Odd Couple Your Relationship May Not Be Felix And Oscar, But If Both Roles Are Filled, Chances For Happiness Are Improved

My husband doesn’t know about this - and please, “please” don’t go blabbing to him - but last Tuesday I threw out a very large stack of mail, including a Time magazine whose cover story proclaimed Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory, a package of outdated grocery store coupons, a 1992 L.L. Bean catalog, three letters from Ed McMahon and Dick Clark beginning “You may have already won …” and several invitations to (a) buy life insurance, (b) renew his subscription to Woodshop News, (c) contribute to his college alumni fund and (d) increase his credit card limit.

Yes, I know it’s underhanded, but while we’re on the subject of credit cards, if Visa and MasterCard have their limits, so do I. Either that mail was going or I was.

To tell the truth, I’m a neat freak. I don’t just give our apartment a going-over before our cleaning woman comes, I wash it down after she leaves, too. If you haven’t read the paper by 9 a.m., you’re out of luck - it’s history. When I was young and foolish and childless (thus had a lot of discretionary time), I would categorize the cans in the pantry and alphabetize the spices. It would cause me real psychic pain to see the chives had somehow crept in front of the chervil.

I would defy anyone to maintain an immaculate household with two toddlers without losing her patience or her mind, but I try. Like General Sherman on the march, I pick up toy train tracks as I pass through the living room, T.C. Timber pieces from the front hall and Play-Doh plastic molds from the depths of the potty. A few months ago, in the middle of my son’s third birthday party, I mopped up the kitchen floor - a move that makes about as much sense as hanging out the wash to dry in the middle of a monsoon. A psychiatrist would, no doubt, say I’m compulsive. I would say I know where everything is in the linen closet.

Now, about my husband, Michael: It’s not that he’s a total slob. Not exactly. Why, he’ll redistribute the mound of clusters in the middle of the room just as soon as it begins obstructing his view of the TV. That unruly heap of mail spread on the table by the front door? Be patient; he’ll get around to it just as soon as there’s a climate change in hell.

Who’s neat, who’s not

My first inclination is to assume that the gene for tidiness is located somewhere on the X chromosome, just as the gene for sloppiness and disorganization is to be found somewhere on the Y chromosome, but that’s just a bit too simplistic.

The fact is that when I was a child, my mother referred to me as Typhoon Mary because of the scandalous condition of my bedroom. It was only as an adult that I let neatness into my life, possibly as reaction to moving from my parents’ large house to a cell-like New York apartment. Or perhaps my apartment simply looked tidy when you measured it against those of the men I was dating.

“Everybody is neat or messy in comparison to someone else,” says Arlene Kagle, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in New York City. “These things are relative.” Any two people who live together, she believes, ultimately come to define one person in the relationship as the fearsomely fastidious Felix Unger of “The Odd Couple” fame. And that, by default, leaves the other person in the role of Oscar Madison.

Depending on the situation, those roles can change. In her first marriage, my friend Jill was cast as Felix; the second time around she’s playing Oscar. Rest assured that nothing about Jill’s habits have changed. Her bedroom closet is still a disaster; her coat still hits the parquet as she walks into the house. It’s just that husband number one didn’t mind the messiness - he knew that Jill would crack before he did and tidy things up. Meanwhile, her second husband has been known to make the bed while she’s still in it. “Oh, that’ll look nice on the floor,” he notes cheerfully whenever she buys a new dress.

How can two people with such different styles live together without coming to very messy blows? “There’s a certain amount of mess the neat person has to be able to tolerate (or else) the other person will feel himself to be back in kindergarten, always being controlled,” says Kagle. The first maxim of Odd Couple cohabitation is that “the sloppy person has to contain the mess to an area that is sufficiently limited either in size or scope to be tolerable to the neat person.”

That is essentially the accommodation my husband and I have reached. A portion of our bedroom has been designated the slob corner. He is allowed to toss into it whatever muck he wants with out my making threatening comments or comparisons to him and certain barnyard residents.

My compulsively neat friend, Ann, who’s married to compulsively messy Peter, makes a distinction between private mess and public mess. Private mess is, by her definition, the sock or suit jacket on the floor of the bedroom. Public mess is the pile of magazines in the living room, the dirty dishes on the table in the kitchen. While Ann is perfectly willing to give a certain amount of latitude for the sock, “I’m considerably less understanding about the Hansel and Gretel trail in the kitchen,” she says.

A perfect match

To be honest, there’s a part of me that is secretly pleased that my husband is considerably less tidy than I am. For one thing, I get to feel both put-upon and superior. But on a more practical level, the union between a person who is on a firstname basis with Mr. Clean and a person whose untidiness makes it impossible to walk into his walk-in closet is really the best design for living.

Think about it for a minute. Imagine two people, both messy, joined together in holy matrimony. With all that old, forgotten food accumulating on the back of the shelves, the refrigerator would resemble a repository for lab experiments gone wrong. The bed would never get made. What with all those clothes piled on top of it, the bed would never get found.

Two neat freaks would be a step worse. My friend Stacy, an interior designer, and her husband, Greg, a dentist, actually engage in competitive cleaning, which not infrequently leads them to arguments about the best method for scrubbing the bathroom.

Perhaps the best one can hope for is that the tidy person in the marriage can put a little starch in the shorts of the slob, and that the messy one can get the neat freak to ease up a bit. Surely there must be a compromise between cleaning the kitchen floor three times a day and cleaning it three times a year.

I think mabye Michael and I are getting closer to jointly habitable ground. Why, just last night he polished our copper pots without my suggesting it. And just this morning, I left the house without making the bed or, come to think of it, re-polishing the pots.<