Moving and Marriage

In the kitchen, hubby-man and I look like a perfectly coordinated ballet. We cook well together other places as well. And we can spend hours talking over coffee, clean our house together in harmony, choose a show to watch side by side, pick a restaurant with little debate, and dance in perfect coordination.

Packing and coordinating a move, however, is like a three-legged race with a peacock and a monkey.

• He wants to keep it; I want to toss it.
• I want to keep it; he wants to donate it.
• He wants to move boxes first; I want the furniture gone ASAP.
• I want the tornado of papers in our home office dealt with first; he thinks we need to do laundry and pack clothes first.

And so the list continues. As long as we're working separately, there's relative peace in the house. Jointly, however, we have snags just trying to decide how the boxes should be taped!

Though I am proud to say that last night we went through the insane amount of pens we have together--tossing dried ones and setting aside good ones to donate--and we didn't get into a single argument.

Why is this such a Herculean task? Not moving itself. The answer to that one is easy: we have a ton of crap and moving is a pain in the butt. I mean getting along.

I think we've both moved so many times that the process has become a ritual, and our rituals are incompatible.

I will say, this time was better than the last two. At least we aim to stay out of each other's way. We nearly killed each other on the first one. Our saving grace this time: We hired movers.