The Germs Aren't Real, They Can't Hurt You

A lot of cleaning rituals are about magical thinking and vague ick, not about avoiding sickness.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

As many of you know, I have OCD. Right now it focuses more on rare unpreventable diseases, but for a while it focused on contamination and germs. Part of my therapy for getting over the worst of my OCD was called “exposure response prevention” or ERP, which encouraged me to expose myself to triggers (in my case, germs) and then not do my safety behaviors (like washing my hands nine times.)

For a while, I was convinced that genital herpes was lingering on every surface, and eventually I needed to stop working overtime to vanquish the risk. I “knew” that you couldn’t get herpes from a public toilet, but I kept wondering if maybe people had gotten it that way but assumed it was from something sexual instead. As a result, I brought Lysol spray and wipes with me everywhere. In college, I freaked out because I had washed my clothes in the communal washing machine and someone else had taken them out and put them on top so they could do their own laundry. I spent the money to wash my clothes again because of all the “germs” that I assumed were lurking on the outside of the washing machine.

A lot of vaguely neurotic terminally online people have undiagnosed OCD, something I’ve written about before. Every day on Twitter, I learn a new way that vague “germs” are infiltrating my house—and not only that, but the fact that I’m nasty for allowing these germs to be there. While I understand certain cleaning practices when there is physical grime or odor associated (such as not wearing shoes in the house because of dirt being tracked) others seem a little more magical-thinkingish. For example, people who own dogs and let the dog sleep in their bed believing that jeans they wore outside of the house are far too filthy to wear in their homes. I saw another recent one that attempted to shame people for having sex on their own couches because it’s disgusting for other people who might sit there later.

People can do whatever wacky stuff they want in their own homes. When I first noticed this phenomenon on Twitter and made a joke about it, I didn’t realize there was a cultural/racial element and was immediately accused of “being white.” (Guilty as charged!) But my issue is when these people (many of whom are also white!) not only do a bunch of illogical magical thinking hygiene rituals around nebulous unnamed “germs” but then also call people disgusting goblins for not engaging in their song and dance.

Basically, my rule (informed by my OCD therapy) is this: if there is no logical way that I’m going to get sick, or get someone else sick, and if there will be no smell, stain, or other clear evidence of grime, I will simply ignore the germs.