Nobody ever cleans their house more thoroughly and with a more critical eye than when guests are going to be knocking on the front door.
We should all be hosting more parties, welcoming judgmental friends into our homes to closely inspect our tidying up and dusting. It's what we need in order to keep our lives in order and our homes from plummeting directly into disarray.
Nobody enjoys cleaning. I certainly don't, though I thought my mom might have considered it a passionate hobby when I was growing up. Like everyone else, she hated it, too, but damned if she was going to let family friends talk behind her back about a line of dust forming atop the piano.
I'm not disciplined enough to keep my apartment clean without the added incentive of not grossing out guests. I'm a reasonably tidy person to begin with, but I like to ignore the things that can't be seen well with the naked eye, like dusting before the grey powder is an inch thick or forgetting all the tiny dust devils clinging to the carpet and hiding in the corner, keeping their backs to the wall so you can't come up behind them.
We need friends to keep us honest, not just to keep help our moral temperature from going critical, but to help make sure our homes don't descend into a whirlpool of filth.
Sure, friends help us maintain a sense of social purpose and provide us with our own communities and cliques from which we draw support. But after thinking about it, what we really need friends for is ensure we aren't living in a mess of empty pizza boxes and chipped wall paint.
Our homes are our kingdoms. They say as much about people as someone's daily appearance. Some people may use them as a way to make up for their daily, disheveled appearance.
When we invite people into our homes for a good meal and some brandy we need our home's appearance to look better than it does on an every-day basis. It's the original way to deceive people and make it look like we have a good grasp on both our lives and reality.
We've been deceiving people with our lovely homes ever since we started painting on our walls to give our guests something to look at and sweeping the rocks out of the cave. Nowadays we can use our online personas featured on Facebook and all the other social medias the kids use to fool people into thinking we have our chaotic lives together.
But that online mask only works up to a certain point. You've made lots of friends with your up-to-date and quirky selfies, but someday people will want you to entertain them in the world of the living and then it will be time to clean your house.
We keep our houses as clean as we need them to be to make them livable for us, but everybody knows that's not good enough for the rest of the world with their judgmental eyes and low tolerance for inhaling dust without breaking into sneezing fits. At least they'll politely tell you it's just their allergies, probably.
We all clean a little more thoroughly when we're expecting company, so it's downright necessary to keep inviting people to your house for dinner, for the game or just to inspect the awesome job you did cleaning behind the oven and under your couch cushions.
Our social lives have as much to do with maintaining good relationships as they do with maintaining a livable home.
