There are many polarities within married couples – introverts and extroverts, nurturers and providers, controllers and slackers and so forth. But one of the most fundamental is the division between the hoarder and the purger.
I am a purger; my wife is a hoarder. No – she won’t stand for that actually. She is a recycler and I am a planet polluter. Old ladies who were once mocked for buying devices that compressed scraps of soap into new bars or forced the last molecule out of a toothpaste tube (such gadgets could usually be found in the small ads of the Daily Express) are no longer neurotic – they are environmental warriors.
Yet I suspect that waste for a certain kind of person is what sex was to the Victorians – a moral crime beyond discussion. There is environmentalism – and there are people who just hate to throw things away.
Often I throw things out that have not been used or worn for a couple of years only to discover them back where I found them a day later. The reason offered is usually that they will go to the school fair/the clothing bank/the plastic bag recycling unit/a friend who needs a ripped pair of trousers with a stain on the knee. The reality is that for some people getting rid of stuff hurts.
For my wife and I this conflict reached its apogee with Ovenglovegate. We have an old oven glove that is worn at the tips. One of our daughters used it and burned her hand through the fabric. I threw it away, only to find it reinstated the next day. I let it go, until I burned my hand using exactly the same glove. In a pain-induced tantrum, I cut it up and threw it into the bin.
I found it, the next day, sewn together and returned to whence it came.
I admit it – cutting up an oven glove is quite an aggressive act and one fuelled by the fact that my finger really fucking hurt. I should have just gone out and bought another oven glove. Getting rid of it could be seen as a form of bullying, and that may have been what my wife was responding to in resurrecting it. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a health and safety issue.
There is just so much stuff there in the house – stuff that seems to be generated from nowhere and is impossible to get rid of. There are parts of games, half-formed sets of playing cards, plastic toys that are possibly connected with some other plastic toy elsewhere in the house, lone chess pieces, loyalty cards, rubber bands, things that no one can identify. I would pick them up and sling them all in the bin. But I can’t. Because one day, somehow, they might come in useful. Or so I’m told.
As a purger, I enjoy cleaning out cupboards, and also the fridge. The cupboard under the stairs is a particular favourite, because it is invariably full of an astonishing amount of detritus that regenerates almost immediately after each clear out. I can see my wife getting anxious every time I go under there, checking and rechecking that what I am throwing out is not going to “come in useful one day”.
The fridge, meanwhile, is about 60% full of substances and foodstuffs that are either green when they are not meant to be green, or brown when they are meant to be green. But I can bitch all I like, the moral argument is all on my wife’s side. It may be damaging our relationship, but it’s saving the planet.
This I confess – the other day I found a pair of jeans I thought I’d thrown out because I would never fit into them again. My wife secretly preserved them. Now I’ve lost 10lb and they fit. I’d forgotten all about them. I was delighted. I won’t forget about them again. Believe me, I won’t be allowed to.
