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.
Oh also the biggest thing I did that helped me keep my house cleaner is I got a roomba. Holy shit, best purchase I ever made. It’s the only vacuum I own and while it doesn’t do quite as good of a job as vacuuming manually with my last vacuum, it goes off every morning at 9:15am vs my vacuuming once a week because I hated doing it. I’m on leave from work rn so I often stop it early because it’s loud, but if you work a consistent schedule just have it go off when you leave for work. If you have pets especially it is an absolute world changer. Freshly vacuumed floors every day is fantastic.