Home Management & Conflict
“I can’t find that invoice,” my husband yelled to me across the room.
“I have no idea where you put your invoices,” I respond.
“This is what happens when you ‘organize’, “ He retorts and walks away.
No doubt — home management leads to conflict. As the above exchange show, it can definitely cause conflict for couples. In our case, I’m more of a minimalist, and my husband is a self proclaimed maximalist. This examples is a snapshot or just one conflict we’ve had over organizing styles.
This is also a point of tension for parents and children. While there are plenty of conflicts between young children and their parents, I would be willing to guess that the most difficult and time consuming conflicts about home organizing and minimizing happen between adult children and elderly parents. It is not uncommon for elderly parents to leave their adult children homes with items the adult child becomes responsible for after their parent passes.
Conflict in home organizing is a big topic. There are a lot of facets to it. In this post, I am going to share some general tips to help you through these conflicts. In later posts, I will share more specific situations and relationships.
I’ll start with some general tips for ALL conflicts. These can be used for more than home management, but are helpful in thinking through conflicts you have in your life about home management.
Don’t try to prevent conflict prepare for it. This is more of a mental task than an action step. Anytime you enter into a relationship with someone — partner, wife, husband, neighbor, co-worker, etc. — anticipate conflict will come up . This is human, and it is okay.
See conflict as an opportunity to learn your own boundaries. Rather than view conflict as inherently “bad” or “undesirable”, recognize it as a way to learn your own needs. You may need more space or quiet than someone else. This can cause conflict, yes, but it is also an opportunity for you to learn about yourself.
Conflict is the best place to learn empathy. Coming out of conflict is one of the best (if not the only) way to learn true empathy. When you are working through a conflict with someone, you are forced to consider the world from their perspective. This is a powerful experience, and in a conflict resolution process, the way to truly resolve it requires you or both parties to present your own boundaries and to understand each others’ boundaries.
Set norms. If we accept the idea that conflict will happen when people related to each other, then we are best to set up norms or ground rules with people well before conflict happens. Essentially, this is an opportunity to learn about each person’s boundaries well before those boundaries are broken.
When it comes to home organizing and minimizing, here are some tips that are specific to shared space that can be useful in managing the conflicts that will arise.
Set physical boundaries. My husband and I share a closet. He get the top section, and I get the bottom section. When it comes to my clothes, I am a minimalist, and I like a lot of space between my clothes so I can see them quickly. He, on the other hand, is a self proclaimed maximalist. He stuffs his section so full that he can barely move his clothes. If I am honest, it annoys me a bit. But I have my section that has the space I need between my clothes. This physical boundary helps us a lot.
Change your space…not your partner or roommate. Rather than looking to change your partner, change the space. For example, my husband is tall. He put all of his stuff down on top of the bookcases in our house. Rather than be frustrated with the stuff on the bookcases, I put a decorative bowl there for the stuff. It works for us. We changed the space rather than letting this dispute about home organizing get in between our relationship.
There may be order in a space that you don’t recognize. When I am not organizing closets, I can be found teaching high school. One way I test a students’ organizational systems is to ask for notes we took several weeks back. If they can find the paper in less than a minute, they have a system I just don’t recognize. One time I worked with a teacher who had a pile. Every time he got a paper, he put it on his pile. That pile didn’t look like a system, but he could find everything relatively quickly because he kept the pile in date order. Once I realized his system, that pile was much less cumbersome for me.
Prioritize the relationship not the space. This one can almost go without saying, but I am saying it because it is important. If you have to choose between the relationship and an orderly space, do what you can to prioritize the relationship. If what is happening in your space is bothering you so much that it begins impacting the relationship, then it is probably not about the space and about other issues in the relationship.
For me, conflict is inevitable, and when it comes to home management, I focus on changing spaces rather than changing the people around me. The goal behind having a well managed home is for me to be able to enjoy the people around me. It frees my time up for those relationships. These tips can help you focus on and maintain those relationships too.
