The longer you live with someone, the more you discover about how little you know them. At least, this is true for me, when it comes to my husband. I have known this man since 2001, for over half my life, and have lived with him since 2003. And yet I have only recently discovered some things about him that baffle me completely. (Does anyone else recall the time when I learned he does not consider soup to be a meal???)
While I am the primary laundry-doer in our household, I don’t fold everything that I wash. This is not out of laziness, Internet. Well. Not solely out of laziness. My husband is not only the Better Folder of the two of us, he has folding preferences. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that he prefers to fold his own T-shirts. For that I am eternally grateful, because I am horrible at folding, especially when it comes to things that can’t be lined up edge to edge, like a towel or a blanket or a dishrag or another piece of fabric with straight and symmetrical edges. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. And yet, despite sometimes extreme effort, my attempts at folding T-shirts result in such lopsidedness and extreme variances in size of end product that frankly boggle the mind. My husband, possibly due to years in his youth spent working in clothing retail, possibly due to being a normal person and not folding challenged like his wife, can fold his T-shirts with seemingly no effort and end up with a stack of perfectly identical little rectangles. This is all to say: my husband prefers to fold his own T-shirts.
Okay, fine. But I can at least fold his pants, right? I fold my own jeans and leggings (the extent of my pants collection) and they make nice tidy stacks. I fold them once lengthwise, meeting one corner of the waist band to the other, so they look like a one-legged pant, and then fold them shortwise (what is the opposite of lengthwise? widthwise? I am explaining this very poorly), bringing the hem up to meet the waistband, and then fold them one last time so that the waist band touches the folded portion of the knee area. (This reminds me of that old elementary school exercise where one person has to explain step by step how to make a peanut butter sandwich and the other person has to follow each step literally, as if they have never experienced either peanut butter or jars or sandwiches before. You know: the explainer says, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” and the sandwich maker picks up the jar and puts it on the bag of bread.) What I am trying to say is that I make three folds and the jeans end up in a small square.
This is how I have folded everyone’s pants since time immemorial, including my husband’s jeans and work pants. Then some years ago I found out that that my husband preferred me to simply fold the pants in half, lengthwise, and leave them at that. Okay, weird, I thought, but whatever. Saves me two folds per pants pair, clearly a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of life. But as the years passed, I wondered why he was so adamant about the single fold. Because, in fact, when he puts his jeans/work pants away in our closet, he stacks them in neat little squares just like I stack my jeans.
It took a long time for this mild curiosity to develop into an actual question, which was, “If the end result is the same, why don’t I just fold your jeans for you?” To which he reluctantly told me that when I fold his jeans, he refolds them, and he feels bad about that, so he wants to relieve me of the initial fold. To which my response was, “WHY.” Which is when he admitted to me that when I fold his jeans/pants, I fold them backwards.
I STILL REFUSE TO IRON.
This is a very, very long story to say that a) apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew, and b) apparently that can be bothersome to some people, and c) my husband and I are pants-folding opposites and I only just found out. (How do YOU fold your pants?)
(By the way, I have since been folding his jeans/pants the opposite way – although I still only make the single lengthwise fold – and it is surprisingly difficult to do! My brain has A Certain Way it believes folding should be done, and that is not it.) (It’s a feeling similar to folding your hands together differently than you normally do: if the left thumb normally sits on top of the right thumb, when you try to fold them so the right thumb is on top instead, it’s doable, but it’s weird.)
I have since kept my eyes open for other weird differences in our everyday trivialities and have come up with two others.
One has to do with filing. Picture a filing cabinet, with folders of paperwork for things you keep track of over time – utility bills, insurance statements, tax returns, etc. I think we can all agree that it makes sense to file these sorts of things chronologically, right? And yet, to my SHOCK, there are (at least?) two ways to do this.
When you open one of the folders, what is on top: the most recent bill/statement, or the oldest? Well, I do it one way and my husband does it the other way (the WRONG way) and that is absolutely insane to me. To make matters worse, at one point in our relationship, we maintained separate files, so some of the files use my system and some use my husband’s. I would almost rather transition ALL our files to his (wrong) system than to have two completely opposite filing methods in the same cabinet. MADNESS.
The other way we are opposites is in how we get out of the shower. Yes, I am really writing about this. Day-to-day minutiae is my favorite topic (next to food) and if you are new here, boy are you getting slapped right in the face with household nitty-gritty.
Our shower has a sliding glass door with two panels. You slide one panel over the other – so they overlap – to expose the opening to the shower. My husband slides both panels toward the front/faucet end of the shower to exit; I slide both panels to the back, wall end. I wonder if this has to do with our individual towel placement: my towel hangs just outside the faucet end of the shower; my husband’s is on the wall on the other end of the shower. Would we exit the shower differently if we hung our towels differently? Are there simply Front of Shower Exiters and Rear of Shower Exiters, just like some people are optimists and others are pessimists?
These are some of the very silly, inconsequential differences between us that are as charming (to me, at least) as they are perplexing. All of us are weird in our own weird ways. And I’m delighted to still be learning new things about this man I’ve loved for nearly a quarter century.
There are lots of other ways that he and I are Very Different. Some of them I know and accept: for instance, he is a Laundry Basket guy, and I am a Pile Clothing Into My Arms And Drip Socks All Over The Floor gal. But maybe (probably?) there are things I am yet unaware of. I hope we have time to discover all of them.
I put my socks together in a very particular way and hang up my jeans and leggings instead of folding them. Many people have a certain way of loading a dishwasher too. I’m way too abstract random about that–which drives my boyfriend crazy. 🙂
I admit to being a person with Some Specific Thoughts about loading the dishwasher. But I recognize that it’s my thing, so I don’t mention it to my family (unless it’s something objectively wrong, like putting a bowl concave-side up in the top rack or something).
I’m not sure if you’re ready for this, but when I fold jeans, I grab them by the ankles and line the seams up. So basically I’m adding a step but until I read this post I didn’t know that there was any other way. In my defense my way makes sense for dress pants, but now I need to think about my life choices in how I fold jeans. Hubs is forbidden to wash or fold my clothes – not because of the way he does it but because I do laundry once a week and he does it whenever, so it throws my schedule off if he washes my clothes a day or so before my next scheduled wash. I am the more regular user of laundry baskets for clean clothes, but sometimes you have a clean load of laundry without a basket and ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
I need more information about your bathroom layout to weigh in on who is “right” about the shower door. How close is the toilet/vanity? The shower on my last trip had sliding doors, and the only way that it made sense to start the shower was to open it at the tap side, because otherwise I would have gotten splashed with cold water. But that was also where the toilet was, so it was an awkward reach. Because of the toilet, I got in and out on the non-tap side. I think in general I’m a non-tap side kinda gal. A common complaint that I have with Airbnbs is that you can tell they were never meant to be someone’s regular home because the towel racks are never close to the shower, but that’s an issue for a separate post.
Birchie, I have so many thoughts about showers. So. Many. Thoughts. Especially about hotel showers and how poorly designed they tend to be. I have some photos in my phone, waiting for me to write a post around them.
Our shower is pretty unobstructed in our bathroom. It’s along one of the long walls, and our vanity is along the other long wall. The toilet is in its own little closet on one of the short ends. I haven’t observed how my husband starts the shower, but I tend to slide the doors to the back of the shower so that the opening allows for easy access to the faucet.
I fold my jeans exactly the same way that you do; which tells me this is the proper way to fold jeans. My husband would never fold his own laundry; so I have no idea if he thinks I’m doing it wrong. And I’m not asking because I don’t want to hear it if he does.
Our shower door opens out and we differ in that I dry off while still IN the shower and he dries off outside of the shower. And the idiots who built this house made sure that there were no towel racks (or room for them) anywhere NEAR the shower. So The Husband piles his on top of a nearby basket; while I just toss mine over the top of the shower when I’m ready to hop in.
Hahaha – yes, we are doing it right, Gigi!
How is it that so many bathroom designers/builders don’t understand how a bathroom works???? This is a mystery I will never solve.
I’m not a laundry fan, but your last line made me melt… I guess as long as we end up at/in love, the routes we take don’t matter…
Thanks, Maya ❤️
Ha! Great post. T and I have nothing in common. Wait, no- we both have childhood trauma and fucked up families. We both moved FAR away from our respective families. And we became each others’ family.
Towels… I spread mine OUT and hang it VERTICALLY on the rack so it can dry out and T… well, he USED to just throw it on the rack, all bunched up, and it would start smelling. I showed him my way, which is the correct way, to hang up a bath towel.
He hangs his horizontally, but he does spread it out, it no longer smells.
Ah, the joy of coupling 😉
I love it! You have improved his life!
HA. That’s what I think, he may think it’s the opposite 😉 lol
Daria, I have to say, I laughed at “wait, no – we both have childhood trauma and fucked up families.” Dark humour for the win, my friend!
HAHA. Thanks Nicole, as a pessimist, it helps get some humor in.
I actually don’t know how I fold jeans. I usually hang jeans and T-shirts apart from my running T-shirts and then I use the Marie Kondo folding method so they all stand up sideways in my drawer and I can easily pull out whatever I want. We have a swinging door on our shower although I usually swing it inwards and I think my husband swings it outwards because I notice he positions the bathmat further away from the door.
I feel like I read years ago about a Maria Kondo method of rolling T-shirts and tank tops, and I do that… but I have not heard about her jeans method! Perhaps I should look into it?
I fold my jeans like you do and am focused on your statement: apparently people can fold jeans/pants differently, who knew? I mean I realized people folded socks differently, but jeans… how could this matter… they’re jeans for goodness sake.
I swear ever since Marie Kondo descended on the scene, how you fold clothes has become a whole new way to argue with people.
Marie Kondo is such an instigator, Ally!
I fold my jeans starting the way you do, except then I fold them into thirds, because that’s very close to the depth of my bureau drawers.
I can barely fold a sheet of letter paper into thirds to fit into an envelope, Swistle. No way could I fold my jeans in thirds successfully. (I keep my jeans stacked on an open shelf in the closet, so I don’t have to negotiate with drawer depths.)
I think drawer depth is the reason my husband has a particular system for his T-shirts. He can fit two rows of them into a drawer but only if they are folded very precisely.
OH MY GOD AM I YOUR HUSBAND? Because I fold my pants like that and I also use a laundry basket always and forever.
I don’t do my husband’s laundry so I have literally no idea how he folds anything. Wait, I think he hangs his t-shirts. WHAT HE DOES, HE HANGS HIS T-SHIRTS. Who did I marry. Ever since I read Marie Kondo’s book I have rolled my t-shirts and tops and yoga clothes and underwear and socks and why do I keep typing “and” I don’t KNOW SUZANNE I am just happy you’re back because day-to-day minutia is also my favourite. I will say I love having the rolled things because it actually is easier for me to find things. When a person has like thirty-forty black tops, you want to find the black top you want.
The truth is I’m not a super precise folder, particularly when it comes to sheets and things. I do my best but it’s never a nice neat square or anything. My MIL is the opposite of this and so it’s lucky she hasn’t looked in any cupboards. At least I don’t THINK she has.
Who has time for precise folding, Nicole? WHO? (Our mothers in law, apparently. And my husband.)
I roll a lot of things — most things in my dresser, in fact. Wait, is that true? I have eight drawers in the dresser. Top left: tank tops, rolled. Top right: unders, thrown into a messy heap. Second left: Socks, rolled but not in the same way. Second right: Sports bras and exercise leggings, NOT rolled, but stacked. Why??? Third left: Sweaters I never wear, not rolled. Third right: Exercise tops, not rolled. Why again? Bottom left: More sweaters I never wear, not rolled. Can you roll a sweater? Bottom right: pajama Ts and leggings, rolled.
I make no sense, Nicole! But I do not hang my T-shirts.
This was hilarious to read! Your husband may be particular about how his clothes are folded, but at least he’s willing to take responsibility for it and do it himself. Is he left-handed?
I fold my jeans just like you do. It’s the right way!
Yes, he is very kind not to force his folding views on me!
I’m confused. You fold your jeans with the zipper pointing to the left and your husband folds his with the zipper pointing to the right? Is that the only difference?
I fold my jeans with the back pockets on the outside. My husband folds his the same way. We are a house in harmony (until you start discussing loading the dishwasher…)
Yes, that is the exact difference! How nice to have unity in your home – even at the cost of pockets on the outside (!!!!). 😉
But now I need to know how you file! I put the most recent on top, as those are the files I typically need to find faster. Am I like you or your husband?? Haha loved this post and all your quirky marriage ways 🙂
Yes that is the One True Way, Colleen!
Beth and I ball socks differently– I won’t try to explain each method– but I taught the kids my method and since the laundry is mainly folded by me and whatever kid is living at home, my method is the one that’s almost always used. She doesn’t care enough to undo and redo her socks.
I am very interested in knowing these different methods. I cannot fathom what they might be.
I fold my jeans in half and then in thirds! By jeans, I mean the one pair I currently wear, and I only wash them maybe every 1-2 months… I fold my and the boys’ clothes so Phil is generally on his own to fold his clothes. The laundry is like 2/3 the boys’ clothes, maybe 3/4, so I do the bulk of the folding. If Phil takes the boys to his mom’s and leaves me home alone in the house and I do laundry, I will fold his clothes as a “thank you” for the quiet house.
My husband has VERY specific thoughts on how his clothes should be folded. He DID work in retail and is forever amazed I can’t fold T-shirts perfectly. I try my best, but will admit my best was becoming pretty lazy. So now he does his OWN laundry. If I happen to empty it from the dryer, I will lay everything out flat on our bed and then he can fold it how he chooses.
I hang jeans zipper to the right, folded in half hung on a hanger and I hang all my T-shirts, sweaters and dresses. I fold exercise pants…however, and I don’t fold underwear.
My husband also has VERY specific thoughts about sock folding. I hate to admit it, but his way is sooo much better than mine. He folds them in such a way they are virtually flat in the drawer and it is pretty lovely and I do it now, even thought it took 15 years of marriage of me doing it MY way and him eventually asking me to stop folding his socks for me to come around to the other side.
I file new arrivals at the back. Not sure why?
I never thought about it before, but I enter the shower from the faucet side and exit it from the rear. I know the getting into the shower from the faucet side is so that I can get under the warm water faster as opposed to having to wade through the freezing shower mist/sprinkle to get to the warm, but what possible reason do I have to exit differently? My mind is a riddle, even to me.
My husband is also persnickety about folding (his high school job was at a department store), so I just set all his dry clothes unfolded on the bed and he deals with it. He does not fold his pants the way you and fold pants, either, because he wants to keep the crease. I leave you to think about what kind of man I married.
Well, I have a solution to the folding issue- I don’t fold ANY of my husband’s clothes. I hang his work clothes (nicer pants and shirts) over a dining room chair, and throw all the other things into a clean laundry basket, and he takes it from there. Also, I don’t fold jeans at all! I hang them up. I think if I had to fold all my husband’s clothes, I would go insane. Plus, as you’ve pointed out- people have their own way of doing things.
I fold my jeans exactly the way you do! AKA, the right way. Actually, I didn’t know there was a “right” way to fold jeans lol.
I open the shower curtain to the non-tap side, but if I opened it to the tap side, that’s where the toilet is so getting out is impossible. My least favorite thing about other bathrooms is when there is not a NORMAL place to put a towel.
One of the most frustrating things about living with someone is learning all of their quirks like this. When I moved in with my roommate in 2015, I nearly cried when I realized she was someone who kept the measuring spoons on the little ring. In my family, we just kept them scattered in the drawer. (In my defense, I was having a very hard time to this big change and this one thing drove me over the edge, lol.)
My friend, I am here for this kind of content!
I fold my pants completely different than you as I’m part of the Marie Kondo Folding Cult, and it actually DOES bring me joy.
https://konmari.com/how-to-fold-clothes/?srsltid=AfmBOoqwJiyHRZFP65mdRxUkuKWR-E8nXhFSg_O_OZaINcA6owkGe8ZD
But my husband? He likes everything hung on hangers; jeans, t-shirts, shorts! The only things that go into drawers are his gym shorts, bathing suits, socks and underwear. A few years ago, he had the nerve to tell me he didn’t care for the way I hung up his jeans, and he showed me his preferred method. Like a good wife, I went with his version, but it’s still not my fave. HA.
Laughing at you and your honey, departing the shower differently.
What’s the old saying: Men are from Mars? Women are from Venus?
This is us!!!!
I was folding laundry wrong and the husband refolded al his stuff so I decided to not do it anymore and now he is in charge of laundry. He is so meticulous about it. Granted his folded stuff looks so much better than when I do it but I just don’t want to spend my life in folding stuff.
But yes, towels have to hang a certain way, bed needs to made a certain way… stuff like that.
I am glad we aren’t the only one with doing things so differently.