Interior Designs: Refurnish a marriage

I’ve ditched chairs with no regrets. I once separated from a wool rug just because I wanted to see something else. And when a vintage dinette set — so charming during our first five years together — began to bore me, I threw it in the back of the station wagon, drove out to a charitable donation center and left it without so much as a backward glance.

So why was I struggling with the idea of tossing our old four-poster bed?

It’s not like it was a family heirloom, or an antique, or even particularly good quality. I bought it some 20 years earlier on deep discount at a nondescript furniture store. My husband wanted me to take it back. I refused. It wasn’t because I was so madly in love with this particular bed but because I was tired of sleeping on a mattress on the floor like aging college roommates. I was also tired of shopping for a bed as we had done countless weekends for more than two years without a purchase. Honestly, more than two years. We were the worst combination of consumers; persnickety about design and rather vague on money. I think furniture salespeople hid in back rooms when we showed up.

Our bedlessness had become a nightly reminder of our inability to make a joint financial decision and, I feared, symbolic of something seriously wrong with our relationship. Our marriage was relatively new, and I was just…