First comes love, then comes long-distance relationship, then comes pack all your worldly belongings and move to your boyfriend’s house/town/space. I’m not going to lie, this whole moving to the small town where my boyfriend lives is freaking me out. It’s a huge step, and don’t get me wrong, I’m ready for it. It’s just the daunting task of packing up my entire life, and moving out of my lovely girl space that freaks me out.
And, dolls, I’ve been pairing down. I’ve been tossing and donating lots of old stuff. But what part of your history, your past, are you willing to part with? Every time I do a clean out, I purge more of my things. I find more and more that I can live without. But so far they are small things.
I’ve come across a box of my old journals from college to current. If you would ask me before if I could part with them, I would say absolutely NO! But now I’ve started thinking, do I really want my kids reading them someday? Do I really want Mr. Paul Child be able to flip through them and read pages of angry scribbles detailing the drama between me and one of the guys I dated in college? Yet it’s a part of my history. It’s a piece of me in time, captured in those scrawling words. Maybe in another few purges I’ll be able to part with them, but right now, I don’t think I can get rid of those pieces that show me how much I’ve grown over these past few years. How do we decide what we keep from our past and what we pitch out with the stale, moldy bread?
This freak out is a layered panic. There’s moving out of my space, that I solely controlled and kept, and then there is the art of combining your belongings with another. I keep asking my married or in relationship friends how they did it, how did they move in with their significant other? Sitting in Mr. Paul Child’s house this past weekend, I was freaking out a little. He was attempting to make room for me in the house, but the problem is that there just isn’t room. No closet space. No workspace. No place to call my own. I look at the pieces of my life that I have to pack up and haul down there and even with the best pairing down, my things won’t have a space. I will have to take over the guest room and stack my boxes in there, despite Mr. Paul Child’s protests that we have to have a functioning guest room.
All those stupid rom-com’s I’ve watched never show this part. They don’t tell you how to make all your things fit into one house. Selecting which items you should toss and which to keep. How to not insult the other person’s taste in décor. The masterful art of not becoming furious, fighting the desire to walk out of the house when becoming frustrated trying to picture how you will live in this space. I’ve never seen Katherine Heigl or Jennifer Aniston tackling those beastly problems while they are swooning around with perfect hair. That is the movie I want to see made!
I don’t know how this part works, and no one really has given me very good advice. Every experience is different. I’m just going to have to deal with him being pissed that I’m using the guest bedroom as a place to stack my boxes for the time being. I’m not selling or pitching important things to me. Hear that, my beloved cookbooks (see picture above!) and my lovely kitchen equipment? You are safe, my lovelies!
If anyone has an advice, HELP! Please share with us! How did you apply combination theory to your relationship?
