Clutter may be man’s treasure, but women’s trash
Study finds the majority of family garages holds bins and boxes, rather than vehicles
Remember John Gray’s 1992 book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? The fact that it spent more than two years on the bestseller list shows that males and females do have different psychological makeups, or at least that we’d like to believe that.
A study by a U.S. storage company found that 48 per cent of couples who live together say they argue over clutter, and that if they knew there wouldn’t be consequences, 90 per cent of Americans would get rid of some of their significant other’s possessions.
I decided to do a personal experiment on this topic. In my basement, there are dozens of plastic tubs with everything from old bank statements to newspaper clippings to original radio and TV scripts I’ve written over five decades. Yes, there are also some small uncashed cheques in there, too. Sigh.
Even more valuable are hundreds of cassette and reel to reel audiotapes with original interviews from the past 50 years. Most are from long- dead people, including famous authors (such as W.O. Mitchell), actually important politicians (such as legendary U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack), and just plain interesting folks, including a woman who typed up mining claims (and, she hinted, performed other services) for men in the Peace River district in the 1940s. I can envision some future graduate student becoming ecstatic over finding original source material in this stash, though, of course, not if it’s still on the pool table in my basement.
Fortunately, I’ve found a great home for this material that will make it permanently and publicly accessible. We’re still working out the details.
Emboldened by the noble goal of leaving a unique legacy, I started tackling those boxes, sorting the good stuff from the clutter. I got bored really quickly, and my wife, having tried to organize me before, wisely decided to visit family on the other side of the planet. She understands that helping your spouse declutter is like teaching a relative to drive — not worth the trouble!
Fortuitously, I came upon someone who was up to the task: a professional organizer named Lana Marie. She runs Jigsaw Organization, Inc., whose company motto is “Every piece has its place. Bring peace to your space.”
Lana comes by her profession honestly. “I come from a line of packrats and hoarders,” she says. “My grandmother, in Belgium, slept on half of her bed because it was covered with stuff. We couldn’t eat at her dining room table because the chairs and the table were all covered.”
But she adds, “that was my happy place, so I feel I have no judgment around clutter.”
I turned her loose on my basement with some vague general guidelines and was very pleased with the results. She brought in helpers to assist her and they made it through quite a few boxes and bins, leaving the results neatly organized and ready for the archivists. There is still work to do, but the system she established is serving me well, and I’m actually enjoying the odd discoveries, such as my father’s ornate metal 1938 New York City cab driver licence.
Are men different from women when it comes to clutter? Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles did a study of 32 middle-class families, observing everything from how they spent their time to what they did with the things they bought. They observed that big box stores like Costco have increased people’s clutter problems by giving us more stuff to store. In fact, in this sample group, “cars have been banished from 75 per cent of garages to make way for rejected furniture and cascading bins and boxes of mostly forgotten household goods.”
Another key finding was that clutter seemed to bother women more than men. This was confirmed by measuring diurnal levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.
“Fathers in their (videotaped) home tours would walk in the same rooms their wives had come through and often made no mention whatsoever of the messiness and were unaffected psychologically,” says anthropology professor Jeanne Arnold in a UCLA Magazine interview. In fact, she says that for the dads and many of the older children, accumulating and displaying artifacts was a source of pleasure.
When does pride of ownership turn into pernicious clutter? For years I’ve brought home (empty) beer bottles as souvenirs from my travels, and I probably have a few hundred. They are now taking up a lot of space and have outlived their usefulness, so I’m going to photograph them (I can’t bear to part with them completely) and either donate them to a local craft brewery or recycle them. My high-speed, two-sided scanner has become my best friend.
Indeed, technology offers the possibility of transforming our physical clutter into digital detritus. This can bring its own problems. My son claims he has probably accumulated as many clippings and references as I have, but they are on hard disks or in the cloud.
I can just see our millennial kids tussling someday over who’s using too much Google or Apple online storage space. In the meantime, I’m heading down to the basement.