love me, love my action figure collection

“It never would have worked out. I caught her trying to file her Fried Green Tomatoes DVD after my copy of John Carpenter’s The Fog.”

Is this really an issue? And if it is, shouldn’t the couples involved be forced to separate, if not for their own sakes, then for the sake of the gene pool?

Every successful relationship comes down to series of compromises -- some large, some small -- concerning personal quirks and preferences that weave themselves into the fabric of the partnership, so that over time the actual boundaries fade into the background of consensual habit. Granted, some behaviors are more bothersome than others, but if you’ve chosen to partner up with someone who is habitually late for events, you weigh the irritation factor versus your affection for said partner and either learn to deal with it or decide to call it a day and move on. There’s always the chance of flare ups within the contested zones, but if the relationship is solid, these function as tension release valves or minor corrective efforts, and not fault lines from which bad break ups arise.

Relationship issues over merging media collections, though? That’s just plain stupid. I know there are some folks who are outright anal about keeping a cross-referenced and spreadsheet-tabulated archive of their books, CDs, and DVDs, but isn’t that the sort of thing a romantic partner would figure out early on in a relationship and accommodate for accordingly? There will always be adherents of the “I can change him or her” school who will play along until the pact is formally sealed (although I’d argue that such antics encode their own seeds of self-destruction), but when you fall in love with a person who, for example, is absolutely devoted to her pet rabbits, it’s unrealistic to think “Hey, I’ll try and convince her that rabbits are terrible pets, and that any home we make together will be lagomorph-free!” Again, it’s all about the willingness to accommodate or compromise, if you think a certain person is destined to be “the one.”

Maybe the columnists were being squeezed by a deadline, and needed some quick fluff to fill space, but the technicalities of merging possessions seem like something that any two people in a working relationship should have been able to figure out prior to living together. Kind of like how I instinctively know what songs to avoid when assembling a mix CD for the wife’s and my work commute, or why I never even raised the question of whether or not we were going to hang the gatefold poster cover of Crass’s Feeding the 5000 (a photo of a desiccated hand tangled in barbed wire, with the caption “Your country needs you” in big block letters) on the living room wall. Besides, unless you lead an extremely Spartan lifestyle or plan on moving into an eighteen room mansion, it’s highly unlikely that there will be enough room both your and your partner’s accumulated masses of stuff.

In our case, it was an organic affair, where we tossed all our stuff into massive piles in the attic, and gradually pulled things from the mess as needed and/or wanted. Anime artbooks share space with graphic novels, history and science texts with sci-fi and horror paperbacks, DVD box sets with Xbox and PS2 games. At the moment, our endtable is groaning under a stack of issues of Shojo Beat, a coffee table book on videogames, and my old Traditions of Western Drama anthology from college, with no Congress of Vienna-style negotiations required. The contents of our communal CD racks have developed along similar lines; various personal favorites cohabitate side by side with no fear of musical cootie contagion.

Vive le difference, and all that. Keeping in the spirit of things, here are two tracks pulled from two neighboring discs, one from one of Maura’s favorites and one from mine, with neither of us seeing the appeal of the other’s selection…

Nina Hagen – Russian Reggae (from …In Ekstasy, 1985) – I just don’t get it, but the wife loves Frau Hagen’s colorfully far-out punk/pop/sci-fi stylings. She even wants to name our first daughter “Nina Marlene Roxy” after Hagen, and her two other musical heroes: Lene Lovich and Roxy Epoxy. It’s a much better choice than “Kayleigh” or “Madison,” I concede.

Throwing Muses – The River (from House Tornado, 1988) – The Muses are an “eh” from Maura, who associates them with the more irritating and pretentious fans she used to know back in the late 80’s (not as much as she does with The Pixies, who are beyond the pale, as far as she’s concerned; a feeling I happen to share with her). I enjoy the band’s quirky, opaque brand of indie rock, though I prefer to ride the sonic currents of their songs and not seek deeper truths in their lyrics.