The Closet Creep

We recently bought a new house, and one of the main selling points was the ginormous closet in the master bedroom. The instant my wife saw it, she fell in love with it. To its credit, the closet was adequately large and came with built-in shelves and racks for our clothes. To my wife’s credit, she divvied up the space equally, giving me half of the shelves and racks for my stuff.

It was soon after I finished putting up the last of my folded sweaters onto my shelves that my wife realized that I was only using two of the seven shelves I was allotted. She also noticed that my clothes were spaced quite far apart on the racks, and that I was essentially wasting valuable space. I assured her that I was not wasting the space, but was merely leaving room for expansion. Little did I know that I was soon to become aware of a strange phenomenon called “The Closet Creep.” This is a slow process that can take weeks to fully manifest itself. I think the slowness is really its greatest strength, because you hardly realize it’s happening until it’s too late.

Basically, one day I came home from work to a single pair of my wife’s pants hanging on my rack and a single pair of her shoes on one of my vacant shelves. I thought nothing of it, believing that they were merely in a transition pattern before being redeposited in their correct location. A few days later, the single pair of pants and shoes had multiplied into four or five pairs. A week after that, the clothes on my rack were being compacted to make room for the “creeping” of additional pants, and my once-vacant shelves were completely full of shoes and overflow clothes. A few weeks later, my wife brought me an armful of my clothes and asked me which of them I wanted to get rid of, because we needed to “clean” our closet.

I had become a victim of “The Closet Creep.” The five hanging racks and seven shelves I had originally been allotted as a sign of equality and good faith had been reduced to a single rack and a single shelf in the guest bedroom on the other side of the house!