Dear Prudence: Avocado Disposal Dispute

[minoanmiss]

Sometimes even Prudence needs a little help. This week’s tricky situation is below. Submit your comments about how to approach the situation here to Jenée, and then look back for the final answer here on Friday.

Dear Prudence,

How many times do you need to ask a partner to do something? My husband and I eat avocados almost daily. When he finishes an avocado, he leaves it (and the spoon) on our very small kitchen counter. I think that this is gross, messy, and unsanitary. The compost bin is on the same counter. He is self-diagnosed with ADHD and on the autism spectrum, so I give him many allowances in the kitchen (he does the majority of the cooking, I exclusively do other tasks, and I work with a therapist on being accepting of his neurodivergence). However, I have asked for five years for the avocado and his peanut butter spoon to be put away. He doesn’t understand why it bugs me. I have explained that I also have things that are important to me that might be hard for him to understand. It seems like I will only get consideration if I am neurodivergent. His daughter also has autism and ADHD (diagnosed) so I often feel like an outsider.

—How Many Times?

Comments

[dissectionist]

Have an avocado/spoon plate and that way his discards are not resting on the counter. Once he encounters the problem that his plate becomes full of leftover avocado skins and spoons and therefore becomes unusable, he’ll have to start dealing with it himself.

[mrissa]

A kitchen that constantly smelled of days-old avocado skins would be literally unusable for me, and while I know this is not universal, I also know that I am not the only one. The smell would drive me out of the kitchen and possibly out of the house.

[dissectionist]

My expectation is that on the second day - when confronted with his own now-nasty avocado skin and spoon interfering with being able to enjoy being in the kitchen and eat a new avocado - it would become a self-limiting problem. When the Cleaning Fairies are constantly whisking gross stuff away, others never have to deal with the outcome of not doing so themselves, and it’s easy to continue not cleaning up. Why bother, when you know the Fairies will deal with it?

As a Cleaning Fairy far too often, I’ve had to learn to cope with grossness for long enough for the actors involved to realize 1) that the Fairy is done with making everything better, and 2) they have to step up because now their own environment is unusable.

[mrissa]

I'm glad that's worked for you! (Sincerely. I am glad.) But I've known people whose tolerance for gross stuff was basically infinite, so I think this is a thing to try rather than a guaranteed solution.