Getting Couple to Agree to Get Rid of Clutter

[@darleneh608]

My husband is a bit of a clothes hoarder. It's a leaning, not a huge illness. For some reason, he has trouble tossing shirts with worn collars, ratty t-shirts, socks with holes, and other things most people have no problem tossing. I did two things to get him to do decluttering of his clothes. 1. The big nudge. I took his sock drawer, emptied everything on to the bed, and sorted them. Whole pairs in good condition, matched and folded and stacked over here. Odd socks with no matchers in a pile there. Socks with holes or where you could see through the soles in a third pile. Then I called him in and said, this is what I've done. I figure these are good and can go back in your drawer, and I finally understand why you say you need to buy socks. But before we do that, I'd like to toss this pile of the holey socks. Is that okay? (He said yes, enthusiastically.) And I'd like to toss these mismatched ones. (This was harder for him, but he said yes.) Then we went and bought him the new ones he needed. I'd been after him to do this for ages. It appears he didn't know how. Go figure. 2. For t-shirts, I showed him my t-shirt drawer, all decluttered and folded the Konmarie way. Told him I'd like to try folding his the same way, to see if he'd like it. He said yes, but before you do that, he suggested he wanted to toss some ratty ones. Pulled them out of the drawer right that minute. (Success!) After those two interludes, and seeing how I'd made changes in my clothes, he spent a little time going through his stuff and got rid of a lot. It's taken several passes for him, but now he works on this stuff without me nagging. (Except for the sock drawer. That's still an ongoing problem.)