Okay… But…
If you have a comforter, and you don’t give a fuck, it doesn’t matter.
I speak from experience. Me and my partner never make our beds. Not ever. We’re happy.
I learned early in life (from ocd parenting figures) that you have to set a certain level of clean you need in your life to how much of your life is taken up by it.
I know people who spend their entire waking hours cleaning. Can’t have 1 dirty dish. Floor cannot have a spec. Lawn must be pure green grass so kill all dandelions and any “weed” (also this is terrible for the environment but anyway). All glass absolutely spotless. Its sad how much of their life they spend just cleaning, to me anyway.
I just have a rule that I don’t let things be disgusting. Do I have dishes in the sink? Yes. Is it overflowing and molding? No. I vacuum and sweep maybe once every couple weeks or if it gets visually dirty faster.
I have way more important things in life than keeping things spotlessly clean.
Making a bed? Never done once in adult life. Complete waste of time for me. washing bedsheets and blankets, obviously yes we have to do that.
Funny enough, this threshold for what you find dirty or gross can cause a lot of relationship strife within a household as partners may have different thresholds for this.
Generally, the partner that has a lower threshold for when they feel like things are too dirty or too messy or too gross and it starts bugging them feels like they do most of the cleaning work because they start feeling stressed and end up cleaning earlier then the other.
I noticed this and tried constantly cleaning what I could but I still don’t think it was enough, I just never noticed what they found messy/unclean :<
I just have a rule that I don’t let things be disgusting.
Some people who spend their entire waking hours cleaning believe exactly the same as you. They just have different thresholds of “disgusting”. My in-laws are like that. I’m much closer to you; where I can easily accept untidy, but not dirty.
My mom found out she had HIV two months after I was born. I grew up a bit of a germiphobe. On top of conditioning me out of my entitlement and generally making me a better person, homelessness was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it cured me of a certain level of OCD as I learned that “dirty” is not nearly as “disgusting” as I once thought. I’m generally messy being schizoaffective, meaning there’s order to my chaos, but I still keep things clean, just not with the OCD of “if I don’t clean this plate I ate a sandwich on right now, I will get airborne syphilis,” or what-have-you.
I’m also very much organized chaos. My wife will “helpfully” put things “where they go”. She hasn’t yet (in nearly 20 years…) figured out that if it’s mine “where it goes” is “where I put it”. I’m generally consistent with where I put things, but there’s little reason to any particular place for things.
Yeah exactly. I dont allow visible dirtyness basically. So some dust, whatever. Actual dirt or mud or food crumbs? Yeah I’ll clean that.
3 dishes in sink? Its fine. 20 dishes and sink is full? Yes we need to do dishes.
It also depends on the area. I clean my kitchen more than the basement.
Making a bed? Never done once in adult life. Complete waste of time for me. washing bedsheets and blankets, obviously yes we have to do that
Well now I’m curious - you don’t make the bed when putting on the clean sheets and blankets?
Routine is probably the most important part of building a cleaning habit. I’m very similar in that there’s a certain level of untidiness that is perfectly acceptable in my home. Gotta keep on top of everything somewhat so that there isn’t health consequences, mental or physical.
Nah. I put the fitted sheets and pillowcases on, then throw the blankets on top ha
Exactly what we do! I “make” the bed when I get into it, using my feed to kick out the blankets.
Ha, well thanks for answering! That’s certainly a way to do it :D
Me and the dog will mess up the blankets anyway haha we thrash around in sleep
I live with a household of people who do not make their beds. It’s hard to explain the immense satisfaction I get slipping into a perfectly made bed. It takes all types hahaha
It’s funny, I’m not a bed maker either, but when I put new sheets on I make it perfect, only to come back that night and untuck the sheets and whatnot because I like my legs out. It’s pointless, but I do love getting into fresh sheets.
Growing up somewhere cold with usually just enough blankets, I would often need to wrap the blankets around me to fully trap the heat. When the sheets are solidly tucked in, you have to rip them out before you can wrap.
I am basically never comfortable in a made bed. If I visit a friend and the guest bed has the sheets tucked in, I have this low level subconscious response of “I guess that’s one more thing I have to deal with now.” Not that they are wrong for doing it, but it does grate a tiny bit versus sleeping at home.
I had that, which is why decades ago I switched to a sleeping bag.
“How you do anything is how you do everything.”
or
“Life in every breath.”
I’ve made a bed a handful of times in my life. The one time I remember specifically was when I had my first girlfriend over to my house when I was 17.
If you don’t want to make your bed, don’t do it. After 60 years of not making my bed, I’ve suffered zero ill effects.
“Exactly, there’s so much shit you have to do over and over in life, why add unnecessary things to it??”
Some people are experts at making more pointless busywork for themselves. My parents had a real knack of storing things that need to be used in one room and replaced often… as far away as possible. Like who the fuck keeps spare kitchen paper towels in the bedroom?
A nod to my parents on this one: up until age 12 or so, it was just mattress, fitted sheet, and sleeping bag.
Mom even sewed little straps to the non-zipper side of the sleeping bag, which secured to the bedframe: kept my dumb ass from rolling out of bed without needing to screw around with rails.
Make the bed? Just pull the corner on the foot and head opposite the straps. 2 seconds, perfectly flat.
Eventually I switched to normal sheets and such cuz in my brain, sleeping bags were for kids!! …aka, the parents tricked me into wanting to make the bed cuz I’m a big boi, see?!
Well played mom and dad. 10/10
Good attempt at a lesson, terrible actual chain of logic.
The attempted lesson here is presumably that things require regular maintenance and attention, in order to keep working well, working as they have been.
So… ‘wash your bedding once a month, or after a spill or accident’… or … ‘clean your room once a week, so that it doesn’t get so messy that you lose things or trip over stuff’ … or … ‘try your best to clean up dishes and cookware and put them away soon after you use them, so that the next time you need to use them, you can usually just assume they will be usable’.
A made bed?
I mean yeah, it can be useful as a simple routine for the sake of establishing any routine, or as regular mild excercise.
But an actual bed that is unmade… being not tidy does not make it more liable to degrading over time, unless shit is literally strewn across the room.
Or… unless you have some kind of very particular linens of something, where being crumpled will ruin their structural integrity…?
I’m trying to be generous here, but I think this is just an aesthetic preference masquerading as somehow … actually functional.
Keeping your sheets and blankets clean, yeah that’s functional.
Keeping them super tidy?
OCD pretending to not be OCD.
I too also have some pressing news about bed making.
Mao’s Little Red Book has a reminder to wipe your ass
Try a hammock. Always made, you can actually wash it (mattresses, ew). Good for your back, super comfortable.
