May 19, 2015 3 min read

Are you a clean freak? I may be a neat freak, but I definitely fall short on the clean freak scale.

I admire those who keep everything spic and span all of the time. I don’t have the energy. My house will always look neat and tidy and well maintained, but please don’t do a white glove test. As a sign once said, “You can laugh at my dust, but please don’t write in it.”

I hate cleaning. When children are little and they use the word “hate” for the first time, I hear parents tell them, “Hate is a strong word.” I want to say, “I know. That’s why I chose it.” Maybe I should say I detest dusting – it’s more alliterative. Vacuuming is vaguely therapeutic, and I can get on board with laundry or wiping up the kitchen, but dusting is just the pits. In fact, I venture to say that I detest dusting more than the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns.

Allergies only exacerbate my contempt for this necessary evil. Not only do you have to dust the furniture, but you have to battle a runny nose, sneezing and watery eyes while doing it. A relative once gave my mom a package of surgical masks to wear while dusting as a joke to help against an allergy attack. I think she was onto something.

Am I alone in my disdain of domestic daily drudgery? I think not. One of my all-time favorite writers, the late Erma Bombeck, once wrote a column about cleaning and men. She cited a poll of women asking who they’d rather have as a husband: Robert Redford, who didn’t help out around the house, or Danny DeVito, who did. To Bombeck’s shock and dismay, a surprisingly large majority of women chose the cooking and cleaning DeVito over the much more ravishing but not as helpful Redford. Imagine, she said, DeVito vacuuming in his Penguin getup from the “Batman” movie and an apron. Compare that with a young Robert Redford in his Navy whites from “The Way We Were” sitting idle. Who would you choose? How much do you really hate cleaning?

A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family shows that nowadays most couples who both work split housework equally until a child arrives. Another new survey found that even when men are unemployed, they do less housework than women. So, I’ve been thinking about this and maybe the best way to sweep a woman off her feet is to sweep her house or hire someone to do it for her.

Erma said she thought Redford could be trained to run garbage out. If not, she’d dust around him. So, today, I ask: Would you choose an idle George Clooney or a dishwashing Will Ferrell? It’s a tough choice, but who I am kidding? Surely they both have housekeepers.