The Decibel - The case against cleaning before hosting

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

With the holidays right around the corner, households are getting ready for company and deep cleans are underway. Even the idea of letting family and friends see a clutter-strewn home can be anxiety-inducing, and images of perfectly-clean celebrity homes on social media don’t help. But what are we actually losing when we prioritize the act of cleaning over the people we do it for?Zosia Bielski, The Globe’s Time Use reporter, digs into the societal pressure we all face over deep cleaning, why the work often disproportionately falls on women and how letting our guard down in our living spaces can deepen relationships.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's 2 p.m. on Saturday. Your friends are coming over for dinner at 6 p.m. You look around your house and see. Your dining room table is covered in the pieces of your family's life. Random mail, the spilled contents of a purse, someone's sweater, a random mug with the drags of coffee in it. And your living room floor is no better. The kids and dogs' toys are all mixed up and strewn every.

The bathroom is less than pristine. What do you do? The clock is ticking and company is coming. A lot of people would frantically launch into a frenzy of decluttering and deep cleaning before preparing an elaborate dinner for their guests. But is all that pressure to present a spotless home worth it? Zosha Bielski is the time-use reporter for the globe. She's on the show today to explain why people feel this pressure to have super clean homes for their guests

and how we can shift our mindsets to try and reclaim some of our precious time. I'm Madeline White, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Zosha, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. Okay, let's start off by just talking about why this is a problem at all. Like, what is wrong with feeling pressure to clean your house before company comes over? So, you know, there's nothing like wrong with wanting your place to look nice and tidy and beautiful and charming for people coming over. And people have very, like, subjective standards around this stuff.

So there's nothing really inherently wrong with it. But those who sort of study time use and time with community and gender roles say the problem, begins when we start comparing ourselves to others, when we start comparing our homes to others to what we see online to having guilt or shame or embarrassment about what your house looks like after a busy week at work or a busy phase in life and feeling that you need to, you know, sanitize your place to the point of, you know, creating like a museum-like atmosphere before people come over when you start feeling that pressure to basically like eradicate all signs of your life and create this, you know, enchanting show for visitors. All of that sort of becomes

problematic when it's loaded down with, you know, there's something wrong with us or we're not meeting some kind of domestic standard. You know, I think a lot of people look at house cleaning and wonder, why are we just sort of devoting a thesis paper to it? But this really dovetails into our time use, our daily time use, our weekly time use, and how often we actually see, you know, the favorite people that we have in our lives. If you're going to be. going to spend days, hours, prepping for your social time, odds are you're going to do it less and less. And this ties into how often we socialize the quality of our socializing and ultimately factors into isolation and loneliness and, you know, the standards we think we have to bear

in order to really connect with our loved ones. That's very interesting. We're going to get into all those different things. But before we do that, I just want to be really clear about when we say this is a question of time use. Whose time are we talking about here? You know, we're still predominantly talking about women. This is where the pre-cleaning for guests' conversations still lives. You know, for many women, as much as we like to say, we're beyond this, for many of us, there's sort of unspoken expectations still about what the home should look like. And, you know, that can come from standards, your mother set, your grandmother set, what your girlfriend's houses look like, what you're kind of taking it online. It comes from a lot of places.

even though we like to shrug this stuff off. There's sort of this mental chatter in our heads about what home should look like. And the standards can get punishingly high even though we work full-time jobs. There's a culture of intensive parenting that demands more of people's time or maybe you might be juggling multiple jobs. So the standards are still quite old school, even though women's realities and their time is sort of so fragmented. And I know time is like such a tricky, slippery thing, right? But is there any way to quantify this? Do we have an idea of how much time people are spending doing this kind of work? Statistics Canada does some interesting social surveys that really delve into people's time use every day. So the latest numbers reveal that women still spend 64 minutes, so that's over an hour, every single day on cleaning, dishes, and laundry.

And men put in just half that time at 32 minutes. And this is like the everyday maintenance of the household. This comes before whatever you might do when guests are coming over. So that's a fair bit of time every day even before we get to the things we're talking about. in terms of the deeper prep for guests. Okay, so I know you talk to a bunch of people as part of your reporting for this story. How did they describe their relationship

with cleaning for the sake of guests? So I really sort of saw the spectrum. I spoke to a woman named Marita Maharaj Dube, who is from Trinidad in Tobago, and she described a cultural element in her cleaning practice. So in her case, this was drilled into you through mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers

that, you know, you respect your guests, you clean, you tidy, things get even more over the top ahead of religious festivals, and she sort of runs her household that way now. So even if her kids want friends over, they've got to clean their rooms first. She did point out that she divides their chores evenly, so her son isn't doing less than her daughter, which is promising. And then I spoke to several people who really are pulling back. The pandemic certainly played a role when socializing got more difficult and people had to sort of get inventive. The nascence for the piece came from speaking to a journalist, Catherine Goldstein. She ran a newsletter called The Double Shift, which looks at motherhood and work and gender roles and domesticity. And she talked about really pulling back on the time that she will spend, you know, sanitizing her house before guests come over because she realized the point for her is connecting with people and seeing people more often and preparing for a day, cleaning up for a day afterwards, just made that frequency of connection impossible. So

her go-to sort of rule is, you know, just a few minutes picking up the trip hazards from her young kids. So no one kind of falls in the hallway and then sanitizing the guest bathroom. So it isn't disgusting in there. And then she'll just make more of whatever she's making for the kids. And no, it's not ambitious, but at the same time, none of her friends seem to care. And she's seeing her loved ones a lot more often. And there's also more reciprocity. So because it's so relaxed, they're also having her over more. And so everybody sort of dropped their standards a bit and lowered the bar. And it doesn't sound like anyone's putting on a show in her circle. So that's interesting. That does seem like a bit of an outlier,

though, because I do feel like it's very common to hear about people feeling pressure to keep a spotless home. You know, cleanliness is next to godliness after all. But for those people who did talk to you about the pressures they're feeling, what was the message that they were striving for when they did spend hours, if not days, kind of scrubbing and decluttering and preparing ahead of, say, hosting a dinner party or something. And I think this is something that Goldstein got at. She talked about this idea of self-sufficiency. We want to show people that we're self-sufficient, basically that we have our stuff together,

you know, that we're sort of managing and navigating this adult life. And certainly when you come into a house this sort of spotless and minimalist, that may be the impression you're left with versus sort of domestic chaos everywhere and, you know, animal crackers on the floor and then toys churn everywhere. It telegraphs something in terms of how well you've got adult life together. So that's certainly something that people talked about. It's like a symbolism essentially is what you're saying. It's like the state of my house becomes the state of my life. Exactly. And a lot of people want to tuck their day-to-day lives away and shove everything in the closets and the cupboards and to sort of create like a minimalist museum like space with clean

lines. And then I talk to other people who really are consciously not going there. And like you said, it really is uncomfortable for people not to prepare this way for some people. So it's a conscious process to stop yourself and say, no, I'm not going to spend the next day on this. And the women I spoke to definitely described sort of rewiring themselves and really deciding. okay, I'll do this, this and this so my guests feel comfortable, but I'm not going to be scrubbing baseboards, you know, no one's lying on the floor, for example. Yeah. And all of this, again, feels so retrograde in discussion, right? We really think we are beyond this, but it's a little slice that reveals just how many of these unspoken expectations still sort of linger for women.

It's interesting, too, because it sounds like a big part of this motivation is around fear of judgment, right, whether it's about like literally the cleanliness and, you know, the sanitary nature of our homes or like whether or not we have our lives together. I'm wondering though if people talk to you about whether like do they go to other people's homes and immediately judge them or do they have a different relationship with the state of mess in other people's places? That's what was interesting that people were so much more forgiving with the messes and homes of other people. The woman I spoke to who really hardcore cleans, you know, the family that has a weekly, biweekly, monthly cleaning schedule and then on top of that they're doing another deep clean

for guests. So she talked to me about like making a point of not going to other people's houses and scanning around and judging. And she talked about like you never know what people are dealing with in their life, whether it's an elderly parent or an illness. So she somehow was able to draw that line and not extend her standards to the homes of others. And then one of the few men I talk to, Oliver Berkman, he's a fantastic author who writes a lot about time use, also picked up on you know, the amount of time we spend maintaining our homes for the sake of appearances. He talked about like his frantic rush around the house before guests come over. So he'll find like piles of mail on the toaster or like crumbs all over the place and he'll

just run around like a chicken with his head cut off, cleaning everything up. But on the flip side, when he goes to a friend's house and he sees their own junk piles, he actually feels like privilege to be able to witness like what their lives really look like. and in his mind that telegraphs that maybe we really are friends because they haven't put everything away and created a facade. So it's an interesting paradox happening there where we really are much more harsh with ourselves than people around us. We'll be right back.

Let's talk about some of the consequences of all of this then. Obviously, it's less time. but is it more than that? Is it affecting people in their lives in other ways? That was sort of where the story interested me. It wasn't, my main focus wasn't simply like domesticity, but how does this affect the time we actually spend with our loved ones? You can think back to like your last dinner party

where maybe you grocery shopped and cooked and cleaned for two days beforehand, maybe even mowed the lawn, the cleanup afterwards. You're really unlikely to do that again in a week, if that's the bar you're setting for yourself. So everybody can relate to this. that feeling. But some of the interesting research around time use really pointed to a few things colliding here. So there's a sense that in North America we really are spending less time with friends and less time with neighbors in-person time. A lot of that has migrated to text or this

like asynchronous, you know, communication. But that in-person time, it's definitely dwindling and there's a sense that, you know, friends and neighbors sort of take the brunt of it. These are those like the optional quote-unquote connections that come after our families and our children and our employers and our colleagues. So one of those surveys I really found fascinating was the number of shared meals globally. So a quarter of people around the world will actually entertain at home every week, most days, or even every day. And we're talking about sharing a meal, having dinner, watching a film or sports with people. The country that topped the list was Mexico, really highly communal countries. So 42% of Mexicans and they had visitors over daily every other day or even weekly.

Argentina, Brazil, China were close behind. Now, in Canada, just 15% of people host this often and 10% said they never entertain at home. So that's quite a striking cultural difference. And so the next question is sort of why does having company at home even matter? The World Happiness Report looked at the effect of shared meals of having people over. strong correlation with stronger well-being, the more you sort of share meals with others versus having them alone. And people who shared more meals were more likely to assume that other people have good intentions.

They were more willing to return favors. And they said they had friends and relatives to count on for support. And then on the flip side, those who sort of rarely shared their meals were lonelier and less likely to help strangers. So you get all kinds of interesting correlations ripple effects that tie into how often. and you let people into your home and share a meal together. So that really gives us a good sense of the problem and how it relates to our choices around time

and then kind of the ripple effect of that initial decision to use so much time to prepare for guests and clean for guests. But I want to dig into this a little bit deeper. Why do people actually feel this pressure? Where does it come from? What is it that's driving people to hide their day-to-day lives and all the clutter that comes with it from the eyes of the people who are closest to them?

There's definitely a lingering gender lens on this. You'll probably do what your mother did, what your grandmother did, what your great-grandmother did. You know, you will probably follow the way things were in your own household. That's a huge factor. Cultural factors also weigh in. I talk in the piece about living in Poland and growing up in Poland and what people get up to at Easter, including, you know, washing the curtains and scrubbing windows and you name it. I talk about how my mom veered away from that model. She was always a rebel, and the fact that I certainly behaved more like my mother than my culture.

You're not washing your curtains. I'm not washing my curtains. I don't remember the last time I mopped, so I'm a failed Polish housewife. So the culture is another thing, and then what we see around us, what we see in our circles, what our friends are doing, what their habits are, what permission they give us to let the bar slide a bit. and obviously the whole world of social media, Instagram, TikTok. That's another domestic cesspool. Let's talk about that because I do think that, I imagine that plays a really big part in this. So, like, what do we know about the pressure that social media is putting on people in terms of hosting guests?

Yeah, and I think this kind of dovetails with how we entertain and how we clean. So, of course, we've had the trad wife movement on Instagram, which is sort of influencers with an army of staff presenting, you know, old school domesticity and sourdough loaves and you name it, homemade cottage cheese and your farmhouse, that's not helping. But even among sort of regular women, people are sharing like endless cleaning hacks and meal prep marathons. And again, a lot of these people have endorsement deals behind the scenes and spend their time mostly doing this. But I get a lot of videos about organizing my fridge. I don't know what the algorithm knows about me, but like a lot of like, here's how to organize all your condiments and stuff like that. So it's even in like small little ways. Exactly. And,

you know, the prime example of this is Chloe Kardashian who's color-coded her fridge and released like a lengthy video of her pantry, which is basically like a monochrome minimalist pantry that essentially is like lit like a museum. And, you know, we look at the stuff and it's obviously completely ridiculous and infuriating, but it seeps in, whether we like it or not on some level these things seep in. So, okay, we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but let's dig into this further. Let's talk about the different ways in which this idea of hospitality is changing. What are some of the new ways in which you encountered through your reporting in this piece?

Basically, I'm hearing a lot of pushback, and a lot of it has to do with women sort of fed up with their grind at home, but also with the messaging that they're seeing online, the kind of stuff we just talked about. So a lot of authors, time use, experts, feminists, people who write about unpaid labor are really sort of calling women out. A, stop doing this to each other and, B, look at the effect of this in your own life and sort of what are you taking on? It may be imposed culturally on you and what are you sort of doing to yourself that you can let up on. So there is a real push to sort of ask for help. Potluck, let people do your dishes, the nesting party.

So this is instead of a shower, baby shower, you have people come over and help you build your crib or fold all your onesies. This is very unusual in our culture to sort of stop and ask your friends for help. I mean, that really is what friends should be doing for each other rather than everybody putting up this facade of self-sufficiency. Another aspect, Casey Davis is a therapist in Texas. She sort of made waves in a New York Times piece when she just laid bare the mess of her home and the clutter. And, you know, publicly people would shame her and her discussion. guesting house, but privately women would email her and say, like, thank you for revealing what a house with young children really looks like.

And Davis's approach to hosting is she really makes a conscious effort not to apologize for her messy house when she opens the door. And then she'll just focus on, if she's got an overnight guest, she'll focus on the little niceties for the guests, whether that's a carafe of water in the bedroom or toiletries in the bathroom. But again, like she said, she's not scrubbing the baseboards. anticipation of anyone lying down on the floor. Right.

She's thinking about the experience as opposed to, like, the just observation. Yes. The way she put it was, you know, consider how your guests feel in the space rather than imagining what they think of you, you know. I've also heard of something called scruffy hospitality. Can you tell me about that? This is great. So there's a pastor named Jack King.

He's an Anglican pastor in Knoxville, Tennessee. And he came on my radar through, again, Oliver Berkman, the author who writes about time use. And Jack King delivered sort of a sermon in at least a decade ago and then turned that into a blog post that picked up speed. So the idea of scruffy hospitality is sort of to question, you know, the very point of hosting. So some of the things he talked about both in the sermon and in the blog post were, 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. Scruffy hospitality means you're more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or your lawn makes.

And what does that mean in his house? Basically, they stopped, him and his wife stopped tiding the playroom. They stopped mowing the lawn inexplicably before people came over for a dinner party. And, you know, the dinner might come from Trader Joe's frozen section, you know, rather than like a Jamie Oliver, an intricate Jamie Oliver recipe. And I loved what he said about hospitality and the idea of hosting. King said, hospitality is not a household. house inspection, it's friendship. And when he talked to me, he was just chuckling at like how far we sort of veer off course, you know, in our hosting. We forget that these are the people who love us and trust us and vice versa. And we just sort of get into this like Martha Stewart

spiral. So it was very interesting to see sort of a man helm this push for his parishioners, right? So then what do people gain if they do try one of these different approaches to hosting? Well, from a time standpoint, they're not spending hours, if not days, sort of spitz shining the place before guests come over. They talked about being able to see their loved ones more often and more spontaneously with sort of less lead time. But they also talked about this sense of relief, just how this is much of a less punishing approach and a sense that this was more of a genuine approach, an honest approach, sort of laying out your foibles, laying out your struggle domestically laying. staying out your busy week. Catherine Goldstein talks a lot about that. And then I also talked to Mary Randolph Carter, who is a long-time creative director at Ralph

Loren, and she's authored a number of books about the home, including her latest, Live with the Things You Love, and she talked about this idea of the easy host, you know, the uptight host and the easy host. And that paradoxically, when everything is sort of in its place, you can actually make your guests feel a little more uptight. And when you sort of let go of that and let go of the facade, she described a number of easy hosts in her life and how your guests can really feel that. And there's a genuineness and an informality that really emerges with that kind of hosting that really rubs off on the rest of the group. I also have to imagine that people are a little bit more relaxed if they haven't spent all day cleaning their house before the guest arrives.

Exactly. I mean, how many times are you completely exhausted runoff? your feet and barely sort of have time to to primp yourself before guests arrive. So the question is, how do we become easy hosts and become sort of able to do it more often in this lighter way? So to end here, Zosha, I actually want to take a minute and kind of confess my own personal approach to all of this, because this has been a very fascinating talk. And it's made me reflect back on how I approach hosting, because I actually invite people over to give myself a deadline to really clean my home. Like, I host a monthly games night with friends, because I know it will mean that I will actually, like, go and scrub my place. So, first of all, is this neurotic? Or is there

actually a benefit in kind of giving yourself an incentive to do a task that you wouldn't otherwise prioritize? This is funny, because a lot of our commenters said, hey, I really do appreciate hosting and having people over, because it's the only thing that will motivate me to actually clean. I'm not alone, then, in my neuroses. and you're not alone. And to me, it's kind of a strange silver lining on this story because it tells me that at least for women, maybe more women are spending less of their precious time,

kind of maintaining a baseline of clean in their homes. Maybe they're doing more meaningful work in their lives to the point that, yeah, things do get out of control and you sort of use your guests, you know, as a deadline to sort of get it into shape. My only caveat is, I think it's only sort of a, feminist silver lining as long as, you know, when the guests are coming over, the whole household is prepping for those guests. And it doesn't fall to, you know, one member of the household. So,

and a friend of mine actually, when she, when she read this piece, she reminded me that I'm in Toronto. She's in Vancouver. She used my arrival to fully renovate a guest room and was actually like painting the bathroom cabinets until, you know, late in late at night, really pushing the deadline philosophy, and she called this the pre-visit frenzies and said without them, like nothing would get done. So the point is we all have varying approaches to mess. And the point is to not berate yourself for the state of your home, for not finding the time to stage your home perfectly, especially when the real point is cultivating meaningful social time. Socha, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation. Thanks for having me.

That was the globe's time use reporter, Zosha Bielski. That's it for today. I'm Madeline White. The Decibel is hosted by Cheryl Sutherland. Our former intern, Kelsey Hallett, produced this episode. I produced the show, along with Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor.

Thanks for listening.