Do the men you date always end up sprinting out of your flat, shrieking like cartoon commitment-phobes who’ve just been handed a list of baby names? Almost certainly not, but if it does happen, finally we have an explanation. It’s your cacti: they’re unwelcoming, apparently. Oh, and all the books you keep in your bedroom are scaring men off too.
These were some of the takeaways from a newspaper piece that went viral last week. In it, an interiors therapist detailed the ways in which a home could be man-repelling: hanging your walls with too many images featuring women alone makes it looks like you’re too strong for a boyfriend, apparently – and you’ve got to ditch your fridge magnets and clutter. The piece received a ribbing on Twitter, with people posting responses such as this from @morbges: ‘In light of the article on how to not make your house the living nightmare of all straight men, I have now purchased 300 cacti, and two dozen books with skulls on the cover.’ (The interiors therapist wasn’t a fan of books with ‘depressing titles’, either.)
But what’s particularly ironic to me is that if you think cacti are off-putting for heterosexual men, you should see what straight women are confronted with when dating. I’ve spent my twenties politely smiling my way through house after house of horrors. First there was the #gains guy, who had 20 giant tubs of protein powder stored under his bed and gym equipment littered around the edges of every room. (Unused, except for hanging towels on.) Then there was the creative whose at was so stark it could have been a Muji store – and/or the set of American Psycho. Let’s not forget the 30-year-old whose room was exactly the same as he had it at uni, except that his Che Guevara poster was now in a frame – or the countless techy guys whose TVs were bigger than their windows. Then there are the literary lads, whose bedside tables inevitably play host to the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest and a bottle of whisky, in case they pull. I’d love to know what an interiors therapist would make of their spaces.
My friends have told me they’ve walked into homes featuring ‘a wall display of skateboards, all emblazoned with naked women’, an arcade-style driving seat, and a box room filled with so many speakers that it was ‘like the IMAX’. One pal slept with a man who owned two eye masks but no curtains; another had dated a guy whose bedroom contained ‘six bikes and a mattress’.
Worse still, a friend tells me that on her first trip to her now-boyfriend’s house, she was confronted by ‘a dead mouse, rigid with rigor mortis, still in a trap’. If anything is a ‘woman-repeller’, surely it’s a rodent corpse? But no, the couple are happily dating; he’s great in other ways. You could argue that maybe this is a case for straight women to set their standards for men as high as said interiors therapist does for us, but I disagree. I think this is proof that we should all judge each other less. Fill your bedroom with books. Date a guy with Che on every wall. Our homes are the one place in the world we control, so let live and let decorate. That said, curtains are non-negotiable