Compromise: The Merging of the Stuff

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When you get married you gain a partner, a husband, a best friend, a new family… and lots of stuff.

We closed on our house and moved out of our bachelor and bachelorette pads about five months before our wedding in May 2008. We had each been out of grad school and law school for three years so we each had lots of furniture and plenty of stuff to fill our own houses. We moved into a precious bungalow that was built in the 1930s and had recently been updated. The attic was turned into a giant master suite and we have tons of space in our bedroom. The only down side is that we don’t have an attic– or any storage. The closets are still the same old 1930s closets and all of my craft supplies fill up an entire closet. It was clear that we needed to get rid of some unnecessary objects.

My sweet husband is a bit of a pack rat. He doesn’t hold onto things because they’re important to him. He holds onto things because he doesn’t want to take the time to go through everything to decide what should be purged. I throw things away all the time. If there’s a mess I’d like to just pick it all up and dump it in the trash rather than hoard more stuff– which often leads to throwing away important things.

The item that I was forced to give up in the move was my massive collection of wedding magazines. I had every issue of Martha Stewart Weddings dating back to 1999. I would spend entire Saturdays pulling out the magazines and flipping through each one looking for inspiring images that I may not have seen the other 20 times I looked at the magazine. We can call it my secret single behavior, but I loved it. When we got engaged I started tearing things out of all of the magazines and filing them by category into a huge binder. So I was a little bit sad to give up so many beautiful issues of the magazine, but I made sure to go through and tear out any gorgeous pages before tossing them all in the dumpster.

Because I had to give up all of my magazines, I thought it was only fair that we not try to store (in our house with limited storage) hundreds of issues of Sports Illustrated– dating back to 1989! Yes, I’m serious. My sweet husband agreed to get rid of them as he had never gone back to look at any old issues.

We both were a little bit sad to get rid of such big collections, but felt better once they were gone. Interestingly, getting rid of those magazines was a much bigger deal than choosing whose sofa to keep and whose sofa to sell. We also had to get rid of one TV, one bed, and one breakfast table. We had two of everything, but those magazines left the biggest hole in our lives.

Did anyone else have to decide how to merge your stuff? Were there any major or significant compromises?