I once acted for a husband who was dead set
on divorcing his wife mainly because she is unable to do these three things -
align the shoes properly, arrange the laces so they do not touch the floor, and
keep the socks folded and neatly tucked into the shoes.
Amongst other habits that he can't stand,
the demanding shoe-neatness fetish was his last straw because that was the
first thing he sees when he comes home from a jaded day at work.
In my view, my client is clearly a
perfectionist. And the one thing about marrying a perfectionist, especially a
neurotic one, is that it makes living together almost impossible; unless of
course, your partner shares the same neurotic obsession with you.
But then, the nitpicking between the couple
would be endless since nothing is ever enough for a perfectionist. (and to have
two of them living under the same roof would be to double the neurosis).
In today's papers, Dr Chong Siow Ann
however wrote an article about another habit that could destroy marriages too.
He entitled it "The hoarder's anguish and inability to discard
things."
Dr Chong started his article with the
Collyer brothers who lived in Manhattan in the first half of last century. They
became the textbook example of how living with hoarders would look like. Their lives
were in fact "fatally intertwined."
The Collyer brothers were no ordinary
hoarders. They came from a respectable family. Their father was an eccentric gynecologist
who would canoe to work from Harlem to Bellevue Hospital.
They also lived in a four-storey mansion
and were highly educated too. Homer had a law degree and Langley studied
engineering.
One day, they just stopped working,
retreated into their mansion and lived in complete isolation, shut out from the
outside world.
Homer eventually became blind and depended
on his brother Langley who would only sneak out at night to buy food.
In 1947, a neighbor called the police as
the caller suspected that the Collyer brothers may have died in their mansion.
What the police found were "more than
170 tonnes of amassed items; toys, bicycles, guns, chandeliers, tapestries,
mantel clocks, violins, a cello, thousands of books, bales of newspapers, 14
grand pianos, an organ, the chassis of a Model T Ford, a horse's jawbone, and
Dr Collyer's canoe."
Homer's body was found "keeled over
with his head on his knees." And Langley was found just 3m away from where
his brother.
But because of the mess, it took the police
18 long days to discover Langley's corpse.
How did Langley die?
Well, here's how Dr Chong described it:-
"Running through the jam-packed rooms
was a labyrinth of tunnels rigged with booby traps to foil burglars. Langley
was apparently bringing food to Homer when he was snared by one of his booby
traps which buried him under piles of debris."
As a result, Homer died of starvation.
Lesson? One.
When you live with a hoarder, I guess it is
difficult to understand why he/she does the things they do.
While it makes little sense, if at all, for
one to keep things that most people would discard at a heart beat like piles of
receipts from two years ago, stacks of tissues taken from various restaurants
after a wedding dinner, plastic bags of impractical junk, and expired canned
food piled up at one corner of the house, just to name a few, Dr Chong's
article actually shed some light on this compulsion that I find helpful to
understand people laboring under this obsession.
He wrote: "Hoarders have a paralysing
indecisiveness when it comes to discarding things - they are convinced of their
future usefulness or value so they avoid making (or postpone perpetually) any
decision about their disposal....
They are unable to categorise and organise
their possessions which they heap haphazardly in a proliferating number of
piles (a process referred as churning); and by mixing important and valuable
things with worthless items, they inadvertently exacerbate their terror of
losing valuable possessions and so will not risk throwing out anything."
According to Dr Chong, hoarders are
"extremely difficult to engage". He said that "they are more
hapless victims of an irresistible and consuming urge to acquire and accumulate
items than willful prevaricators."
That means that sometimes a hoarder is not
lazy, but they genuinely identify with their massive possession (or junk) for
various psychologically compelling reasons that are often beyond our layman's
comprehension.
Many of them see "their possessions
not only as an extension of themselves but may even anthropomorphise these
objects - animating them with human-like properties, and forming such a bond
with them that they would agonise over wanting to ensure (and assure
themselves) that their discarded possession remains unharmed or goes to a good
home, or not at all."
I have seen a few clients of mine citing
such behaviour as one of the reasons for divorcing their spouse.
While I always tell them to "live and
let live", they will always tell me this: "How do you live and let
live when there's no more space to live and let live anymore?"
Well, my unspoken rejoinder to them is this:
"When you can't make physical space in a limited house, then make more
rooms in your heart to live and let live." Too idealistic?
But nevertheless I see their point to some
extent.
When you are living in an avalanche of
worthless mess, inviting disgust, discord and filth, and endangering your
mental and physical health, one has to draw the line somewhere.
Even love has her limits too, right?
Alas, maybe the worst couple to invite down
the aisle for a lifetime of marital union are a certified perfectionist and a
compulsive hoarder?
And while Dr Chong is of the view that
there is no generally effective treatments for hardcore hoarders, although CBTs
have seen some successful cases, maybe what men can't bridge, love may just
overcome? (I writing this with much trembling anticipation here).
If not, and one has to resign to such
atrocious condition, maybe early prevention would be better than cure then. And
excited pre-newly-weds had better go for an additional test apart from the
usual blood test to ensure a reproductive match.
And the additional
test is to ensure that the couple are psychologically compatible before they
risk taking a plunge into a world of agonising polar opposites that is capable
of turning just one day of living together into a lifetime. Cheerz.
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