ear Prudence,
I have been with my husband for almost 14 years. We have been married for four years and have lived together since around 2013. He’s great and I love him so much. When we were young, poor, and renting, my husband was always a slob; he never picked up after himself, left his dirty and clean clothes together in a mountain on his side of the bed, would rather die than wash a dish, etc. His car was putrid. As a medium clean person (but not a neat freak), I was annoyed by the clutter and grossness, but learned to live with it since no amount of begging ever changed it; I still do essentially 100 percent of all daily cleaning/tidying tasks except for his laundry.
Ever since we bought our house and got a new shiny car, he’s become fussy in a way that I find off-putting. He frets and fusses over microscopic dings in the bumper; can’t get over the latest landscaper screwup; rushes to put a pad under the paper I’m writing on at our ancient, already scratched up table; leaps up and scolds me if I scoot a chair a few centimeters rather than pick it up. If any possessions are remotely marred or imperfect, it seems to really stress him out. But that doesn’t stop him from continuing to be the same slob he always was in his own way. The pile of mixed laundry still mars our bedroom floor, he leaves candy wrappers and crumbs on the coffee table during late-night snacking, and the car is still full of snack crumbs, crumpled papers, and old gym shoes. His own home office, which I don’t clean, always looks like a tornado hit it.
I feel like I can’t criticize him for being more cautious about things, but it seems like the only thing he cares about is not physically damaging property, not keeping the daily environment we live in clean and tidy. He gets defensive and pouts if I ever bring these things up to him, but it really gets me down, especially because I feel like he’s constantly policing my behavior around our shared possessions. What would be a productive way for me to think about this, and do you have any suggestions for me?