When I met my partner, he lived in Koch in the Kerem Hatiman neighborhood in Tel Aviv, with roommates who lived in the bread box on the counter.
If there used to be bread in the bread box, there wasn't much left when I opened it one morning.
The cockroaches were surprised and very angry and went to complain to their friends, the cockroaches who lived in the pizza boxes on the floor.
I informed my partner as an educational act - I will clean his apartment.
He lit a cigarette and said if there is no choice, then there is no choice.
It was a very small apartment, you could get from the bed to the kitchen in three steps on empty pizza boxes.
I used the time I sent him to buy paint to empty four gallons of bleach in the shower.
The paint was needed, because two years earlier he accidentally burned the whole apartment.
He just kept living like that.
It is difficult to say whether the educational act proved itself, because instead of starting to clean his apartment, the partner moved in with me.
The cockroaches declared a victory of consciousness and wandered over to the toaster oven.
As with any beginning of a shared life, quite a few disagreements arose between us due to the fact that I like to live in a clean house and he doesn't differentiate between a cloth, a rag or absorbent paper, which made me wonder - how did single men clean the house before the invention of wipes?
When his clothes got dirty, instead of doing laundry he would go to the Carmel market and buy new ones.
I suspected that this is what happens with cutlery and plates as well, but I was afraid to ask.
I once gave him a garbage bag to throw away, and he got into a taxi with it.
I once asked him to sweep the porch, so he looked for a tutorial video on YouTube.
When I demanded that he take part in the household chores, he did them so badly that I repeated them after him until I gave up and went back to doing them myself.
The wise readers will challenge me now and say that this is the oldest exercise in the book, but they are invited to eat from the dishes he washed and get cave fever.
It is important for me to emphasize that this is a smart, successful, sensitive, diligent, loving and considerate guy, who simply cannot learn to pick up the towel from the floor after he takes a shower.
The angry readers will ask "Why didn't his mother educate him?", and I remind them that it is very unfeminist to blame the woman.
What haven't we tried?
Begging, yelling, passive aggressive, apps, angry messages on the fridge, nothing helped.
How do you educate a partner?
Can a person change on demand?
Because if so, I would also like him to know how to assemble the ceiling fan I bought, to eat healthier and change his profession to something that earns NIS 60,000 a month.
But then he won't be the guy I love anymore.
When we met, a mutual friend told me it wouldn't work out between us, but we've been together for 11 years.
In that period of time we both changed a lot: he stopped being late everywhere, I learned to listen when people talk to me.
He stopped losing all his things, I started.
I still pick up towels after him, but he is the one who gets up with the baby at half past five every morning and allows me to continue sleeping.
No one educated anyone, love educated us both.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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