But I was obsessed, and all I could talk about was the couch. The craziest fucking couch in the world is still not more exciting than the Q train running on the R line because of scheduled track maintenance. You know how you’re not supposed to talk about the weather or your commute because they’re boring? The same is true of couches. I became obsessed with the extremely banal mistake I had made as a consumer. One direction was to “Hold the cushion properly and make sure the pointed end of the stick is all the way through, until you can see both ends of the stick on each side of the cushion.” I tried in earnest to follow the directions, but the wooden dowel would not fit into the buttonholes, and the entire exercise left me with fewer buttons than I started with. ![]() The kit was backordered, so it arrived two full months later and contained a wooden dowel, two buttons, and some directions that didn’t make sense. They sent me a button-repair kit, indicating that this probably happens a lot. I emailed customer service and asked if this was normal. As soon as one button had fallen off of our couch, it was like a spigot had been turned, allowing all of the other buttons to fall off, too. We would lean back slightly too far, and all of the cushions would shift forward and over the edge of the couch in unison. We would scooch across a cushion at the wrong angle, and a button would pop off, leaving a fraying hole behind. We sat on the couch at the end of each day and congratulated ourselves on our good and prudent choice and searched for throw pillows that didn’t have any words or foxes on them.Īround when the throw pillows finally arrived, the couch began to disintegrate in small ways. It was a little uncomfortable, but probably just needed some throw pillows to soften it. The couch came, and our old one, a vintage leather Craigslist number, left. If you buy a couch together, either the couch or the relationship will break, and the two things will have no correlation. Engagement rings are the biggest racket in history, and even if you love each other, one of you will lose your ring. No matter what Apple commercials and jewelry ads tell you, you should never, ever view an object as a metaphor for your relationship. This is the moment when I need to warn you of something vitally important. I looked at the image on the West Elm website and saw an entire montage of us laughing on the couch with friends, reading the Sunday paper on the couch, drinking obscure liqueurs on the couch (would this be the couch on which we would discover that we loved Cynar or Chartreuse?), moving the couch into a larger apartment, covering the couch with tarps while we painted the walls around it a daring color, giving birth on the couch, dying on the couch. It was more than we were used to paying for a piece of furniture, but the price seemed to be proof of enduring quality. We would each put a fat $600 towards the couch, and that money would be an investment into our new life together. ![]() ![]() ![]() We chose a West Elm design called the “Peggy” in a deep rusty orange color. The couch would be the most prominent piece of furniture in our small apartment and our first big purchase together - a gigantic spongy representation of our shared style sensibility. This is why, a few weeks after moving in with my partner, Kevin, we decided to buy a couch from West Elm. And more specifically, a need to prove that I’ve graduated from Walmart bedframes and second-hand plywood shelves scooped up from the sidewalk. The only couch anybody needs is a metal frame pulled from the curb, a few pillow cases, and a stack of old newspapers.īut in spite of myself, as a 28-year-old, I find myself drawn into the same capitalistic pitfall that many young professionals are drawn into - a need to prove my adulthood with mid-century furniture. Poly-Fil? Foam? Goose feathers? Forget about it. Every couch I have sat on since then has felt unreasonably, needlessly luxurious. When I was a kid my grandma had a couch on her front porch that was, as a result of some sort of thrifty post-wartime craft project, stuffed with crumpled-up newspapers. Comparing notes with other unsatisfied owners of the Peggy sofa
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