To the IKEA on Park Manor Boulevard:
I love a good Swedish meatball as much as the next girl, but helping a single, 25 year-old man pick out furniture for his empty Pittsburgh apartment isn’t exactly my ideal Saturday night. No offense, nothing sucks the life out of a room like shopping for mass-produced, minimalistic Scandinavian furniture.
I mean, it was technically a first date. But first dates require a lot of courage, and courage was not something I had in abundance at that time. IKEA, though, seemed…safe. It’s a date that can masquerade as a simple errand if things go wrong. And at that point in my life, I needed “safe”. Correction: I wanted “safe”. But, you know what they say about a place like IKEA: You never go in with a plan. The store just tells you what you need, and you oblige.

I think that my date and I came for a mattress, a desk, and a coffee table: the bare necessities of 20-something urban living. Despite our list, we stopped in every single section, admiring each hyper-detailed scene–you know, the ones that help people better envision what the furniture they’re eyeing will look like when it’s assembled and incorporated into its potential space. As we wove our way through, messing around by playing games, making up stories, and gabbing about color schemes and curtain choices, the irony wasn’t lost on me. My first sample of doing life with this guy making furniture shopping feel like an amusement park. I was having an amazing time, but I still had my guard up, bracing for that all-too-familiar pit in my stomach to give way, ready for the moment he would “casually” mention how this desk chair was his ex’s favorite color, or how he’d need a sturdy mattress to keep up with all the girls he planned to sleep with, or how I was such a good friend for helping him pick out furniture.

But that moment never came. In fact, somewhere between the kitchenware and the plants, something shifted that even the most hypervigilant parts of me couldn’t detect. Discussions over the best cabinet color became explanations on why dark-washed woods reminded him of summers in that cabin in Maine. Preference of kitchen fixtures became recounting summers sitting around the table with my friend who had since passed away. In hindsight, we were so severely over the line of polite first date talk that it would have made even my most seasoned dater cringe. But in the moment, I heard no alarm bells, felt no gut feelings. The image of him in my life was coming more into focus by the second. He would be a perfect fit, I knew it.

IKEA, you may be the world’s quirkiest spot for a first date, but I left that day with the love of my life, and I in no small way attribute that to the playful whimsy of IKEA creating a space which coaxed out an uncharacteristic vulnerability in me–one that let me relax into to the possibility of not only loving, but letting myself be loved, after so long. I still think back to that date when times are tough. I think about watching him pantomiming the mundane intricacies of everyday life in a fake office or display kitchen, and how badly I wanted to experience life with him for real. It feels poetic, then, that I’m writing this, snuggled up next to him against my MALM bed frame. He really is exactly what my space was missing.