I'm married and unfortunately for my poor wife I have some kind of hole in my brain that doesn't allow me to notice or care about things being tidy or organized. I'll often get asked why I didn't pick up the trash that was in my path through the apartment or if I noticed the garbage is getting piled up.
I will always do chores when asked, I have no objection to handling the necessary labor of managing a household. The problem is my wife doesn't want to have to ask and I want her to be happier.
I often will try to motivate myself to take stock of each room I'm in before i leave and try to leave it cleaner but after maybe a day or two it's out of my mind. I just don't get any dopamine from things being clean and it's hard to form a habit.
Before I lived with someone else I basically never cleaned until it was severely impacting my daily life, did a big clean that took like an entire weekend, then just let it get just as bad.
How does one break this kind of behaviour? Some kind of shock therapy? Am I a lost cause? My current plan is to write a list of chores and things to check after work before settling in for the night but I'm skeptical as it's not the first chore list I've made.
I'm pretty bad about this and so is my girlfriend. Basically we do a big clean every weekend, takes about an hour. Basically, I set a timer, and try to clean as much as possible in that time frame. Try setting 20 minutes at first and see how much you can do in that time frame, you would be very suprised. Work up to an hour. 15 minutes on week nights should easily cover a lot of the clutter or mess though and then take care of things mainly on the weekend.
Inevitably our apartment goes to shit during the week but I generally try to clean dishes and pick up stuff as we go (unfortunately she has total blindness for dishes and just throws them in the sink but what are you gonna do). By Friday though it's a mess and then Saturday we'll wake up and do a clean and that will generally take us to the next Wednesday or Thursday no problem