Normally They Behave Themselves.

With Rosii, Brazil, Janita, South Africa, Frank, France. Monica was hopping around in the Tundra and sent her apologies.

At Lunch, a conversation about household rules travels from polished pans and shoes on balconies to ice-cube crimes, secret rule-breaking and the dangerous question of whether there is only one correct way to make a bed.

There are rules written on paper, rules printed on signs and rules announced with enough authority that nobody can pretend they did not hear them.

Then there are household rules.

Nobody remembers voting for them. Nobody knows exactly when they became law. Yet somehow everyone understands that the wet towel does not belong on the bed, the empty water bottle should be refilled, and if you use the last ice cube without refilling the tray, sooner or later somebody is going to ask who did it.

When Rosii joined Fruitloop and the Mayor for Lunch, the subject was strange household rules. It did not take long to discover that three homes, spread across different countries and generations, could have remarkably similar rules—and equally different ideas about what happens when somebody ignores them.

Leave the street at the door.

For Rosii, one of the clearest rules begins at the entrance to her apartment: shoes that have been worn outside stay outside the living space, on the balcony.

The habit goes back to childhood. Her mother did not like the dirt from the street being carried into the house. But Rosii remembered another part of her mother’s explanation too: the outside world could carry “bad energies” with it.

During the pandemic, when people suddenly became much more conscious of what they brought into their homes, the routine felt strangely familiar to Rosii. Her mother had been doing something similar years before. Shopping came home from the supermarket and was cleaned before being put away.

What looked to the outside world like a new precaution was, in her family, simply an old habit returning.

Fruitloop’s childhood rules had a different flavour, although they came with equally little room for negotiation.

Her mother cooked dinner, the family ate together, and afterwards Fruitloop and her sister did the dishes: wash, dry and pack away. As children, they assumed everybody did this. Eventually they discovered that everybody most certainly did not.

It changed nothing.

They still had to do the dishes.

There was pocket money for doing their chores and consequences for refusing them. The household constitution was apparently not subject to international comparison.

Rosii suddenly remembered her own version. She and her sisters also washed dishes, but their mother’s standards went considerably further. The pans had to be polished until they were almost like mirrors.

Rosii laughed at the memory. There was no choice. The pans had to shine.

That unlocked another memory for Fruitloop: school shoes.

Every Friday afternoon, her shoes had to be polished. If she kept them clean during the week, Friday was still Friday. The polishing happened.

The Mayor was unimpressed by this hardship.

He had polished his every afternoon.

“Lightweight,” was roughly the verdict.

No democracy under this roof.

The Mayor’s childhood rules were harder for him to compare because, growing up as an only child in Australia with relatives far away in Germany, his home was largely his world.

But one household law survived perfectly in his memory.

At eighteen or nineteen, still living with his parents, he had a curfew when returning from seeing his girlfriend. Occasionally, as young people have been known to do since the invention of clocks, he interpreted the agreed time somewhat creatively.

Then he got caught.

At dinner the following day, his father laid down what the Mayor remembers as something close to the constitution, the law and the Ten Commandments combined: however old he was, while he lived under his father’s roof, he followed his father’s rules.

“There is no room for democracy in his house,” the Mayor recalled.

Many years later, the wording has survived because the principle is so recognisable. Every household has its own small government. Some are democracies. Some are benevolent dictatorships. Some operate through negotiation.

And some appear to be governed by whoever notices the wet towel first.

The visitor rulebook.

Fruitloop then imagined something more official: suppose every house had a tiny rulebook for visitors. What warning would appear on page one?

The Mayor’s rule was less about tidiness than expectations.

He dislikes the idea that a home has to be permanently presented like a museum, ready for inspection in case somebody appears at the door. A house is private space, he argued, and real life is sometimes messy. Visitors are welcome, but they may find the household exactly as it is.

There might be coffee. There might be tea. There might also be chaos.

“Don’t expect a pristine, tidy, representative welcoming committee 24/7, 365,” was his general philosophy.

Fruitloop was even more relaxed.

Visitors, she said, can more or less do what they want.

The Mayor tested this generosity. What about family visitors?

Fruitloop thought about it. Her family did not need a special rulebook because they already knew how to behave. They would not arrive, put their feet on the couch, inspect the cupboards for food, abandon towels on the floor or jump onto the bed wearing shoes.

“Normally they behave themselves.”

And there it was: possibly the perfect household rule.

Behave yourself.

The difficulty, of course, is that every household has a slightly different definition.

The ice-cube emergency.

At Rosii’s family’s beach house, one law is beyond negotiation.

If you use the water, refill the bottle.

If you use the ice, refill the tray.

There is a particular disappointment in opening a freezer on a hot day expecting ice and discovering that somebody before you enjoyed the final cubes and apparently considered their responsibilities to civilisation complete.

“Who didn’t fill the cube?”

Fruitloop immediately recognised the crime.

Her childhood home had the same rules for water bottles and ice trays. Empty the bottle, refill it and put it back in the fridge. Use the ice, replace it.

The system was not flawless. Sometimes someone had obediently refilled the ice tray, but the new cubes had not yet frozen. The next thirsty person therefore opened the freezer and discovered not ice but a tray of extremely optimistic water.

The rule survives in Fruitloop’s home today. She tries to refill the water bottle because when she wants cold water later, she wants it cold.

Rosii’s ice problem survives too. A niece visiting her apartment may use the ice and forget the second half of the transaction.

Perhaps, Rosii decided, the fridge needs a note.

If you use me, fill me again.

Rules are easier when nobody is watching.

Then came the dangerous question.

Which household rule do you break when nobody is watching?

The Mayor immediately invoked something resembling the right to remain silent.

“I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

If he answered, he explained, the information would become public knowledge. He could not incriminate himself.

“Rules are there to be broken, but I’m not going to tell you which ones.”

Fruitloop was considerably more forthcoming.

She dislikes shoes being left everywhere, yet sometimes takes hers off in the office and leaves them there.

Then came the more serious confession.

In her household, nobody is supposed to drink directly from the large cool-drink bottle. Milk receives the same treatment. You pour it into a glass.

Unless, apparently, Fruitloop is alone and there is only a little left.

Then the bottle becomes the glass.

The important part is that her son must not witness this flexible interpretation of the law, because he would immediately ask the question every parent eventually faces:

Why are you allowed to do it when I’m not?

“I’m the adult,” suggested the Mayor.

Fruitloop was unconvinced.

That defence does not always work.

My way, your way.

The conversation then wandered into more dangerous territory than rule-breaking: the possibility that two people can both complete the same household task successfully and still disagree completely about how it should be done.

The Mayor had fresh evidence.

The previous evening he had tried to help bring in the washing. The problem was not whether he was willing to help. The problem was that apparently he was about to fold things incorrectly.

He wanted to help.

Yes, but not like that.

So he chose another household survival strategy and withdrew.

Fruitloop understood immediately. She likes floors washed a particular way. Her husband has his way. She likes laundry done her way. He has his.

Does she try to educate him?

“No, I gave up.”

The bed, however, is another matter.

Her husband can make it, and Fruitloop is genuinely pleased that he does. Sometimes she simply fixes it afterwards because she likes it a certain way.

He knows.

The Mayor has developed a different strategy. He likes using a broom on his parquet and tiled floors. His method attracts criticism because sweeping can stir up dust. So sometimes he does it at night. Everybody sleeps. The Mayor tiptoes around. The floor gets swept his way.

Some household disagreements are not solved. They simply become covert operations.

When the fridge takes command.

By now the household rulebook was clearly too small for the job, so Fruitloop handed authority to an appliance.

Suppose your fridge suddenly became boss of the house. What would its first rule be?

Rosii returned immediately to the great unfinished business of ice. Her fridge would demand that people replace what they use.

The Mayor’s fridge would have a different instruction:

Look carefully.

He remembered the familiar domestic scene of someone opening a fridge, failing to see the butter directly in front of them and announcing that there is no butter.

His own caution around refrigerators goes back to the early days of his relationship with his wife. Her small fridge was packed so tightly that retrieving one jar could require carefully removing half the contents, reaching the distant target and then attempting to rebuild everything exactly as it had been.

He learned another rule.

Do not touch the fridge.

Fruitloop’s fridge would make a plea on behalf of forgotten food:

“Don’t let the vegetables die.”

She buys beautiful tomatoes, eats some, forgets the rest and later discovers the consequences. She has adapted. Instead of buying a whole packet, she now buys one.

Rosii knew exactly what she meant.

The Mayor, however, identified another breach of household law: tomatoes, according to his rulebook, do not belong in the fridge.

“Everything goes into the fridge,” Fruitloop replied.

Three people. Three households. Three constitutions.

No international treaty was reached.

Open sesame.

For the final bit of Fruitloop logic, every door in the house suddenly required a password.

The Mayor knew exactly what his doors needed to hear, especially during winter when an open door lets precious heat escape up the stairwell.

His password would therefore be less magical and more practical:

“CLOSE THE BLOODY DOOR!”

Fruitloop went in the opposite direction.

She would become a wizard for the day.

“Open sesame.”

And somewhere between polished pans, forbidden shoes, empty ice trays, secret drinks from the bottle, precisely made beds and fridges that need their own management structure, the strange logic of household rules began to make a little more sense.

We inherit some from our parents. We invent others because something annoys us. We enforce a few, quietly break a few more, and sometimes discover that the person beside us has been doing exactly the same ordinary task in a completely different way for decades.

The Mayor claimed the final word with a nod to Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way.”

Then he added one rule that might actually deserve a place in every household constitution:

Before you impose a rule, make sure it makes sense.

And if it doesn’t?

Perhaps that is one rule we can safely break.