Thoughts on marriage, year two

I am grateful for a lot of things about Mike. He is kind and funny and responsible and loving and a great friend. But there is one thing that, when I tell people about it, they look at me like I won the lottery.

He does 95% of our laundry.

And he does it weekly. All of it. The 5% I contribute usually involves folding things with him and putting away my own clothes. Or making a half-assed attempt at starting one load, then forgetting about it in the washer until he just jumps in and poof, all the laundry is done.

Before we lived together, I would wait until the last pair of clean underwear was on my body, then I’d wash just the right amount of clothing to get me through a week or so, plus all the underwear. There were clothes at the bottom of that pile that were never worn again. 

In addition to the laundry magic, Mike makes sure we don’t run out of things. There is a tower of toilet paper and always staples like flour and milk and dish soap but also nice things like parchment paper. And chocolate.

They say it's very European to go to the grocery store every day, so I am CLASSY. I prefer to just pick up what's for dinner, cook it, and to forget that paper products are finite. 

Before Mike, I managed to stay clean and fed. But not like a grownup. It was a common crisis to be texting my roommate asking her to steal a roll of toilet paper from work/the bar/wherever she was because we were OUT. No more cocktail napkins, no travel-sized Kleenex, OUT. Nothing says classy like a stolen roll of 1-ply from a bar.

And so there is no complaining about a man who, in addition to being generally wonderful, is the king of domestic shit and especially of laundry. But, you know, there are things. We don’t sort our light and dark clothes (I didn’t before getting married either) and sometimes there are casualties. Mike patiently picks up on “please don’t dry that one” or “those jeans might bleed.” And the bras.

Every time I throw a bra in the wash (shhh I know I should wash them by hand. We should do a lot of things. See the story above about stealing TP from bars.), every time, Mike hangs the bra to dry on our china cabinet. The first time he hung them there, right in the middle of our apartment, I said, “ahhh don’t do that I’m going to forget and people are going to come over and see my bras festooning the living room!” He laughed. And yet, two years later, this is how I know the laundry is done. Mike may be the king of the laundry, but he is still Mike. 

Love is clean laundry.