Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together. We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.
You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?
Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no. Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.
I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.
Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.
He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.
He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”
He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”
“It’s a habit,” I reply.
He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.
When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.
Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.
This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.
