"The Pile of Clothes"

In my professional life, I have a general adult psychotherapy practice.  What this means is that I work only with people over 18 years of age; I treat issues ranging from depression to anxiety, to obsessive-compulsive disorder, to eating disorders, to posttraumatic stress disorder, sexual dysfunction, and more.

The bulk of my work falls in the category of "relationship issues".  (My specialty is infidelity, but that's another story.)  In other words, I do a lot of couples and marital therapy.  Now, couples come into therapy with a vast range of concerns, but, after a certain amount of time together, husband and wife may simply become disgruntled with each other and their idiosyncracies.  I sometimes call this the "pile of clothes" syndrome.

When we're just starting out in a relationship, we tend to be much more tolerant of someone's peculiarities and annoyances, whether it's being consistently late, being a finicky eater, or simply depositing one's "stuff" around the house.  This can be piles of mail (I confess to a bit of this), or the proverbial "pile of clothes".  I can't count the times I've heard from women "He just drops his clothes on the floor and they pile up for an entire week.  He'll even just drop them right in front of the clothes hamper."

Well, there are different ways to respond to this irritant.  One, of course, is to repeatedly complain to your spouse or partner.  Clinical experience, however, suggests that this approach accomplishes very little.  Your spouse may or may not change his behavior in response to your nagging--for a time.  Another approach is to become the "clothes martyr".  What this means is that you decide it's your job to manage the clothes pile, but you do it with deep and audible sighs, and you suffer largely in silence.  Of course, you can always try the rational approach of explaining to your spouse why the clothes pile is a problem; but he or she may simply not agree that it is.  It's not a problem to him.  If it were, he'd likely do something about it.

Finally, one option is to reconsider what that pile of clothes signifies.  Yes, it may be unsightly and may "spoil" your otherwise spotless and tidy house.  Yes, it may signify to you that you haven't adequately "trained" your spouse.  One other way to think about that mound of clothes is that it signifies something other than messiness or disregard for your feelings.  As long as the pile is there--and continues to grow, within reasonable limits--your beloved is alive and well.  He'll return home from work, change his clothes, and add to the pile.  It's when you lose a loved one, whether through death or divorce, that the pile disappears forever.  And that can be a very lonely way to live.  So, some measure of acceptance of a spouse's foibles and annoying habits can help to orient us to what we really value in life and what we really don't want to lose.