All our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment. (Isaiah 64:6)
Someone says young men need practical instruction in manliness.
Start with your clothes.
No woman—not your mother and certainly not your wife—should ever have to pick up your dirty clothes and place them in the clothes hamper. Soft men are thoughtless and inconsiderate. Soft men take their wife and mother for granted.
Think about it this way. You love the tenderness, delicacy, and modesty of the women God gave you to love, right? Why coarsen them by making them deal with your dirty underwear? Why not hide from them the parts of your bodily existence you wish you never had to notice?
The same is true of your sweat-soaked socks and shirt and pants (if you work outside) or the contents of your gym bag (if you work out inside).
Take them off, pick them up, and put them in the clothes hamper yourself.
If they’re really nasty, put them directly in the washer and splurge. Live dangerously. Be real extravagant and run a cycle just to keep your wife from having to touch them.
Yeah, you’ll waste ten cents of laundry detergent and fifteen of water and power, but what price do you put on protecting your dear wife or mother from picking up your sweat-soaked clothes?
Don’t ever leave dirty clothes lying on the floor or tossed on a chair or strewn across your bathroom floor. And while we’re at it, hang up your washcloth and towel after using them.
I have never had a day in my life that I am not consciously grateful for my dear wife always—and I mean always—having my dresser drawers filled with clean underwear and clean socks, and my closet filled with nicely ironed shirts. What a kind gift she gives to me each and every day!
How could I be so thoughtless as to ask her to clean up after my drippings and droppings?
Come on, man up and think about your dear wife or mother. Don’t let her do the stuff you can do yourself.
And if she has trouble staying ahead of the dirty clothes, don’t let it irritate you. Instead, do as my dad did and drop your clothes off at a laundry. When she sees how much money it costs, she might decide to change her ways.
NOTE: After writing this and doing what I always do which is to read posts to my wife before putting them up, Mary Lee informs me that Jordan Peterson talks about this same thing and people will think I’m referring to him in the opening sentences. I’m not. I’ve never read him and the one time a couple men read to me a paragraph or two he wrote somewhere, I was ready to sue him for plagiarism.
