Does your Polish partner suffer from disposophobia

I am not really one for complaining about my life especially my personal life, I would rather get on with it and work to a better end. There is one thing that has always been the bane in our relationship, the need for my Polish wife to hold on to things for the long haul, my wife is a compulsive hoarder to the point we have 200 english woman's magazines sitting in my front lounge. It is so annoying the excuse she gives is that the kids may need them for projects at school. Our cupboards,drawers and storage are bursting at the seams with valueless items. The one that kills my sister is the story of my wife demanding that I go out and buy a new iron 6 months ago because the old one had been dropped on the floor and was dangerous for the kids. We now have a total of three irons in our utility room, the reason she does not want to throw them away is because her father may be able to fix them, thats the logic I live with on a daily basis. I know it is a cultural thing so many Poles I have met just don't know how to let go,

Any other stories out there of Polish disposophobia?

That is a typical syndrome of people who survived Auschwitz and other camps. My advice is: give up.

Ha... it comes from the old Communist mentality , never throw anything away that may have a use someday....

Of course if you are not so rich , you also tend to keep things that can be repaired...

As an Englishman who bought an old farm in Poland , i was quite amused by the ammount of junk that the old Farmer kept in the place...

But...after a few years of living here i found myself doing the same thing , hanging on to all kinds of junk...

Poles are great at making usefull stuff out of old junk , for example , some old milk churns i was going to throw out before moving out of here have now been transformed into wood burning stoves by a Polish friend of mine....

Its a fact of life , that junk expands to fill whatever space there is to be filled...no problem if you live on a farm as i do...but its a bit of a problem in a small flat....

Thats the excuse some of my older relatives use, who love hoarding useless items. You never know when you may need it.
I can't understand the reasoning why some peeps hold on to old medicines, that expired several years ago. Lol!

Here we go,one more foraign "expert" on Polish affairs.Communist mentality you say?Interesting.Here in the US we have a TV show Hoarders,do these Americans suffer from the same "Communist mentality",Sherlock?Foraign fool.

My apartment in Warsaw is 235 m2 not small by Polish standards. We have 6 bicycles for four people this summer I was ready to sell two of them of allegro.pl, but she did not want to because they have sentimental value. We still have cots and playpens and prams from when the kids were young.


The nearest my wife has been to Austwitz or any camp was the A4.


Pawian, I am not interested in being sucked into one of your little webs, firstly it is not a boast - its a fact. Secondly the hoarding is a real problem and I am very much interested to find out if others have the same problem.

Do any other Polish people reading my post have a problem with what i said....?

Or is it just Mr Grubasa Pole in America that knows more about Poland than somebody who lives here....?

You got it pal.

I am thankfull the Poles who live in Poland do not have your attitude...

You should come back and live here , perhaps you may learn to be a pleasant and friendly as most of my friends here....

I have the same problem - I am a hoarder myself :)

My Filipina wife also hoards. Her logic: "I'm collecting for the my family back home". That's all well and good. The problem lies in the fact she rarely sends anything!

Yes I do. Hoarders are international breed, nothing Polish-specific here, so your generalizations are wrong, and your reaction to "grubas" response is just funny. There are people that call themselves collectors, but they are actually compulsive hoarders

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding

Here in Canada we call them hamsters. Some of my (non Polish) friends readily admit to be such. They "collect" old magazines, old useless electronics, old useless toys, old useless manuals. In most cases this is just a funny habit. In other cases it becomes an annoying custom. There are also dangerous types of hamsters. I quite often read about some old ladies somewhere in Toronto "collecting" cats - 20-30 of them, living in terrible disgusting conditions. I am not even trying to describe the photos posted often by Humane Society, or similar organizations.

Others pose fire hazards by collecting junk in apartment buildings. Just in September last year one of the Toronto Housing Community Corp. buildings (subsidized apartments) caught fire caused by a resident flicking the butt of his cigarette off the balcony to the balcony below. The guy below was a hoarder: "bundles of newspapers, an air conditioner unit, plastic bags, plastic containers, shoes, cardboard, tarps and bikes - crammed on his balcony. The debris was stacked 24 inches (61 centimetres) above the balcony railing."

"More than 1,200 residents, many suffering physical and mental health ailments, were displaced from their homes for weeks and months."

For your viewing pleasure google has a collection of the images appropriately called "HOARDERS"

Of course.... but its a Polish forum..and we are talking about Poles...

We have such people in the UK too....mostly older people who learned their ways during the war...

The original topic is stupid, and because of it - your answer here is not very logical, I am sorry to say.

My direct answer to the OP question: "Does your Polish partner suffer from disposophobia" would be definitely: NO. But he is not interested in NO answer, all he wants to hear is the YES answer. So this question is loaded and poorly stated. Man, I am sorry to hear you have problems with your hoarding partner, but implying that this is something Polish-specific is wrong. I already gave a clear explanation in my previous message.


Well, this is just your hypothesis, and quite acceptable too, I agree. Problem is, it is not general enough. Apparently:


tvhowl.com/tag/hoarders

omg... my mom's exact mentality right there.. lol

I don't know if it is anything to do with nationality, nor do I care but my sympathies with everyone who has a 'hoarder' at home!!!!!!!!!

I havent noticed the problem at all in the 50 or so Polish homes I have been in. On the other hand my partner likes to keep old magazines. Dont think this is Polish specific.

It is definitely not Polish specific. It is a world wide phenom. I have a friend whose parents are English and Welsh. They are in their early 70s- cannot throw a thing out. They still have old toys from when their 40 year old children were babies- and they are thrilled to be able to use them again for the grands!!

The house my husband grew up in is packed to the rafters with crap. Plastic yoghurt containers, glass jars, old tiles, old tools, furniture, books- you name it. They are slowly weeding through the garbage and doing major renovations.

my husband keeps knick knacks- we call this trinketville. I hate it but we have a part of our basement sectioned off for his stupid trinkets.

I keep stuff if I know it can be used again or if I can find a way to repurpose it.

Poles always keep their items in case Germans come again.

My wife is Polish and is a hoarder.

I think it stems from documentation or rather the need to hang on to documentation for everything here. Any time I have decided not to hang on to a stupid sheet of paper because it seemed so trivial a thing to have documented, it has come back to bite me in the ass. I believe that has permeated into the thinking some people have with regards to other things in life.

Yes, you have to have something to offer for uninvited guests. But we learned our lesson. ;)

That is old German school. They have to write, document and file every thought they have. That obsessive behavior proved to be the rope around their necks in Nuernberg trials.

I suspect that 50% of Germans suffer from paper hoarding ;)

Is this hoarding thing a newly invented disorder inside the always flourishing Manual , DSM I started with 106 diagnosis !!!!, DSM II had 182, DSM III R 292, and Diagnostic Manual IV 297 ? Are people getting sicker or something else is wrong? ;)

Something like sex addiction, that one is hilarious disorder (very pleasant and healthy for the sufferer) :))))))

I remember watching a tv program about Mr Trebus he was an old Polish gent who loved to hoard.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Trebus

She is normal enough in that respect in that she holds onto things from her studies. There are things which she holds onto mentally that could be dropped, though.

Exactly, so getting back to the subject of Polish hoarders, we also see this in the case of the Polish need to focus on the past. A classic example of this is the Polish diaspora who frequent Polishforum debating life in Poland circa 2011, when they have not even visited Poland in the last 10 years +. As the English saying goes " In order to grow you must let go "

I will also agree, recycling will become a future necessity and I am 100% behind it. Maybe we could have Wroclaw boy and some IT guy here set up a " barter exchange site" I would certainly become a client. Where theres muck theres brass!

You have been told quite specifically this is nothing unique to Polish people. You wife is a nut case, what ever nationality she is. Just accept it, but its not normal in Poland or anywhere else..

Hoarders are, of course, to be found everywhere. At the risk of annoying people in America who think they know modern life in Poland, I'd say that there is a higher proportion of hoarders here than elsewhere. My mother-in-law used to use a forty-year-old washing machine which gave her electric shocks until we just had a new one delivered and finally persuaded her to get the scrap metal guy around to take it away, along with half a ton of other crap. She got nearly 200 PLN for it all and was delighted.

It's more about not wasting anything, rather than just hoarding for some anally-retentive reason.


Rings a bell. My missus never throws any document away, and I've been extremely glad of it on several occasions.

Show a link to statistical data of any sort, supporting your claim, otherwise I say you just lie. :-)
[I put a smiley here because I really do not care that much about the topic of the discussion. I just dislike that people twist facts to match their weak hypotheses.]

Did you actually care to look at the images I posted? Did you see those terrible examples of hoarding, captured on camera? That's USA, not Poland.


Irrelevant and frankly - not anybody's business. You know nothing about me in this respect. One of the arguments used here before was that hoarding is a habit of older people. So I have known many of them, like my parents, aunts, etc. and I can draw my own conclusions. And I know many young people too - both in Poland and in here. Besides, the topic mentions "Polish partners" not "partners in Poland".

On a personal note: I have visited many houses of my friends over the years - both Canadian and Polish, 100 places maybe? And that includes not only their living rooms, but also recreation rooms in the basements, and work areas with tools with work benches. Only three of them would qualify as hoarders - all three are Canadians.

And I resent putting me into hoarders category by definition of being Polish. Don't you dare. :-) I am one of the birds (as opposed to bushes), changing homes every so often, and reducing amount of electronic equipment, computers, papers, books, and furniture during every move.

Great post Boletus.

Peterweg, two points here:

1. My wife is far from being a nutcase, she is merely an 'obsessive hoarder' that does not qualify her to seek mental health treatment.
2. From my experience, I consider Poles to be obsessive hoarders of, information, goods, emotions and idealisms that are sometimes lacking reality. Poles in general have a weakness to share freely/openly, anyone that has any experience of Poles will agree with me here. Now don't get me wrong I am not being derogatory to my host nation.

The points raised in point number 2 are most definitely in the Polish national psych. Although Poles consider themselves traditional the last decade has allowed Poles abandoning the national psyche of victimhood and turning liabilities into assets.

It would be more interesting for me to debate this issue with Poles that are living in Poland rather than those who have not been living in Poland for a decade or so, as those Poles have lost their modern day Polishness.

200 peoples friend, more irons than you could shake a big stick at and cupboards bursting with tat....maybe not as far as you think :-)