The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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It partly depends on how committed you are to your roommate.
I am usually the messier person in this situation, and did not like having neater housemates. They would get upset with my slovenliness, and I would get upset about them being judgy and uptight. They thought I was free riding, I thought they were making unnecessary work for themselves. One older woman was especially terrible to live with, because she didn't realize that her preferences were preferences, and thought that my other roommate and I were simply bad people for having messier living standards. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/she-divorced-me-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink_b_9055288
The solution was to eventually marry someone about as messy as myself. We now clean up (not very thoroughly) about once a week, and feel better about ourselves afterwards. In the meantime, we have a baby and a toddler, so things get very dirty. If we ever have money, we will first clean up what we ourselves notice, and then hire someone else to come in and clean the things we do not notice, which is a lot.
Other reasonably stable situations have included living in households with a full time homemaker in them, in foreign exchange and English teaching situations. I was still messier than them, they still ended up doing way more housework than me, but they seemed to consider that their actual job, and not something to get resentful over.
Something to consider when having these conversation is that having to maintain higher cleanliness standards they prefer wears both on you and on the other party, but the other party might feel ashamed to admit their actual preferences, leading them to promise to do things and then not actually do them. Maybe they say they will scrub the bathroom once a week, but to them that means a bit of spraying and a couple of wipes, and to you it means some kind of deep clean. When bringing this up, try to remember that it is likely that what they are doing represents their actual preference. They are cleaning until they are comfortable with the situation, and a bit more than they want to make you more comfortable. They may not have an intuition for what will or won't bother you.
When I had my first baby and no washing machine, I washed clothes every two weeks, sometimes every three. Sometimes I bought baby clothes because it was easier than washing that week. That wasn't because I thought someone else would wash them if I just held out long enough (I knew for sure that they wouldn't). It was because I was more willing to wear the same shirt three times than sit at the laundromat reading sad texts about the screaming baby. Clean people sometimes don't realize that people really live like this when they aren't around, and make comments like the messier person is just waiting for them to do the housework for them. That probably isn't true.
Anyway, in the long run there are two solutions. Find a housemate with similar preferences, or the neater person takes on more homemaking duties in exchange for the messier person doing something else instead (usually involving spending more money, but it could involve things like homemade decorations or gardening or something else non-financial to make the living situation more pleasant)
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