An honest mess: Is the pressure to deep clean for guests sabotaging our social time?

Globe and Mail

14-05-2025

When guests are coming to Katherine Goldstein's house, there is no frantic vacuuming, no hiding of clutter, no race to make the home 'presentable' before the doorbell rings.
Instead, the author and mother of three leaves the reality of her life in plain sight. On a recent spring day, shoes, jackets and lunch bags are piled high near the front door. The kitchen island brims with bowls, cutting boards and water bottles, pens, mail, a basket of random stuff, a hummingbird feeder.
No one seems to mind – not Ms. Goldstein and not her friends, who come by often to her home in Durham, N.C., for casual dinners and playdates with their kids.
'Letting people see our messy houses, it's a way to show vulnerability and build relationships,' says Ms. Goldstein, whose forthcoming book is How To Find Your People: A Guide to the Transformative Power of Community.
For many, the thought of inviting friends to a clutter-strewn house is embarrassing. There's a sense that we can't play host until things are 'under control' – even if it means rarely opening up our homes to family and friends because of the time involved in a deep clean.
A proliferation of domestic content on TikTok and Instagram isn't helping, with women posting endless cleaning hacks and meal prep marathons, showing off their sparkling kitchens and meticulously organized closets. Celebrities up the ante: Try Meghan Markle's rainbow fruit trays for your kids, or colour-code the fridge and stage the pantry like a museum, as Khloe Kardashian does. Much of it feels disconnected from reality, from houses and routines upended through life's chaotic phases.
Fed up with domestic pressure, others are pulling back the curtain on their imperfect homes. On TikTok, women do walk-throughs of grimy, toy-strewn rooms. 'Normalize being normal,' Emily Feret, an Illinois mother, tells her 1.3 million followers, showing her overflowing junk drawer and a refrigerator brimming with expired relish and other mysteries. From the TikTok account @domesticblisters (1.7 million followers), Texas therapist KC Davis shares what a home inhabited by children looks like: a sea of toys blanketing the living room; food scattered near a high chair; a laptop and kids' stuff vying for space on the kitchen island. Commenters sound relieved, seeing a reflection of their own lives.
Others are dropping the front by openly asking for help at home. Instead of baby showers, some expectant parents opt for nesting parties. Guests help set up nurseries, build cribs, fold onesies and burp cloths.
The idea is this: By letting our guard down at home – by leaving our mess in sight, or accepting assistance – we might deepen our relationships. In the end, friends and family aren't coming over for a white-glove test; they're coming to connect.
It was the pandemic years that made Ms. Goldstein reconsider hosting and household mess. A month before lockdowns hit, she and her husband had twins, while raising a preschooler. Socializing got complicated. So Ms. Goldstein simplified things, getting friends together in her yard and ordering a pizza.
She's maintained this relaxed hosting stance. Instead of saving dates months out, she'll invite people over with a few days' notice. She'll cook more of what she's making for her kids: Costco pesto pasta, air-fryer chicken. And then she'll do a 'minimum viable cleanliness' check. 'That means making sure there is nothing disgusting happening in the guest bathroom and picking things off the kitchen and living-room floors that the kids have left that would trip someone.'
Friends tell her these visits feel relaxed, which makes them more likely to keep plans even when they're tired after a busy week. Because these aren't big productions, it's also easier for them to reciprocate, which helps them meet more often.
'If you feel you have to clean for two days, cook for half a day and then spend half a day cleaning up, you're just not going to do it,' Ms. Goldstein said. 'If you are able to reframe – 'I'll spend 10 minutes cleaning up, order pizza and we'll eat on paper plates on the porch' – that becomes a much lower bar for creating connection, which is ultimately one of the most important parts of having people over.'
For some hosts, letting go this way is a relief, a less punishing way to operate. It's also more genuine. When we nervously stage our homes for guests, we're trying to convey that we have it together – that we're 'self-sufficient,' as Ms. Goldstein puts it.
Some are questioning whether this façade is worth the time and effort. What message do we actually want to send when we open the front door?
Guests are on the way, and Gayle Waters-Waters is nervous. Duking it out with the vacuum cleaner and fluffing throw pillows until they're like 'microwaveable popcorn bags, three minutes deep,' Gayle is overwhelmed.
Gayle stars in Company is Coming, a cult skit created by Massachusetts comedian Chris Fleming. He modelled Gayle, an easily excitable suburban mom, after people he grew up around, though he's said Gayle really came to life after he watched a woman diving into a vat of placemats at Crate & Barrel. In the skit, Gayle's on a housecleaning rampage before a dinner party.
'These chairs need to be pushed in! There cannot be any sign of LIVING in this house!' she bellows. 'I want this place looking like a new Mediterranean fusion restaurant by noon!'
The skit is absurdist, clearly. But with 15 million views on YouTube, it's obviously struck a chord. Commenters write about recognizing their own mothers in Gayle's harried tailspin.
I have sympathy for Gayle. The morning of a dinner party, I can be found hunched over, maniacally weeding the garden. Or scrubbing the walls in the guest bathroom, questioning how we can live like animals. When showtime finally arrives, I can be tired and cranky, the opposite of an easy host.
For KC Davis, the ridiculous part is how harshly we judge ourselves even though we rarely see anyone else's normal home, on a normal day.
'When we go over to people's houses, they cleaned before we got there. Before people started putting that raw stuff on TikTok, we didn't have a good sense of what the average person's home looks like. We just knew what ours looks like, and what our families' looked like growing up,' says Ms. Davis, who wrote the 2022 book How To Keep House While Drowning.
Oppressive expectations to make a home 'presentable' land on top of the daily burden of chores. In Canada, women spend double the time that men do on indoor house cleaning, dishwashing and laundry – a daily average of 64 minutes compared with men's 32 minutes, according to the 2022 Time Use Survey from Statistics Canada.
Still, these hours of domestic drudgery can feel inadequate when women peer in on immaculate palaces paraded all over Instagram.
'Social media presents these rarefied, unrealistic versions of what people's homes look like, and what entertaining should look like it. Even if we see it and think, 'That's ridiculous, I know my house doesn't have to look like that,' it still seeps in,' Ms. Goldstein says. 'Women are highly socialized to see our worth around homemaking, cleanliness and domesticity, even if we think we're not susceptible to that.'
As a therapist, Ms. Davis proposes a more compassionate approach to 'keeping house': Make home functional, not museum-perfect. When visitors show up at her front door, she makes a point of not immediately apologizing that her place is messy. Fundamentally, she thinks it's time to rethink what it means to host.
'For most of history, people either had staff, or the women giving all this labour. Now we're feeling like, 'I'm hosting people – and I'm supposed to be enjoying this also.' But you can't if you're working yourself like staff," said Ms. Davis, whose new book is Who Deserves Your Love.
Instead of obsessing about what her guests might think, she tries to focus on how they feel when they're over. Her baseboards might be coated in a film of dust, she admits, but who cares? No one's lying on the floor. She puts her energy into more relevant details, leaving travel-size toiletries in the guest bathroom and a carafe of water in the guest bedroom. 'People care if you've thought about them,' Ms. Davis says.
The therapist also challenges hosts to ask for help. Make dinner a potluck, and when the night winds down, let friends wash the dishes. These are simple gestures some women are still reluctant to accept, as if doing so means falling down on the domestic front somehow.
'The best way to create an environment where people feel like they can start to depend on each other,' Ms. Davis says, 'is somebody has to be the first to say, 'Hey, I need something.''
Jack King and his wife, Emily, used to run a 'fast and furious sprint' together before guests arrived at their home in Knoxville, Tenn.: Plan a menu, grocery shop, sweep and vacuum, mow the lawn and clean their young children's playroom (twice).
Behind it all hummed unwritten rules about Southern hospitality – high standards that collided with the havoc of raising two toddlers.
'Those invisible things that were underneath the surface, those weren't facilitating connection, they were actually impeding it,' said Mr. King, an Anglican priest.
The couple decided to start thinking differently about hosting. 'Scruffy hospitality,' Mr. King called it in one of his sermons. In practice, it meant the toddlers' playroom might not be presentable. Dinner might come from the frozen-food aisle at Trader Joe's.
'Scruffy hospitality means you're not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home,' Mr. King wrote in a 2014 blog post. 'Hospitality is not a house inspection, it's friendship.'
Essentially, he was asking about the goal of hosting. Is it a mentality of serving people? An exchange of friendship? Or a means of impressing people?
'In meditating about hospitality, at the heart of it is, you put your guests at ease. It's not for the sake of the host,' the priest says. 'Your guests, they may feel more uptight if everything's too polished.'
British author Oliver Burkeman featured scruffy hospitality in his 2024 book Meditations for Mortals, which explores how we squander our precious time.
How did it become normal, Mr. Burkeman writes, for hosts to hide 'the daily reality of their lives'? He was guilty of it too, scurrying to conceal any trace of everyday life – 'crumbs underneath our fridge, or mail stacked inexplicably on top of our toaster.'
And yet, when he visited other people's homes, their messes made him feel 'obscurely privileged, as if I'd been granted the VIP access pass to their lives – so we must really be friends.'
Hosting offers a window into more beyond your home life. It can telegraph how you were raised and what you prioritize in life, now.
In Poland, where I was born, domestic expectations still run high for women. Before Easter gatherings, many will scrub windows, beat rugs, tidy linen closets and wash 'firanke,' delicate curtains. A 'rebirth of your house anew' – an 'inner necessity,' even – is how Radio Poland hosts describe the deep spring clean.
My mother was mostly indifferent to such practices. She hired a weekly cleaner and didn't go overboard. Before a party, she'd drape decorative scarves over stacks of paperwork in our living room, concealing the mess. We teased her for this deal-with-it-later approach.
Today, I'm a decidedly more uptight host. But I also feel no 'inner necessity' to wash curtains at Easter, like some of my Polish compatriots do. I have my mother to thank for lowering the bar this way.
For other hosts, keeping a home presentable remains culturally hard-wired.
To Amrita Maharaj-Dube, a mother of two in Elmira, Ont., the idea of letting guests peer into your mess is a non-starter: 'Your house is like a physical manifestation of your values,' she said.
Ms. Maharaj-Dube described growing up in Trinidad and Tobago with parents who placed importance on keeping the home spotless, especially when guests came over. An even more thorough cleaning took place before Hindu festivals, religious observances and special gatherings, with curtains changed and the glassware hutch dusted.
'Part of the fasting and cleansing process is decluttering your house and making sure it's clean to welcome the spiritual presence,' said Ms. Maharaj-Dube, noting that these routines were drilled in 'from a very young age.'
Today, her home is tidy and minimalist; the family is diligent with a rotating schedule of chores. Before any planned gatherings, they mop floors and fully sanitize the bathroom, plus blankets and throw-pillow covers. 'Kids can be grimy; those things need to be washed,' the mother laughed.
If her son, 9, and daughter, 6, want friends over, they need to tidy their rooms, collect toys and deploy the Clorox wipes for surfaces.
To Ms. Maharaj-Dube, the cleanup isn't really about wowing guests. It's about respecting those who visit and cultivating good habits.
But the high standards sometimes come at a social cost. Already, busy work and school schedules keep the family from having people over more often. The cleaning can get exhausting, Ms. Maharaj-Dube acknowledged, so visits need to be spaced out.
'I can't do entertaining on back-to-back weekends because I need time to clean. I need time to prepare. I'm not really good with spur-of-the-moment things.'
The way we host sends a signal: How much do we want to share with the outside world? Some people prefer clean, minimalist sightlines – any evidence of day-to-day life hidden away. Others leave more out in the open.
Mary Randolph Carter doesn't ascribe to putting things away. When guests arrive at the Manhattan apartment she's shared with her husband for five decades, she'll often leave her work desk, an old farm table in the living room, piled high with research materials.
'People like to see it. They're like, 'What are you working on?'' said Ms. Carter, a photographer and long-time creative director at Ralph Lauren whose new book is Live With The Things You Love.
In her apartment, treasures crowd every surface; piles of books sit under tables and the sofa.
'I call clutter 'the poetry of our lives,'' she says. 'People have walked in here and felt like they weren't in the city but in the country. It felt warm and comforting because we wore our heart on our sleeves. It's kind of like a big scrapbook of our lives.'
She titled her 2010 book A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of a Misspent Life, after a line on a doormat she and her sisters spotted at Walmart one Christmas. It became a mantra both for daily life and times of hosting.
'If everything is in its place, it does send this message of, 'How does she do it? She has a job, she has children, and yet everything's in its place,'' Ms. Carter said. 'We do put up barriers around what we present to the outside world – to even our closest friends.'
There are tightly wound hosts and those with an easier sense of hospitality. Ms. Carter described a friend, a European photographer who entertained frequently at his apartment. He'd set out fruit and roses on the dinner table but never bothered with napkins.
'He would stand in his open kitchen cooking his pasta while we stood around sipping wine, some of us watching,' Ms. Carter said.
'People would sit around talking, really enjoying themselves. The moment you walked in, there was this spirit of, 'This is the way I live, this is informal, welcome in.' You feel honoured to be part of that kind of reality.'