I change most of my clothes every day. I would never think to wear the same shirt twice without washing it, and in fact I feel weird even wearing the same color shirt two days in a row, in case it looked like I was wearing the same shirt. And yet, when it comes to pants, I generally grab whatever I was wearing the day before and wear it again. And again. And, unless I have spilled something on in, again.
Why are pants different? Are your pants different? Do you wash your pants after one use? Is it a guy thing? I’m trying to figure out why I do this. Here are my ideas:
1) Convenience
My pants are filled with my life. As I do not carry a purse (or a murse), my pants’ pockets contain my wallet, my keys, my phone, loose change, various receipts, sometimes my iPod, and whatever other detritus I have accumulated over the course of the run of the pants. It take up to one minute to transfer all of this to another pair of pants, and that’s a minute I’d rather spend doing something else.
2) Low Quantities
I have probably 23,000 t-shirts in my drawer, but I only have maybe seven or eight pairs of pants, tops. So if I am planning to do laundry once a week, or sometimes two weeks if I don’t get to it on time, I will run out of pants if I don’t wear them more than once. And one of those pairs of pants is a pair of baby blue dress slacks, and I’m certainly not wearing those every week!
3) Conservation
I don’t want my pants to wear out. Washing them every three or four (or eight) wears will keep them lasting longer than washing them every time I wear them, right? Doesn’t washing clothes wear them out or something? I feel like my Mom said something to that effect when I was in middle school, although I can’t really remember. Middle schoolers don’t listen to their Mom’s that much.
4) I Am Lazy
Well this is certainly true, but seriously, why should I wash my pants all the time? They don’t look that dirty! My legs aren’t especially sweaty. As long as they are stain free, what’s the point of getting a new pair when the one I was just wearing seems just fine?
I don’t know. I can’t really nail down a reason here, but for some reason I feel fine wearing the same pair of jeans or khakis for several days in a row. Maybe it is just a linger instinct from when people wore all their clothes repeatedly. People in olden days were WAY dirtier than we are now. In fact, Ruby has about 15 pairs of pajamas that she wears once and then puts in her hamper. When I was a kid, I had maybe two pairs of pajamas, and I wore them all week until it was laundry day. So maybe my pants are just an extension of what I was taught growing up, which was that if it’s not dirty, it’s not dirty. But it’s probably that I am just lazy.