Or: Thirty Years of Marital Harmony, One Allen Key at a Time

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who read the instructions, and those who have finished assembling the furniture before the first lot have found their reading glasses.

I married one of the former.

My husband, John, is a highly educated man. He has an impressive academic background, an enquiring mind, and a profound respect for the written word. These are admirable qualities in almost every conceivable situation.

Except when assembling a bookcase.

To John, a flat-pack furniture delivery is not a domestic chore. It is a research project.

First, the box must be opened carefully, preferably without damaging the packaging, which may conceivably be required at some unspecified future date. Every component must then be removed, identified, counted and arranged in precisely the order prescribed by the manufacturer.

The screws are sorted. The dowels are inspected. The mysterious little metal things are studied with the concentration normally reserved for archaeological discoveries.

Then comes the instruction manual.

John reads it. All of it. Including the safety warnings, the manufacturer’s recommendations and, quite possibly, the Swedish recycling instructions.

Should the manual mention a particular tool, that tool must be located. If the tool has its own instruction manual, naturally that must be consulted as well.

At this point, I have generally finished building the bookcase.

I am not entirely sure how. There may have been a high-heeled shoe involved, pressed into service as a hammer, and a kitchen knife standing in for a screwdriver. I have always maintained that a tool is simply an object that happens to be suitable for the task at hand.

John disagrees.

John believes that every task has a correct procedure, and that the correct procedure exists for a reason.

I believe that if the shelves are horizontal and the whole contraption remains standing when you let go, the procedure was sufficiently correct.

We have been married for a very long time.

Our differences extend well beyond furniture.

If something in the house breaks, John approaches the problem intellectually. He considers the possible causes, weighs the available evidence and formulates a hypothesis.

I fetch a screwdriver.

By the time he has established a theoretical framework for the malfunction, I have usually dismantled the offending appliance, discovered the problem and put it back together.

Occasionally, I even have a screw left over.

This does not trouble me nearly as much as it troubles John.

“Where did that come from?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t it be somewhere?”

“Probably.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Is it working?”

This is not, apparently, an acceptable answer.

In fairness, John’s approach has certain advantages. He is considerably less likely than I am to discover halfway through a job that something important was supposed to be fitted before something else.

I, on the other hand, am considerably more experienced at taking things apart again.

One might imagine that after all these years we would have reached some sort of compromise. A sensible division of labour, perhaps, in which John reads the instructions while I do the actual work.

And, in a manner of speaking, we have.

He reads the instructions.

I do the actual work.

He then explains what I should have done differently.

It is a system that has served us remarkably well, provided neither of us is particularly concerned about maintaining a peaceful atmosphere during the assembly of Swedish furniture.

The curious thing is that neither of us is entirely wrong.

John’s method is careful, considered and systematic. Mine is quick, practical and occasionally involves language that would make a dockworker blush.

His produces an understanding of how things ought to work.

Mine produces a functioning bookcase.

And should the bookcase collapse six months later, he will remind me that the instructions specifically warned against using the wrong screws.

He will be right, of course.

Which is why I shall never tell him.

After all, a successful marriage is built on mutual respect, tolerance and knowing precisely when to hide the leftover fittings.