When I was in high school, a certain friend came over to visit and he was shocked, shocked I tell you, that we were strictly a shoes-on household, and none of us had ever given it much thought; that's just how we lived, with our shoes on. Shortly after that, we would remodel our home and expose a lot of bare wood flooring, which is unpleasant if you're barefoot, I must say! We were also cat-owners (mostly indoor cats), and my mother would constantly shame me in advance, every time I wanted to trim my nails, that I must never leave a scrap of nail to fly onto the floor, because she would inevitably find it, as she was the "barefoot outlier" of our typically shoes-on policy.

Living alone for the last 30 years, I gradually developed a strictly shoes-off household. I've found it's easier to organize my shoes if they're doffed in one place by the door, and as a renter, I prefer to keep a clean carpet, because landlords don't really clean them, they only replace them after disasters. So a tenant's carpet tends to just accumulate nasty stains until it's unusable.

However, my fiancée came in from Barcelona and she was appalled at my barefoot habits! She said it would never do at her home! She immediately found slippers for me to wear, and that was a lot of trouble, because I am not accustomed to wearing slippers and I tended to slip out of them at all times. But she owned a cat, and cats tend to leave little surprises on the floor for us to find with our feet. And I'm unsure whether that's why fiancée wanted to enforce slipper-wearing, but it sure was a big deal for her.