I always found that so difficult to grasp, too. Even if you’re splitting responsibilities, so that one person does the dayjob and the other does the household, hell, even if you’ve decided to be a terrible partner, how do you never think to yourself:
“I need some space on this table, let me just put away a few things.” or
“I’d like this one specific meal that I have in mind, I’ll try to prepare it.”
Ooh, I can answer the first one! With two answers!
Answer one is because things that I already saw there basically fade into the background. You know how in, like, Hannah Barbara cartoons it’d be obvious when a cupboard was going to open, because they had the static background painted on a different layer, and the moving objects were on foreground cells with slightly different colours? Right, so, when I first notice something new in a new location I might go “huh, why is that there?”, but once I’ve seen it, it’s now not new, and I basically don’t see it anymore. So long as it’s not actively in my way, it’s a static part of the background.
There have been times when I was actively trying to clean up a room because we were going to have guests over, and I noticed I had been cleaning around a large white plastic bag that was on the coffee table, probably from some food delivery in the past several months. Like, my whole job was cleaning and tidying, and it was like the bright white bag was part of the table. I think it’s just always been there 😛
It wasn’t until I had already cleaned under the edges of it that I went “hang on… This is garbage. Why am I trying to preserve this and keep it undisturbed?”
Unfortunately my wife is, I think, basically the same way, so our house is a nightmare. Or it would be if either of us could see it 😉
The second reason is much simpler, which it that when something is in a place, and I know I didn’t put it there, I assume my wife may have put it there for a reason. So probably best to not touch it, in case she wanted it here, or comes looking for it here again in the future.
![Having a good partner [PizzaCake]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/3c29d75b-f0f5-4c4b-ad7a-5dd4bfeb0f06.webp){kind=link}
I always found that so difficult to grasp, too. Even if you’re splitting responsibilities, so that one person does the dayjob and the other does the household, hell, even if you’ve decided to be a terrible partner, how do you never think to yourself:
???
Ooh, I can answer the first one! With two answers!
Answer one is because things that I already saw there basically fade into the background. You know how in, like, Hannah Barbara cartoons it’d be obvious when a cupboard was going to open, because they had the static background painted on a different layer, and the moving objects were on foreground cells with slightly different colours? Right, so, when I first notice something new in a new location I might go “huh, why is that there?”, but once I’ve seen it, it’s now not new, and I basically don’t see it anymore. So long as it’s not actively in my way, it’s a static part of the background.
There have been times when I was actively trying to clean up a room because we were going to have guests over, and I noticed I had been cleaning around a large white plastic bag that was on the coffee table, probably from some food delivery in the past several months. Like, my whole job was cleaning and tidying, and it was like the bright white bag was part of the table. I think it’s just always been there 😛
It wasn’t until I had already cleaned under the edges of it that I went “hang on… This is garbage. Why am I trying to preserve this and keep it undisturbed?”
Unfortunately my wife is, I think, basically the same way, so our house is a nightmare. Or it would be if either of us could see it 😉
The second reason is much simpler, which it that when something is in a place, and I know I didn’t put it there, I assume my wife may have put it there for a reason. So probably best to not touch it, in case she wanted it here, or comes looking for it here again in the future.