Re: I like small projects, my wife likes large ones

[Anonymous]

This could be my house, except I’m you and my husband is your wife.

When I cook, I clean up as I go. It’s rare that I cook, though, as I never learned how, and find it very challenging to read and follow a recipe. When the meal is ready to eat (only 1 dish), the kitchen is clean, and I insist that we clean up after the meal.

My husband, on the other hand, uses every pot & pan in the house (he’s the regular cook), never cleans up, leaves a Jackson Pollock splatter masterpiece on the stovetop and walls, and doesn’t see what the problem is.

I also go nuts when he puts dishes in the sink rather than the dishwasher because I really hate handling wet mucky dishes! Can’t get him to change that either.

My kitchen rule is that we need to clean up before we start cooking (or it gets major worse if he’s doing the cooking), and we clean up after cooking. I can’t do much about the mess he makes after cooking and before we eat, but it works. We do it together (including the emptying and filling of the dishwasher) because neither one of us likes to do it alone.

Try reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are” – there’s a good tale in there about his wife’s habit of leaving the cat’s dishes (dirty) in the sink along with the “people” dishes. She never stopped doing it but he grew more comfortable with it.

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