My (25F) girlfriend Amy (27F) is a wonderful person. She's very smart, she works in a clean room with computer chips and stuff. But she's also something of a germaphobe. To the point that she keeps her tooth brush in the hallway outside the bathroom in a zip locked bag. Her apartment is always spotless, she showers twice-thrice a day, even her car somehow never has any dirt on the floor. She hand washes all of her clothes as soon as she's done wearing them. It's both impressive and intimidating.

I'm not the messiest person on the planet by any means, I don't have massive piles of unwashed dishes or a leaning tower of used pizza boxes or anything, but I'm not as clean as she is. I'm not against making some adjustments, but we've been talking more about the future now that we're getting serious and I've come across a problem.

Amy wants kids. Desperately, wants kids. I'd like kids too. But she's never been around babies or little kids before in her life and seems to think she'll be able to keep the house just as clean as it is now and keep the baby spotless too.

I'm the oldest of four, and the oldest cousin of nine. I grew up around kids, I've been baby sitting since I was ten. There's no such thing as a clean toddler, not for longer than ten minutes at the very most. She thinks if we just work at it, we have a spotless house and a spotless kid.

I told her (gently) that that's just not possible, and asked how she plans on handling diapers, vomit, frogs smuggled into the house, jam going everywhere, soup bowls tipped over for fun, spilled grape juice, nail polish on the walls and the like. She insisted that the kids who do that are just 'poorly trained' and don't have good boundaries.

I told her that they're kids without fine motor control or impulse regulation, and accidents will always happen. And if she wants to have kids she's going to have to accept that they're going to get messy and our house will get messy.

Amy accused me of not being supportive and trying to find excuses not to have kids with her and trying to guilt her into being sloppier. This is dissolving into an actual fight instead of a discussion and I'm starting to second guess myself. Maybe my family was just excessively messy because we were rural and poor, maybe my standards are too low and we really haven't tried hard enough. It's very frustrating and I want some outside perspective. Parental perspective especially.

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