There are white, Hanes ankle socks lying next to the laundry basket. Thoroughly worn and tossed aside, they are inside-out, and I, even though I did not wear them, stick my hand inside and turn them right-side-out. Cringe.

Why? Why, you may ask, am I torturing myself so? What did I possibly do to deserve this wretched task, a task that comes at the very start of the long ordeal that is doing his laundry?

Well, what I did was move in with a man. And somehow, someway, I finally realized that I’ll take the dirty, inside-out, stinky socks just to be able to spend Saturday afternoons on the couch, watching our favorite, illegally downloaded, anime shows. In fact, I’ll take a whole host of horrifying habits, messy mishaps, and crazy character traits just because I happen to be in love with him.

I didn’t think this way at first. Before we moved in together, I saw his old house. We spent many a Saturday there, too, with old pizza boxes on the table and laundry scattered throughout the living room, dining room, bedroom, hallway, and, finally, into the kitchen, where the scarcely used washer and dryer sat. I felt the crunch of leaves and small petrified reptiles that had died in his house and never been swept out. I managed to survive using the bathroom that hadn’t had a date with Scrubbing Bubbles since the mid ’90s. Yet, somehow, I thought it would be different when we moved in together.

In my defense, I was convinced years of living with other guys during college had led to the harried state of his living quarters. And he did, from time to time, try to clean the place up a bit. He was especially tidy after he came home one weekend from a fishing trip to find that I’d scoured his entire kitchen and all of the laundry and dishes were done. He really tried for quite a while.

As we were moving in together to a new place, and he left boxes of his books and trinkets unpacked for months at a time, I saw the old habits picking back up again. His computer desk turned into a storage unit for papers, beer bottles, and piles of clothes. He managed to put some dishes in the sink, but not in the empty dishwasher. He tossed his socks aside – not in the laundry basket two inches away, but next to it – turned inside-out, reeking of sweaty man feet. Yuck.

So I started cleaning up after him more, and then I started doing laundry. And then, finally, I started cooking regularly. And whoa, I started “keeping house.”

At first I was bitter, sad, frustrated. How could he? Seriously, how could he not manage to get the sock in the basket, but he could get it next to the basket? I just didn’t understand. And why, why, if he pulled it off, could he not get it turned the right way? Couldn’t he just pull from the toe and not even turn it inside-out at all? Oh, the torture of the simple things.

And rather than tell him as each individual issue arose, I kept my mouth shut. Brewing. Stewing. Getting more and more pissed off as each day passed. And then I finally lost it, crumpling into a messy ball of girl tears, and I told him how much it bothered me, how angry I was that he was irresponsible and left all the work to me.

That’s when the strangest thing happened. I saw a look of shock and embarrassment on his face. He apologized so fast I barely saw it coming, and he resolved to help more. He gave me reasons for not helping, and they all made sense, in theory.

So then a week or two of him helping went by. Then dishes started getting left in the sink, and socks began to pile up in random corners of the house. As soon as I’d mention anything, he quickly picked up after himself and did a little extra just to help. And it worked.

It still isn’t perfect. He’ll always be a slob at heart, but he tries. And I try, too, to be more relaxed and less worried about what condition the house is in on a daily basis. And I got to the point where I am now, which is that I understand that we give up a little bit of our lifestyle when we move in with someone else. I am a little less neat. He is a little less disastrously messy. When things get rough around the edges, I ask for his help and he pitches in.

But all in all, I don’t mind the smelly-man, Hanes ankle socks, because they mean lazy Sunday mornings when he brings me coffee in bed and sex at any hour, in any position, and in any spot of the house we choose. It means having wild, intense sex on the dining room table spontaneously. So if the dirty, nasty, disgusting, stomach-turning socks are a part of the deal that gets me him in my bed and in the kitchen and on the porch (wink) whenever I want, I’ll take the socks.