Tango, July 31st, 2007
ANNE AND RJ HAVE BOUGHT A HOUSE and had a baby together. They share a bed, a bathroom, even a toothbrush when necessary. And yet, until a few months ago, their 200-plus CDs had remained strictly separate—his Bruce Springsteen on one shelf, her Brad Paisley on another. Marrying each other, it turns out, didn’t automatically mean marrying their stuff.
Almost every couple we’ve talked to can relate. They may have cosigned a mortgage or even combined their DNA—but consolidate their books or music or art or furniture? That’s a big commitment!
But it’s one worth making. A joint MasterCard account may signal to the world—or at least your creditors—that your finances are intertwined. But your books mingling on the shelf (or your Saarinen side table snuggled up to his Chippendale sofa) are an everyday reminder that you’ve meshed as a couple.
Navigating the mine-field
What’s so difficult about turning his and hers into ours? For some couples, the issue was that the possessions in question were deeply personal. Stuart, a friend who’s a former book editor, has an emotional attachment to his library—so much so that even an emotional attachment to his wife, Patti, couldn’t persuade him to integrate their books for the first three years they lived together. “Books were my thing,” Stuart says. “Before we were together, I moved six or seven times in a four-year period, and my books were a part of me that stayed with me as I moved.” Combining Patti’s books with his would have been like pasting her baby pictures into his family album. Instead, she moved in her own bookcase intact.
Stuart and Patti did eventually marry their libraries. But wisely, Patti didn’t force the issue.When one partner has qualms about a wholesale blending of belongings, a smaller, symbolic merger can be a way to signal togetherness without trampling anyone’s feelings. On a certain shelf in their dining room, Patti and Stuart keep a group of volumes they consider special to them as a couple—mutual favorites, books they first read when they were dating, gifts to each other, or that they received jointly, beloved titles from childhood. It’s a collection that symbolizes their relationship as much as their reading taste—and as a meaningful gesture, it far surpasses simple co-shelving.
The taste test
Sometimes, what makes a merger bumpy isn’t so much a question of emotions as a clash of aesthetics—particularly when it comes to collections of art or furniture. (Though we did hear from one husband who was reluctant to house his wife’s wellthumbed paperbacks among his pristine hardcovers.)
For Wendy and Jim, it was the art. After moving into a three-story house in New Jersey, they finally had plenty of wall space. But Jim’s maps of Ireland and depictions of famous military invasions didn’t live comfortably beside Wendy’s arty black-andwhite photographs and oil portraits she had painted herself. “They looked disastrous hung in the same room,” Wendy says. “Much less on the same wall.”
So most of the art stayed bubble-wrapped—and most of the walls, bare. It might sound like a head-in-the-sand approach to merging, but in fact, by not insisting that their collections be integrated, Wendy and Jim left room for a new, mutually pleasing one to develop. They started with installations that were easy enough to agree on: photos of their two kids along a hallway, their son’s artwork tacked up in the playroom. Adorning their home’s walls suddenly felt like fun, and they found themselves eyeing new paintings and photographs they might like to acquire—as a couple. Ironically, as they begin to fill the house with this new, mutual collection, small groupings of his maps or her oil paintings no longer cause such a huge visual disconnect, bridged as they are by common ground.
Orderly conduct
But what do you do when what’s undermining a merger isn’t the stuff itself, but the system for organizing it?
What seemed to work best for the couples we talked to was letting the more meticulous scheme govern—with the understanding that occasional insurrections must be tolerated. An example: though her husband, John, would be fine with alooser arrangement, our friend Laura, organizes their CDs alphabetically within genre: rock A-Z, comedy A-Z, classical A-Z. The exceptions, she says, are quite simply “anything one person cares a lot more about.” So though some of John’s Peter Gabriel albums should, according to the system, be filed in rock and others in world music, they stay together. As Laura points out, John is the only one who’ll be listening to them—and so he’s the only one who will need to locate them. “We don’t make theory more important than practicality,” she says. “There’s no ‘My logic is better than yours so you must apply it to things I won’t use!’”
The same is true with Patti and Stuart, who did eventually merge their books—once Patti, a random shelver, capitulated to Stuart’s precise alphabetical scheme. The bookshelves start in the sunroom (Dorothy Allison through Aldous Huxley), continue in the living room (John Irving through Tom Robbins), make a leap to the master bedroom (Philip Roth followed by J.K. Rowling followed by … well, you get the point.) “I ceded all control,” Patti says wryly. Et voila! Bibliophilic bliss. But there are some books—Patti’s vast number of reference works, for example—that are exempt from the system. And it’s those little idiosyncrasies that turn the collection from his into theirs.
A melding of the minds
Of course, the very best mergers are those that come about organically, even when it’s a glacial process. Take Anne and RJ’s formerly segregated CDs, now assimilated into four large CD binders. When they met, country music was something Anne inflicted on RJ. Now he knows every word to “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” And as he began reaching for Anne’s CDs as often as he did his own, their personal possessions began to feel like joint property. No, not every single one—they will never truly co-own the Metallica CDs (his) or the Indigo Girls albums (hers). But when one of them brings home the latest George Strait, they consider it theirs.
Get more advice from contributing editors Lauren and Anne Purcell at purcellsisters.com.
