The Life and Times of Chai

Many of you have wandered through IKEA, picturing yourself in the amazingly designed living room hosting a great soiree. You get really caught up in your own daydream that you see yourself writing down with such hot passion the aisle and bin numbers to obtain that living room. You feel yourself going to the self-serve section, finding the items, and putting it in your cart. You find your wallet nearly $800 lighter and enjoying the Tetris-like skills you obtained to put all of the furniture in the back of your four-door Civic.

When you get home, you lug the boxes upstairs (now with the weight of the box noted on the label) and you take a seat on floor, tired and exhausted. Should you open the box right now or later? And that simple question is translated into should you start building your new life now or later?

Last year, in early 2007, T and I moved into our first marital abode in Manhattan. Of course we were excited to be in the same city, starting our new lives together, but to say it was a challenge would be an understatement. The challenges not only came from being married, which is harder than it sounds, but from the lack of space we once were privy to in our own apartments. Now, in a 400 square foot apartment, we had to place two individuals' junk, along with a beautiful, yet space consuming, dog.

To put it mildly, we were in deep shit.

We found ourselves in a line to IKEA at Penn Station on a gorgeous January afternoon. New York was facing some warm front which was unusual for the region. We were shuttled to the New Jersey IKEA with 60 or so individuals trying to find their new lives in a box. We shopped and found two bookcases, a dresser, bar chairs, and a living area rug. I will never forget watching T, with a cigarette in his mouth, pushing the cart to an IKEA delivery man. His face, saturated with sweat, showing triumph and shock. We were ecstatic to get our stuff back to our apartment to start building our apartment together.

We decided not to unpack that night. We waited until Sunday. That morning, we turned on the television so T could watch the "most important football game of the year" on television. I have since learned that every single game is the most important game of the year. Project number one was bookcase. We laid out the bookcase pieces: two long boards, five shorter boards, a backing, and a small board. That was the easy part. The harder part was counting the equipment. Although I am a woman, it didn't mean I had no clue how to build something. I relished building things with my dad and mom. In college, I built all my furniture. It was something I knew how to do and it had precise steps:

1. Remove items from box.
2. Count the items in the box and make sure it corresponds to the instruction manual.
3. Read through the directions once to understand how everything will come together.
4. Make sure you have the tools and necessary safety equipment around you.
5. Follow each step in the instruction manual.
   
6. Do it slowly and do it properly.

I believed the above six steps were universal. That is, until I started building the bookcase with T. He didn't believe in the idea of counting the hardware. He just wanted to start. I couldn't imagine building something without knowing if you had enough nails, screws, and the IKEA wrench. And there we were, sitting on our new IKEA rug with bookcase pieces strewn around us, yelling at each other about the importance (or lack thereof) of counting the hardware. This turned into a fight about how I am really disciplined and how T is nothing but an animal with no rules. That turned into "I can't believe we got married. We are soooooo different from each other." And eventually that turned into tears (from me) and exhausted sentences from T.

A half an hour later, we were back at building the bookcase. I had convinced T through tears and yelling that counting the hardware made sense. He eventually conceded. After a few more fights and more tears, we built our first bookcase. We were done with each other after that one bookcase and we had a second one to build. Fortunately for us, we had no way to hide from each other. If you didn't catch the sarcasm in the last line, you don't understand what a 400 square foot apartment can do to a person's psyche.

After some reflection, I realized that T and I were not fighting about the actual hardware counting or rule building. We were fighting about whose style was going to dictate our relationship. Would it be T's, where we do things last minute, unplanned, and have more flexibility to life? Or would it be mine where things are planned, rule based, and tiptoeing near the edge is horrible to one's health? IKEA made us see that we had different ways of getting to point B. It also made us see how we could make each other's lives difficult or easy if we wanted.

Here we are again in marital home two, with IKEA boxes around us. Yesterday, before we started building our bookcases, desks, and other filler furniture, we had a five minute talk about some ground rules. Some of those rules were mine ("count the hardware and material before beginning") and some where his ("don't criticize or freak out if we put a wrong screw in the wrong hole"). We were successful in building not one, but four IKEA projects in six hours. And there were no tears shed, no yelling, and no pain.

Who knew that IKEA can also be a marital counselor?