Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : A small background, I live with 4 other guys - we all go to the same uni and we're all friends.

4 of us are quite tidy. Sure, we make a mess, but we always clean it up within the day. We prefer to live in a clean environment and while none of us are clean freaks by any extent, we try to be considerate of the others.

However, "Ben" as I'll call him, doesn't follow this ethos. If he cooks food, he leaves dishes in the sink for days (I used to clean up when the dishes started to smell, but I've recently started to refuse to clean up after him as I'm not his carer), he leaves empty glasses all over the house (or hoards them in his room) and otherwise causes quite a lot of mess.

I (and the other housemates) called him out, we in particular have problems with the leaving of dirty dishes all over the kitchen as it is literally a health risk to have rotting food in the sink and we told him in no uncertain terms that it wasn't acceptable to keep doing this. 

He and his girlfriend (pretty much lives here rent free) were slightly better for a few weeks, but they've fallen back into creating mess and refusing to properly clean up again.

When he was told that we wanted him to be cleaner, his counter arguments were as follows:

1. We live in a student house, they're naturally messy - we're being unreasonable by wanting it to be clean 

This makes no sense to me, as while I'm aware that some students are absolute animals, that doesn't mean we should live in filth.

2. He won't handwash his dishes (he "hates scrubbing"), if we want him to clean them properly we need to get "stronger dishwashing tablets" which will clean off dried food when he puts them in the dishwasher.

3. We should be thankful that his girlfriend helps with the dishes at all (she occasionally puts THEIR dishes in the dishwasher after the food has already dried, so most dishes don't get cleaned).



Would I be the asshole for bringing this old argument up again? It deeply bothers me because I'm naturally very clean in the kitchen, and I despise the smell of the food which gets left in there. 

