Dating Disasters·
CLEANLINESS VS KIDS
Two partners clash over whether a spotless home can coexist with raising children, as one urges reality and the other clings to pristine standards.
Can a spotless home and kids both work?
Be one of the first to vote.
A spotless apartment, a germaphobic girlfriend, and one blunt warning: if they had kids, the dirt was coming in anyway.
The 25-year-old poster says her girlfriend Amy, 27, is brilliant, meticulous, and intensely clean. Amy works in a clean room handling computer chips. At home, she keeps her toothbrush in a zip-locked bag in the hallway outside the bathroom. Her apartment is "spotless." She showers two or three times a day. Her car has no dirt on the floor. She even hand-washes her clothes after wearing them.
The poster says she is not a slob, just not on Amy's level.
The problem came up when the couple started talking more seriously about the future. Amy wants kids "desperately," and the poster wants children too. But the poster says Amy has never really been around babies or little kids, and seems to think she could keep both a baby and a house perfectly clean.
That's where she pushed back.
Having grown up around children and babysat since she was ten, she told Amy there was simply no such thing as a clean toddler. Not for long. "There's no such thing as a clean toddler, not for longer than ten minutes at the very most," she said.
She tried to spell out what that actually means in real life: diapers, vomit, frogs smuggled into the house, jam on clothes, soup bowls tipped over, grape juice spilled across the floor, nail polish on the walls. A child can be watched closely and still leave a mess in seconds.
Amy did not take that well. She said kids who do those things are just "poorly trained" and don't have good boundaries.
The poster explained that toddlers do not operate like miniature adults. They lack fine motor control. They lack impulse regulation. Accidents happen. Mess happens. If Amy wanted children, she would have to accept that a spotless house and a spotless kid would not be possible at the same time.
That's when the argument turned.
Amy accused her of "not being supportive," of "trying to find excuses not to have kids with her," and of "trying to guilt her into being sloppier." The poster says she started doubting herself in the middle of it all. Maybe, she wondered, her own family had just been "excessively messy" because they were rural and poor. Maybe her standards were too low. Maybe she and Amy "really haven't tried hard enough."
She turned to outsiders for perspective, especially parents, because the question hanging over the fight was simple: can someone stay that clean and still have kids?