Men organize; women clean.

I will put my garage up against my wife's closet any day.

My garage is organized to the last peg on that pegboard holding my drill or my saw or my duct tape. Every item in its place, displayed so that I can find it and use it any time I need it.

My wife's closet, on the other hand, is something I couldn't live with. Clothes hung up willy-nilly, as the old expression goes, shoes all over the floor, stuff everywhere.

But when my wife says we have guests coming and the house needs to be cleaned, I'm in a panic.

Cleaned?

Being a guy, I know what that means. Every surface scrubbed -- not just wiped off-- and every nook and cranny in the kitchen and the bathrooms scoured with something like a toothbrush.

God, it's like being in the army all over again, when the notice of a general coming to inspect our quarters generated all kinds of non-guy hysteria: everything had to be not just packed away but sanitized, with bleach if necessary, with steel wool if you were on kitchen duty, with paint if you were in charge of rusted vehicles in the the auto pool. In other words, just this once, when someone is visiting, everything has to look like no one's ever lived here.

So the general arrives -- or the guests arrive -- and everything is perfect. He gives his okay and moves on. Your guests say how nice it was, and they move on.

And your house does look really good, almost ready to sell.

And the two of you, husband and wife, are exhausted from the effort and maybe at one another's throats. Why didn't you do this or that? Why didn't YOU do this or that?

Take a break. It's just the difference between men and women --once again.

Men organize; women clean.

When guests are coming, it's almost always up to the wife to be sure that everything looks good for them. The good china is out -- did the husband even know they had good china? The whole house has been dusted -- did the husband even know that things needed to be dusted? The nice wine glasses are on the table -- did the husband know that there were nice wine glasses? Where are they kept? Oh, maybe in that glass-fronted cabinet he dares not go near.

Men organize; women clean.

The man of the house can usually point to the garage as evidence that he's doing his share, trying to keep things organized: all the tools and hoses and such that keep the house functional. He's proud of his organization. Everything within reach. Need a wrench? There it is. Pliers? Right up there. Duct tape? In front of your eyes. Black electrical tape, too.

Men like to keep things where they can find them. Women tend to want things looking nice.

Which means -- and I'm stretching here --that women's personal space is often messier than men's. A typical woman's closet is probably not as well organized as a man's, and certainly not as well-organized as a man's garage. I suspect that most women dump lots of stuf into their closets that they expect to wear someday but may not, depending on circumstances, so that their closets probably get littered with lots more shoes, etc., than their male counterparts' closets do. Most guys, after all, have some shoes and some shirts and pants and don't worrry much about how to match them to each other, which makes it easier to put them away. I can't imagine what goes through a woman's mind as she confronts her fashion choices.

But turn a woman loose on a man's bathroom, and all hell breaks loose. This can be a wife or a woman hired to clean once a week. The complaints can be heard a block away. Stains in the toilet and on the tile floor, hair in the shower drain, soap on the mirror, etc. Or as the guys hears it: blah blah blah. Hey, just clean it, okay? Or don't. It's no big deal to me. I can live with it.

And that, of course, is the point. Guys aren't concerned about things being clean. We just want things to be organized. We want to be able to reach for this or that and find it there. Women are just the opposite. They want things to look nice and smell nice and be presentable to company.
My closet may be chaotic, they might say, but my kitchen and my bathroom need to be spotless. What will my women friends think when they come to visit?

It's a wonder at least half our marriages survive. I guess we all learn to compromise, no?

Is it that love triumphs or that convenience, in the end, rules?

Your guess is as good as mine.