Recently, I purchased my first real desk. It’s solid pine. A piece of Amish-made furniture, and I think I spent a relatively large house payment just to take it home with me. I walked into the furniture store and took a deep breath, imagining myself sitting at a beautiful, ornate desk, just like some of the ones I saw in those princess suites when I was younger.
We develop a relationship with the furniture we bring into our lives. Whether it’s a good, healthy relationship and we care for our cheap furniture like it’s a member of our family, or it’s an unhealthy one and we’re carving our names into our school desks, it’s still a relationship. Most people don’t really think of furniture that way, but I know that my dad remembers the milk crate bookcase he had in college, my mom remembers when she bought her first bedroom suite when she had her own apartment and I will always remember when I bought that beautiful desk.
Sometimes, our furniture is an excellent reflection of our personalities. How many men in our lives have a “man cave” with heavy leather Lazy-Boys and a big screen TV on one wall? How many couples buy matching baby furniture for their first born and then shop at Goodwill and garage sales while they’re pregnant with their fourth? How many vampires have coffins in their bedrooms? Alright, so perhaps that last example isn’t realistic, but it’s an excellent illustration of how even unconscious decisions about furniture reflect our internal characteristics of modern furniture
Walk into a furniture store. You will be drawn to certain things and turned off by others. You won’t make a rational, logical decision about it, but maybe you happen to believe that the bright orange sofa would look perfect in your living room or that the antique Victorian side table would accent your foyer and match the cat. Maybe you hate the black leather sofa and the person who walked in right behind you falls in love with it instantly. Our relationship with furniture is a personal one.
I also know that I’ve walked into a furniture store and almost instantly hated everything in sight until I got to the very back room, half-hidden behind a bookcase, and found a tiny side table that I fell in love with. Like all relationships, sometimes we have to spend quite a bit of time sorting through the junk to find something we want to bring into our lives.


