I have a cold take that no one asked me for: Just because you are broke and a twenty-something does not mean you are excused for having a disgusting apartment. Everyone can tidy up, no matter how wealthy they are.
I’m not talking about people in a depressive episode who don’t feel like leaving their bed or leaving their room, or parents with children, or people with long work hours who don’t have the time or energy to vacuum after a double shift. The transgressor is the usual suspect—it seems that once again, I am mad at straight, young men.
Has this ever happened to you: You go to the residence of a gentleman, be he a casual friend or a potential love interest, only to find out that they have never once emptied the dishwasher? You find your attraction for this person slipping away as you wade through piles of dirty clothes in a low lit room with only a single poster on the wall. He suggests you open a bottle of wine, which you drink out of questionably clean coffee mugs since all of his wine glasses are stacked in the sink. Under the guise of “freshening up” you escape to the bathroom to reconsider your decision, only to discover that he has never cleaned his toilet and that there is only one square of toilet paper left. You text your best friends to help you weigh out whether getting laid is really worth the possibility of getting tetanus from the exposed nails poking out of his poorly constructed headboard. Results of the poll are inconclusive.
This has become an instance of increasing regularity in our unfortunate world of modern dating and friendship. If I had a dollar for every time that exact scenario has occurred in my personal life, I would be able to afford to put guac on my Chipotle burritos. It’s not just dating, either. Every male-inhabited dorm room or apartment I ever entered in my college years was just vaguely sticky, as if they had never discovered the joy of Clorox wipes.
Perhaps it is because young men are so often coddled when it comes to splitting labor in the household as children— an article in The New York Times from last year stated that “Although there are a few signs that the gap is shrinking, a variety of data shows that girls still spend more time on household chores than boys do. They are also paid less than boys for doing chores and have smaller allowances.” However, I grew up with only sisters, and my dad loved cleaning more than any other human I have ever met. Given that this article is more than a year old and without a subscription to the Times I can only click on it once without hitting the paywall, can I really stake my claim upon it? It seems that I will have to base my conclusion on personal experience without peer revision. This is a blog, people. Nobody is here to edit me.
Whether it is because household chores are unevenly split among children, or because Home Ec no longer exists and thus no one is learning these skills anymore, or because few 20-something cis men have aspirational Pinterest boards about apartment décor, the disgusting apartment epidemic seems to be sweeping the nation’s straight boys. If I have to enter the home of another man where my shoes are virtually shellacked to the floor with sticky beer juice, I will light it on fire. Good thing I am swearing off of dating for the present moment.
You don’t have to be a woman or love interior design to have an apartment that smells pleasant. You don’t have to be able to afford an expensive one bedroom in the city to have a residence that is not terrifying. You don’t even have to have a housekeeper or a regular cleaning service. The generic paper towels at Target will do the trick, y’all.
At the end of my senior year of college, I lived in a disgusting apartment. The floors were uneven, and we had roaches (shout out to my landlady for calling multiple exterminators even when my roommate said she had never seen any bugs because she didn’t want them to come in and find her illegal dog she had smuggled in). But even though the walls were barely soundproof, and we had no furniture, I still kept my side of the apartment clean. I put my dishes in the dishwasher instead of allowing them to pile up in the sink for a week and a half. I had to keep my cat’s litter box in my tiny room, but I still swept on the regular to keep litter from sticking underfoot. I always flushed the toilet. It’s the little things.
It’s okay if you can’t afford expensive furniture. Your apartment does not have to look like a West Elm catalogue. It just has to be free of accumulated debris. Even if you live in a tiny shithole and you don’t want to spend money on furniture given that you frequently move, you can still at least empty the trash before you have company to at least create the illusion that your apartment is not a hotbed of microbial activity.
If you can’t set up a weekly cleaning schedule or at least get a toilet brush for the bathroom like a functioning adult, you can at least tidy up when you are expecting guests. Do what you want on your own time. But don’t expect me to look over your faults just you’re a busy twenty-something with no money. I am too. But I still clean the moldy fruit out of my refrigerator every once in a while.
So, to any straight, cis dudes who might have had the misfortunate of stumbling upon this aggressive rant: If you want to decrease the chances of your date sprinting out of your house at full speed because they almost contracted rabies from a rogue rat, consider cleaning up after yourself. Or, perhaps, when you text a chick sayying “im bored come over,” take a sweep of the premises and gather the litter of fast food wrappers that has collected in every available empty space. Do whatever you want on your own time. But if you have guests and especially a guest of the romantic variety, do the considerate thing and hide the mess. It’s simple manners.
I think it should be in the guidebook for millennials and Gen Z: If you can’t keep clean on the regular, at least pretend like you do for guests. Not only does it make it less likely that visitors will talk shit to their friends, it asserts that you cared enough about that person to make an effort.
If you can’t muster up the energy to do any of this, consider the classic cop out phrase that suggests this mess is a rare anomaly: “I’m sorry about the mess, I didn’t have time to clean.” I’ll at least appreciate the lie.
Comments