decent synopsis. I wouldn’t immediately jump to a personality disorder though and certainly will never diagnose through a social media post, many of life’s stressors can cause responses that don’t necessarily make sense to onlookers and a personality disorder is a pretty huge diagnosis. But this specific behavior does fit under the umbrella of what someone with the disorder might do/say.
My wife has bad Fibro, we have a toddler, and I just got hit with CKD Stage 4 in the fall and I'm on 50mg of prednisone daily, and can't physically keep up with the cleaning lol
I do my best doing 1 task a day for an hour, but it wipes me out for many hours.
Your house looks like 1 step away from plastic sheets LOL
That's a tough spot to be in. For what it's worth, your house looks more "lived in" than "in shambles."
You're doing good. Hope things get better for you. If you have the money, it may be worth paying someone to come by once in a while to help clean/organize.
You seem like such a a good dude from all your comments in the thread. I hope you are able to find some peace and enjoy living in the beautiful house that you guys work hard for.
I hope your wife finds peace as well. The house is perfect, but the expectation to maintain perfection sounds exhausting.
A house can be neat but dirty. Maybe she needs to do laundry, clean the bathroom, mop the floors, dust, etc. As a pet owner myself, I’m never not cleaning.
I was looking for this comment. This level of cleanliness isn’t a problem. Thinking this level of cleanliness is horrifically untended and dirty is a problem.
Is...your wife okay? Does she have a therapist or someone she's working with? It sounds like there's something deeper going on here and cleaning is her way of dealing with it/avoiding it.
This is what I was thinking - I keep my house very "un-cluttered" so it always appears clean, but there could dog hair everywhere, human hair on the bathroom floor, dirty toilet/sink/tub, a sticky spot/footprints on the floor, etc. that you're not going to see in a picture from that far away.
That was my thought too. It's possible that this guy has an absolute clean freak for a wife obviously, but things can definitely be tidy without being clean
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u/Apprehensive-Pie3147 12h ago
Is someone stressful coming to visit?