Neatniks Always Striving For Perfection

Everything about Pauline McCue gleams. Her clothes gleam. Her car gleams. Her house gleams. Even her dog gleams.

McCue, 31, a furniture sales associate, is into all that is immaculate. She cleans when she needs to reduce stress. She cleans when she’s bored or angry. She cleans for the sheer pleasure of cleaning.

And, when she’s done with her own home, she cleans her mother-in-law’s place.

“I’m a fanatic,” she laughs as she poses for pictures with her cleaning tools in her living room here recently. “And if I knew you wanted me to take out the vacuum, I would have cleaned that, too.”

Everyone knows a Pauline McCue - the relative, friend or co-worker who never has a hair or a possession out of place, who irons sheets, folds underwear and never, ever puts his or her feet up on the coffee table.

McCue is a neatnik, and she’s proud of it.

While Freud’s followers might suggest that a need for neatness is linked to the potty-training experience, and Skinner subscribers might attribute it to a desire for praise, McCue and several other neatniks interviewed say their pursuit of a spotless life is to achieve the ultimate in cleanliness and organization.

Neatness is efficient

Take Barbara Cangi, for example. The 45-year-old Hopkinton, Mass., woman is a high-energy person who “tends to be a little bit of a perfectionist.” To her, neatness is synonymous with order and ease.

For instance, alphabetizing her 200 CDs makes it easier to find a particular artist, she says. Lining up sunscreens in a cabinet according to bottle size and SPF number makes it easier to pick the proper protection. And the money arranged in her wallet in descending order by denomination ($20s in back, $1s in front) makes it easier for her to make swift transactions.

Efficiency is also a key reason for neatness, says Cangi, a Millis High School Spanish teacher. Hanging the clothes in her closet in the order she wears them ensures she will not repeat an outfit during one month, and the shoeboxes she’s labeled with their contents (“navy blue, medium heel”) eliminate searching for the appropriate pair.

“Everything has its place. If things are always in the right place and if they are always in order, I never have to look for anything and I can move on to better things,” said Cangi, who cleans her seven-room home top to bottom for three hours every Saturday, folds towels when she’s in hotel rooms and is famous for fixing crooked pictures in restaurants.

“I don’t think of it as a neat-freak thing, or as obsession, really,” she said. “I think most of what I do, I do out of convenience, and I try not to impose it on other people.”

Life with a neatnik

Being a neat freak is one thing. Living with one is quite another.

Eileen Johnson has been coexisting with her cleanliness-conscious husband, Kevin, for a decade. The Newburyport couple, who have three children under the age of 5, don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on the neatness issue, she says, and they both have had to work on tolerance and compromise.

“We don’t fight about money; we don’t fight about jealousy issues; we fight about the kitchen floor,” says Eileen, 34, an at-home mom. “Basically, I’d rather cover the dirt up with rugs, but he’s always at it. It’s never clean enough for him.”

Eileen says that many times she has come down to the kitchen late at night after putting the children to bed only to find Kevin, 36, an accountant, still in his starched white shirts and wingtips, furiously mopping the floor.

“When we first got married, he would get on his hands and knees and dust the hardwood floors with Pledge,” she says. “That did seem odd to me. It was an inkling of what was yet to come.”

She says her husband follows their year-old daughter with a spray bottle, as she toddles her way through the kitchen, making sure to wipe away her tiny fingerprints from the appliances. And the sight of their disheveled home after his three children have been creating art projects all day is almost more than Kevin Johnson can bear.

“I’ll look at him sometimes and his whole face will contort as he looks around at the mess,” says Eileen. “And I’ll say, ‘Kevin, your head is exploding right now, isn’t it?’ And he’ll blink a couple of times and say, ‘Yes, yes.”’

Psychology of neatness

Most neatniks stress that they are neither anal-retentive nor obsessivecompulsive and that sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Just don’t let the ashes fall on their rugs.

Joseph Tecce, a neuropsychologist at Boston College who has done behavioral research, agrees that, yes, there are some people who enjoy cleaning and there’s nothing more to it. However, he says he thinks there are plenty more who - consciously or not - use neatness as a way of dealing with stress, as a mechanism for gaining control in their lives, to build self-esteem and to produce predictability.

He said being overly neat can be a way of distracting the mind from unpleasantness in one’s life and can be a clear signal of excess anxiety. If it becomes a compulsive disorder - if you can’t leave the house unless it is sparkling clean - then professional help would be in order.

“These people should meditate or should find some other ways to relax,” he suggests. “If you lower the stress level, if you lower the anxiety level, you lower the need for neatness. The house might not be as clean, but you will feel much better inside.”