Something I’ve had to come to terms with when it comes to living with other people: Not everyone shares the same standards for cleanliness as you do. And no amount of needling and nagging will change that.
Even my fiancé, Jeffery—whom I consider to be tidier and even more fastidious with organization than I am—has his undesirable habits. But the thing we argue about the most? His bath towels always seem to get that unmistakable mildew smell faster than mine.
It’s a maddening issue, because we haven’t been able to figure out why exactly his towels get funkier faster.
We’ve run it through every possible scenario we can think of: Does he not drip-dry as much as I do before getting out of the shower? Does water cling more tightly to bodies that have more hair? Does our bathroom have such poor circulation that our towels don’t get dry enough? Or is my sense of smell so disturbingly keen that I’ll never make peace with the odors in our house?
While the last bit is probably true (I am plagued with my mother’s bloodhound nose), we haven’t landed on anything concrete that would cause this discrepancy in towel smells.
We have tried a number of solutions, though, including: switching to waffle-weave towels that apparently dry quicker (nope), draping towels over the shower-curtain rod for maximum airflow (helps, but doesn’t solve the problem), and even washing towels after every single use (exhausting and kind of wasteful).
But in the end, I’ve discovered that the answer to our bath-towel woes is much more straightforward than an exhaustive investigation, and it’s certainly more cost-effective than tossing our towels whenever the mildew odor lingers. It’s quite simple: a scoop of borax and a hot laundry cycle.
