Ikea-Proof Your Relationship

There are a few proven ways to test a relationship. You know, the kind of events that really show what your chances are as a couple--the equivalent of testing a newly constructed tree-house by jumping on the floor you just assembled. If it holds, hey, you've done it! If it falls... sh*t.

Two relationship tests that I know of are moving and putting together Ikea furniture. In almost six years, Tiffany and I have moved three times and put together Ikea furniture twice. (Okay, we actually have built Ikea furniture three times, but one of those times was for our friend. On that occasion, we nailed the back of her dresser on the front. We were able to salvage it, but now the front of her dresser has tiny pin-nail holes all around the edges. We don't count that one--it wasn't our furniture!)

Last weekend, Tiffany and I finally bought a dining room table. Of course, you know from reading past blogs that Tiffany and I live in a one-bedroom apartment. We don't have a dining room. We have a coffee table in front of our couch. But now we also have a corner-of-the-living-room-table-that-we-eat-on.

We'd been looking for a table for a while. Here's how it worked:

"Oooh, look at this table," Tiffany said proudly, calling me over to look at a craigslist ad in her first weekend of looking.

"Hmmm, nah," I said.

Days go by.

"Babe, here's a perfect one," Tiffany said. "It could go right by the window."

"Really? Turquoise? Nah."

More days go by.

"You don't like any of the tables I've shown you!" Tiffany said.

"You haven't shown me any tables I like!"

And that's how we ended up in the car on the way to Ikea.

Ikea intimidates me. When we arrived at the top of the escalator, I grabbed a map. I used to get lost on the highway that circled Kansas City--you can't imagine how easily I get lost in a store with an endless series of fake living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and bedrooms.

We found the table we liked in the first fake living room. We sat down at it immediately and put our forearms on the surface to assess its size.

"Having a seance?" a woman asked as she passed with her son.

"No, something much more difficult," I said. "Trying to agree on a table."

We loved the table. And what we loved most about the table, besides the fact that it was cheaper than the ones we were looking at on craigstlist, was that it had two leaves that pulled out so that it could be small when we didn't need it and big when we did. In a complicated marvel of carpentry I will never be able to explain, you can pull the leaves out and then lift the middle of the table and push them back under.

And it was that marvel of carpentry that scared us. Because we knew we had to put the table together.

Still, determined--and tired of eating hunched over our coffee table--we bought it. And, of course, what we bought looked nothing like our table. It looked like a gigantic cardboard box because that's what it came in.

Tiffany and I prepared ourselves for irritability. It's what you should do, you know, when you confront a task like this: prepare yourself for the fact that your partner is going to do something fabulously annoying. For instance, in such situations, I am prone to asking subtly undermining questions ("are you sure that's the right screw?") at inappropriate times (when the screw is already in the hole).

But you know what? We didn't get annoyed at all while we built our table. Even when Tiffany took the one Ikea-related task I'm good at--sorting the various screws and plastic thingys--and did it herself.

Because here's the trick. Tiffany is way better at certain things than I am, and, rather than try to prove that I am just as good, I defer to her on those things. I can't read Ikea-furniture assembly instructions because there are no words! There are only pictures and arrows! And I am spacially-challenged. So Tiffany deciphered the instructions and then we took turns putting the various pieces the way she concluded they went.

After that, we had a table.

And you know what I am good at? Making dinner. So I made it. And I let Tiffany help. ;)