Can decluttering your home help you find love?

So you want a new relationship? What are you going to do about it? The conventional, contemporary approach would be to go online, click on a dating website – or, better, several – and start swiping. But what if this is all wrong? What if we start with your house, your bed, your wardrobe, the pictures on your wall?

I’ve recently been re-reading Suzanne Roynon’sWelcome Home: How Stuff Makes or Breaks Your Relationship. I picked it up pre-pandemic, but for the last brief eternity the basic rule of society has been, AVOID RELATIONSHIPS, you might live a little longer that way. Now, in the wake of a return to normal, it feels like time to get back to living with other people again. But which people in particular? And how do I make it happen?

Roynon has the answer – or answers. And tech comes right down at the bottom of the list of priorities. Right at the top, under the heading of “Interiors Therapy”, is a major spring clean of your entire house. The key to getting in the new is stripping out the old. Some of this is going to seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many of us hanker after what is dead and gone. I know I do it myself all the time. It’s the instant nostalgia of the Proustian moment: you dip your petite madeleine in the cup of the tea and you unleash a flood of memories from way back when.

Don’t do it! Says Roynon. Move on. Don’t look back, look forward. You’re living too much in the past. Her book could have been entitled, “Forget It!” Thanks for the memories – but no thanks. Her general principle is “anything which generates memories of fear, anger, sadness, pain, anguish, and trauma should not be given houseroom”. For starters, get shot of anything that might remind you of those bygone love affairs. Don’t keep that old wedding ring hidden away in your drawers, even if you’re not wearing it. Seek out those old photos of you and your ex – especially wedding photos! What were you thinking of?

Change your bed. I mean, really change it. Get rid of the old one, not just the linen or the mattress, the whole thing has to go. “This above all items is imbued with the energy of your former spouse or partner… the residual energy of pain, resentment and high emotion created by the end of a relationship lingers in the very fabric of the bed.” If you want someone new to climb into your bed alongside you, it has to be a new bed too.

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Case in point: Amoura*. “She dismantled her old bed and put it outside the house to be collected,” says Roynon. “Within 12 hours she received a text from an old flame inviting her out for brunch and later the same day was asked out by a guy at her gym and then by another in a Pilates class… But as Amoura told me on the phone, ‘That’s just coincidence, right?’”

And you can make a start by not hogging the whole bed even if it’s just you. Sleep on one side, leave room for your future lover to slip under the sheets. While you’re at it make space in the wardrobe too. If you want someone to come and stay or at least leave some of their kit at yours, you’re going to need to have a spare rail or shelves or drawers. Talking of which: dump that old chest of drawers – not out in the street, please. It might put you in mind of failed relationships in the past.

Maybe a lot of your old clobber needs to go too. Roynon makes a good point: “Think about Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. After she was jilted on her wedding day, her life stopped moving forward. She continued to wear her wedding dress and relived her loss each day for the rest of her life. She fed off the rejection and worse, she inflicted her sadness, vengeful thoughts and limiting beliefs on the people around her.”

You’re probably not going to be quite as overloaded as Sarah*, who lives in a luxurious seafront apartment and has marked First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos tendencies. “The built-in wardrobe was over 5m long, well equipped with rails and deep shelving. It was rammed so tightly the coat hangers were distorted out of shape and pulling anything out risked a small avalanche. At the bottom were over 100 pairs of shoes, boots and trainers, and in the top cupboards, Sarah kept three large crates of handbags and two tubs of scarves. In addition, foldable items were kept in the two large sets of drawers and the under-bed storage.” Roynon persuades her to chuck half of it. Pretty soon Sarah is falling in love because she “made space for the relationship”.

I wonder if the guy who owned “79 pairs of socks, 42 white T-shirts, and over 60 work shirts” had a similar experience. The question is: do you feel good in it? Ditch those “fat” clothes that you’re keeping just in case. And donate those tight jeans from your twenties that you would need a scalpel to remove.

Berkhamsted-based Roynon, herself the survivor of many a heartbreak who has learned by her own mistakes, was inspired by her divorce 28 years ago to rethink her decor. “I read long ago that peach and apricot can trigger infidelity, and from experience, I’m inclined to agree.” She is no fan of the Fifty Shades of Grey approach though. “I’m always very blunt with clients in a grey home and ask them if they are feeling flat, listless, bored and de-motivated. So far, I’ve always been right. Interiors magazines and fashion have a lot to answer for.” She also has an amazingly positive approach to disaster. One time her house was flooded and she takes the line that this is a good opportunity to do that re-modelling that she has been thinking about for a while.

She took 17 years to write the book, but most of that time was taken up applying her interiors therapy, going into people’s homes and enabling them to re-evaluate and rethink their lives and loves. She comes out of the feng shui tradition, which is all about seeking alignment with the rest of the universe and setting up your living space to support you. But she shifts it in the direction of supporting you plus one, possibly the One, someone, who doesn’t – yet – live there. According to feng shui, “relationships and love” constitute just one area among a possible nine. But the reality is relationships, or the lack thereof, pervade an entire house.

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Among all the dos and don’ts, there are some classic clangers. Roynon tells the tale of one woman who was keen on pigs. At least the image of pigs. People would give her pig-related presents all the time, so she ended up living in a house decorated with pig cushions and pig pictures and little piggy coasters too. Cue a new man entering her life. He is young, slim, sporty, and good-looking. After a few years of increasing inertia and over-eating, he has turned into a raging porker himself. I think she ended up turfing him out but it needed Roynon to come along and get rid of all the pigs in the house. They were creating “negative energy”. Personally I have nothing against pigs and I reckon they are perfectly decent and friendly animals, even if they are liable to get their trotters in the trough. But I can see how having them all over your walls and your sofa too could strike the wrong note.

Another sound piece of advice: ditch any Darth Vader posters. Not everyone has Darth Vader posters, of course. But if you do, you should know that they are likely to suggest to any passing guest that you are one mean, lonely dude and destined to remain so. Relationships are probably not your strong suit – even though, secretly, you probably just want to be loved. Roynon recommends pictures evocative of a more harmonious future, generally involving couples although they do not have to be human. Rabbits copulating might be just a bit too obvious. Candlesticks or vases will do, but there have to be two of them. “Avoid solitary items and especially photos of you on your own – regardless of how stunning you looked that day.”

“Clutter,” says Roynon, “is the stuff we keep out of habit, fear, guilt or confusion, but it’s those very things that prevent us from moving forward.” In many way she is utterly ruthless. Even the old books – including the Dickens, cited above– have to go. Let’s face it, they probably have associations with your ex too. If you’re not actually reading a book, and don’t look likely to either, take it to the charity shop or recycle. And commit to the fire – or the recycling bin – all those letters from an old flame. “By keeping them, you are allowing their energy to have power over you and prevent you from moving forward.”

Roynon is an exorcist, a ghost-buster intent on eradicating the memories of long-lost lovers. Her vocabulary is all about “cutting” or “culling”, donating and re-gifting. What she is talking about is how to engineer for yourself a rebirth. It’s logical. If you want to find a new love then you have to reset and renew yourself first.

There are certain elements to her thinking that strike me as mystical or magical. I’m prepared to allow that it probably helps in general to have a broadly optimistic or positive outlook. If you’re going out on a date for the first time, you probably don’t want to sound too depressed or angst-ridden or doom-laden. Having said that, I recall one old friend who went out exclusively with people who were having mental health issues.

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Do I believe in the “cheque from the universe”? No. So I will not be downloading a cheque from the “Bank of the Universe”, writing a suitably large figure on it, with lots of zeroes, and made out to me, and expecting a deceased aunt to have left me her fortune. Apparently there are people who having done just that curl up on the sofa and lapse into a state of optimistic passivity, fully expecting the dosh to materialise without any apparent effort on their part. That is mad, of course.

But, when it comes to relationships, you don’t have to be mad but it probably helps. You have to believe in the magical and the mystical. And the fairy-tale happily ever after. Try to explain how else a fundamentally irrational institution like marriage persists in the face of all the stats that say how improbable the whole undertaking is. I suppose by the same token, people will keep on playing the lottery in the hopes of winning the jackpot. I gather that getting married in a hot-air balloon is now a thing. Perfectly sensible. But what happens when you come down to earth?

I will probably not be writing down 25 reasons why I am the “perfect romantic partner”. Or filling in my “Manifesto for Love” either. But the great thing about Roynon, as an author, is she doesn’t expect her book to be “unputdownable”. She recommends that you put it down from time to time, to get on with your life. To fix that wardrobe or chuck out the old bed. But she also points out, having dedicated herself to refreshing your relationships, that, in the end, if you fancy being on your own that’s fine too. “Until you’re perfectly content being on your own, how can you be ready for a relationship? Not just content, but revelling in it.” And do you really need that significant other, after all? No. Roynon herself, she says, is, “deliberately single – I’ve got too many other fun things going on.”

But do you need to declutter and get rid of all those old books and photos and knick-knacks and souvenirs that will get in the way of you living your best life? I’m hiring a skip right now.

*Some names have been changed

Andy Martin is the author of Surf, Sweat and Tears: the Epic Life and Mysterious Death of Edward George William Omar Deerhurst.