Out, damned toothbrush

I made a casual remark to a friend this week, expressing my admiration for a couple who'd just celebrated 15 years of marriage.

My friend's response was something along the lines of: "Should we give cookies to people because of the dubious achievement of staying married?" So I pointed out to him that a single guy's opinions on marriage are about as relevant as the Pope's views on fellatio.

I admire people who have been married longer than I have. Staying married is harder than single people imagine. And I'm not talking about the obvious challenges of marriage such as paying the bills, raising kids or keeping it zipped up in the face of provocation from every random in a micro-mini and clear heels.

I believe that a far bigger marital challenge is sharing living space with a spouse without accidentally dropping some cyanide in their tea in the end. If you have never found yourself staring at a sleeping love of your life at 4.25am on a Monday morning, fighting off the urge to suffocate them with a pillow because they were breathing too loud, you have probably never been married.

I'm not too big on advice, because human beings are just not wired to accept advice that doesn't support what they already wanted to do. But when people ask me if they should marry their sweethearts, my response is to tell them that if they haven't lived with the other person, they lack critical information towards making an informed decision.

Yes, I'm an advocate of living in sin. However, if that's not an option, it is critical to have some experience of sharing a house with people other than your family. I have shared many flats, rooms and houses in my life. And the majority of housemates I have experienced can only be described as Housemates From Hell!

Look, I am a self-absorbed, finicky chap at the best of times. I like things a certain way, bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Take a thing like the storing of a toothbrush, for instance. I believe that my toothbrush should have a hermit-like existence. You can't dump your own toothbrush anywhere near mine. I once had a housemate who would forget this cardinal rule and throw his toothbrush in with mine. The bristles would even touch sometimes. Needless to say, I discarded many a contaminated toothbrush. He was a toothpaste tube middle-squeezer to boot. I'm sorry, but that's an unforgivable Stone Age practice. Almost as sacrilegious as orientating a roll of loo paper counter-clockwise.

And don't get me started on housemates who leave the shower floor wet after they're done. Wet surfaces after someone else's cleansing ritual freak me out. My imagination gallops likes wild horses. Do not make me spell out the moist, gory details.

This reminds me of a house I shared with three people on Durban's Berea. The Neanderthal owner of the house had seen fit not to install a shower in the solitary bathroom. Just a bath. Look, taking a bath is a disgusting habit of soaking in one's filthy scum as it is. But when you share a house with Lucifer's spawn, who have the hygiene practices of an 18th-century Parisian hobo, I treat the bath with the same delicacy I would treat a nuclear reactor.

After two months of daily 30-minute pre-bath rituals, scrubbing down the tub with a corrosive cocktail comprising Dettol, Jeyes Fluid and Handy Andy, I knew there had to be another way. So I started dating this older woman down the street. She had a shower at her house, see. To quote my high-school Zulu teacher, Bro Placidus: "It's the little things that count". Things such as a housemate who will wolf down a mountain of Weetbix, leave about a tablespoon's worth in the bowl and leave it uncovered in the fridge. Double credit if you reach for the milk and discover there isn't enough left to drown an anorexic pubic louse.

The first real conversation I had with my wife, before we started dating, was about housemates from hell . Listening to the passion in her voice as she elucidated the horrors of housemates, I realised that she was The One - and that I could share my living space with her.

One of the last housemates I had was a woman who had multi-channel ears. She didn't see anything wrong with walking in on me watching TV and switching on the music stereo. I can't deal with two external sounds on top of the many voices inside my brain. But the thing that sent me packing was back in the bathroom.

I'm not squeamish about women's undergarments. I can accept the solitary thong hanging on the rack after a shower. My roomie wasn't, in a manner of speaking, a petit woman. She satisfied the criteria to be a resident at that Nkandla compound.

What bothered me is that she had a habit of leaving several days' worth of undies hanging. A buffet of loin covering. And during certain periods in the lunar cycle I'd walk into the bathroom to be greeted by a row of pillow-sized bloomers in various stages of dryness. I moved out after four months.