My robot vacuum saved my relationship. 

This will sound ridiculous but by far the most consistent, frustrated, and vicious fights that happen between myself and my partner are the ones that revolve around cleaning our house.

We don't argue often but when we do, it will be while I am tearing around the house in (only) an oversized t-shirt whilst brandishing a bottle of surface spray and screeching about the mental load. 

I should be clear: my boyfriend is a brilliant partner. He's kind, generous, and thoughtful in ways that I scarcely knew it was possible for men to be before I met him. It's just that besides those qualities, he is apparently blind to the build-up of dust and doesn't understand the very basic concept that feeling grit under bare feet in your own house is rarely a good thing. 

I should also acknowledge within this conflict that I am an unusually neurotic person when it comes to cleaning. I have always had wildly high standards for neatness and cleanliness in my apartment. I would describe myself as 'house-proud'. Others may choose to describe me instead as "anal retentive" and they would not be wrong to say it.

Watch: Four cleaning hacks that will make your life so much easier. Post continues below.

My obsession with cleanliness is also likely reinforced by watching too many Architectural Digest videos on YouTube and being quietly manipulated into believing that everybody lives like this, with the surfaces all adequately wiped down, no visible crumbs on the kitchen counter, tight sheets, folded blankets, and mirrors that are routinely cleaned three to four times a week. 

Everybody is running their fingers along the top surface of power outlets to clean off the dust that gathers there, right? 

Having a clean house is just something that makes my brain relax, which would be fine if the inverse wasn't also true –that having a dirty house makes it feel like my brain is literally on fire.

We already know that Australian men and women take on extremely unequal loads of unpaid domestic work. According to the 2021 census, 13 per cent of Australian women are taking on more than 30 hours of unpaid domestic work per week and only 3.9 per cent of men are matching this. 

I feel that my desire to have a house in which every surface is painfully clean all of the time only intensifies the already disproportionate amount of labour that I'm taking on as a woman who has made the unfortunate decision to be in a heterosexual relationship. 

What we have really needed all along was something to help even the playing field, something that could carry some of the burden that I feel like I'm shouldering, something that could ease my mind and cost somewhere in the $100 to $800 range. 

Enter: the robot vacuum. 

This was a purchase that I did not originally endorse but my boyfriend was excited about because he is, in general, very enthusiastic about buying appliances. Some people cook, some people paint, this man's primary hobby is identifying good appliances and then hunting them down at a reduced cost (we don't need to inspect this further, I've decided mostly to leave him to his passions). 

So, one day we simply ended up with her. Vacu-Uma Thurman. A lovely little white, disc-shaped unit that sits beneath a cabinet in our living room on her charging station, nesting, and absolutely brimming with potential. 

It was a completely surreal experience the first time we switched her on and she began to move around, mapping the house and cleaning our rugs. After all, this is a robot that you can buy. When we first set her about to clean the house properly, using the app installed on our phones, I kept exclaiming loudly, "THIS IS THE FUTURE. WE'RE IN IT!"

She was, I admit, outrageously expensive for something that normal people do not need. She's a Roborock 6 that my partner found on sale however, her price generally sits in the $600 to $700 price range, which is clearly absurd in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. But you can certainly find cheaper options that do much the same thing and I need to stress that this ludicrously expensive hockey puck that moseys its way throughout my apartment was worth every single cent. 

I should note here that this is no way a sponsored post, even though might be reading rather like it at this point. I am not being paid by 'Big Vacuum' – although now I sort of wish that was a possibility. If I were a Big Vacuum shill, I would be very happily not working my day job and instead spending my days making love to the Dyson heir on a beach somewhere. This is not the case. 

I actually just love Vacu-Uma with all my heart. She has abolished the sweaty Saturday morning spent lugging my chorded vacuum around the house with my headphones on and wishing my partner an ill-fated demise. She can run basically every day if we choose it (and of course I do) so that my carpets are constantly spotless with those satisfying-bordering-on-erotic track lines that you get from high-powered suckage. 

She's also just a delightful presence to have in the house, hurrying around and knocking gently into your ankles as she veers towards corners in the kitchen while you're making toast. We like to talk to her as though she's some sort of hapless little friend when she occasionally gets stuck trying to off-road on foreign surfaces or accidentally sucks up iPhone cables and runs around with them caught in her mouth. "Oh Uma," we'll say, charmed by our productive little pal. 

By the way, if you think it's weird that we're anthropomorphising our vacuum cleaner. We do it for a couple of reasons: firstly, thinking of our fun, sweet robot as a pet is an important, cute bonding exercise between my partner and I. Secondly, come the robot revolution, we'll be favoured as having been rather good to our servants and our lives will be spared, instead of being torn to shreds by one of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs. So, jokes on you.

Listen: A Realistic Guide To Decluttering. Post continues after podcast.

Uma has made a genuinely enormous difference to our lives because I no longer feel as though I'm carrying so much of the domestic load. She cuts out a full two hours of housework out of my weekly schedule. She makes us giddy and content and as though we're demi-God-adjacent beings who never ever have crumbs on our floors. 

A while ago, I was talking to a friend who disclosed to me that she had been to a couples counsellor with her partner because she had reached the end of her tether about carrying so much of the domestic workload compared to him. The counsellor suggested, with almost comical simplicity, that they just hire a cleaner. They did – and that was that. It helped a huge amount. I'm not suggesting that regular cleaners or $600 robot vacuums are accessible to everyone, more that whenever you have the option to take a shortcut and shed some of the load, it's honestly worth it a lot of the time. 

For my partner and I, Uma has genuinely meant that we fight less, I feel less stressed when I come home after a day in the office, and that I always have the option to switch on an adorable buddy for company whenever he's out of the house. 

Image: Supplied.