This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
Click here for the full table of contents.
Over the decades that I’ve been thinking about households and the running of them, about living spaces and their maintenance, I have talked to dozens of people who get nervous about being in a living space that is too “nice” or too “pretty.” Everyone I’ve talked to who has felt this way has been surprised when I’ve told them that they’re not alone, and that there are, in fact, lots of people for whom a “too pretty” or “too nice” living space truly does provoke anxiety.
It makes a lot of sense that it might. “Keeping things nice” or “keeping things pretty” means having to be cautious, having to be intensely self-aware lest we do anything that might muss up or mar a very specific appearance or setting that someone else has gone to some trouble to produce.
We usually learn this dynamic as children, when a parent’s desire that we keep something -- the house, our clothes, a space in the house -- “looking nice” or “looking pretty” meant that we were strictly policed, restricted in terms of what we could do or how we could do it, and forced to behave in particular ways that probably weren’t either freeing or fun. As we get older, we realize that it also connects to other people’s belongings and other people’s standards and the work other people have done to make things “nice” or “pretty” in ways that were important to them. We don’t want to cause problems. We don’t want to create a burden. But we also don’t necessarily want to have to walk on eggshells and be breathlessly worried about our every action lest something happen that would mess up the nice or the pretty.
Some of this gets tied up in socioeconomic class. For a space to look “nice” or “pretty” often means that it looks new or expensive or both. Beautiful living spaces, historically speaking, have been living spaces occupied by people who have plenty of money to make those spaces beautiful and outfit them with objects that are beautiful. In fact, the very idea that a living space can be a showcase -- a space where objects are intended to be looked at and appreciated as aesthetic objects -- rather than simply a utilitarian space where people carry out the activities of their daily lives comes from the homes of the wealthy. Who else could’ve afforded such a thing? Certainly not people whose economic existence only permitted necessities. As a result, sometimes being in a space that feels too fancy or too nice or too pretty makes us feel like we’re somewhere we, and “people like us,” don’t belong.
