Mental Gymnastics

Usually, it’s easy to justify getting new sheets.

You tell yourself: Oh, these’ll be great for when my old college roommate comes to visit! We don’t want to make him sleep on our old pilly set! Or, Oh, my aunt said she wanted to come see the new place, so we should have something ready for her visit! Or just: What if someone needs a place to crash and we don’t have time to run to the store to buy fresh sheets to put on the fold-out couch?

It’s a brilliant ruse because it’s not entirely untrue. That college roommate might actually come to visit. Your aunt might be in town. There’s a chance you’ll get that text from a buddy on a road trip who just needs a place to crash in, I don’t know, a half hour? And, in any of those cases, it would be nice to have some good, fresh sheets.

The trick is that you don’t specify what happens next.

Sure, you could wash the new sheets and then set them aside for the next visitor. After all, they were slept on what? One night? A couple nights? Two weeks max? One trip through the washing machine and they’d basically be good as new, ready to go. Think of how long they’d last! Think about how you’d never struggle to find sheets for your guest again!

And yet, that’s not always what happens, is it? No what happens is this: once they’re cleaned, those new crisp super comfy sheets go into your sheet rotation. It makes sense. You want nice new sheets too, and a bigger sheet rotation means you don’t constantly have to be washing linens.

And yet just out-and-out buying sheets feels indulgent. After all, any layer of fabric between mattress and you will work, right? You rarely need new sheets. So, to protect yourself from feeling guilty about spending money on something you don’t need, you tell yourself it’s just part of the selfless art of preparing to host guests.

But now, you likely won’t be hosting guests for a while. So you really just need to face the facts: sometimes you just want new sheets.

(And then, if you sleep in a queen bed or larger, you need to buy sheets elsewhere. Because the copywriter wrote this whole thing without noticing the whole “twin or full” thing on the sale title. Sorry.)