Charles , my husband, and I had moved furniture once before we were married (an apartment to share after the wedding), and twice after we were married, but all with the help of others. Thus, while he was moving the heavier items with his friends, I was folding linens and gossiping with mine. Moving seemed easy. But then came the move to Bakersfield, California. Initially, we had hired movers to move all of our items from our old place the three hours north to Bakersfield into a storage unit while we looked for a house to buy. A few thousand dollars later, we had decided that we, ourselves, would handle moving the items out of storage to our new house. How hard could it be to load up the truck? It was all tucked nicely into the storage unit by the professionals. 

       Welcome to the day I first said, “Who did I marry?” We had recently celebrated our third year anniversary and our first child was still an infant. It was a sweltering late August day in the Bakersfield heat and dust. I looked at my sweet husband with a smile, gave him a hug and said, “We can do this because we are so great together.” We offered up a little prayer to the Lord for strength and safety and began to work on the heavier items first. 

        B ut let me back up a bit here. When the professional movers put our things into storage, I specifically requested that they put all the heavier items in front of the unit so that we could load those items first and save our strength. I watched them do it, thanked them for their consideration and told Charles that they had made our job easier. So why was he standing on our dryer that moment before we moved the first thing into the truck? Because he didn’t believe me when I said all the heavy items were in the front. He stood on the dryer to get a bird’s eye view of the entire unit and shifted his weight back and forth on the top of the dryer. Trying to block the sun from my eyes, I told him I didn’t think it was such a good idea to be standing on the dryer because it wasn’t likely designed to withstand his 230 lb. frame. 

       “I know what I’m doing.” He offered as we could both hear the sound of metal crushing. His left foot began sinking into the dryer top and there was a magnificently large dent in our newly acquired dryer. I could feel the blood draining from my bottom lip as I bit the living heck out of it. 

        O ur first task, thereafter, was to load the heavy appliances onto a dolly and roll them up into the truck. Suffice it to say, from the very first to the very last attempt to move our furniture, it was a battle of the wills. In a nut shell, when I zigged, he zagged. When I lifted up, he pulled back. When I said I was turning clockwise, he turned counter-clockwise. The result? Even a thirty pound piece of furniture instantaneously became too heavy to lift. You had to add together the original 30 pounds of the item, the force of Charles’ muscular pull, and the force of my not so wimpy lift; and would then have a 30 pound item weighing about 150 pounds. I’ve never had so many issues with an end table from Target before. It was unbearable. 

       And it wasn’t solely because we weren’t listening to each other. It was simply the aftereffect of nostalgia in a real marriage. While dating, and while we endured the first couple years of marriage, we took pride in be able to know what the other was “thinking.” (This is the part were those who have been married in excess of seven years start laughing.) We didn’t need words, we were in love. Well, let me tell you something you little lovebirds…love doesn’t exist in a storage unit that is baking at 120 degrees. Love doesn’t exist when moving a queen sized sleeper sofa (mattress in) into a truck that smelled of rat urine and wet dog. Love doesn’t exist when you are rolling a refrigerator up the ramp of the truck and one of the dolly’s wheels falls off. Love doesn’t exist when you think it’s a good idea to say, “Let’s wait to eat lunch until after we’re finished moving.” No, love doesn’t exist in these places. Only the desire to survive without killing. Only the desire to respect without fashioning a prison shunt from cardboard box piece and left over packing tape. 

      You want to know if you’ve found the right person? Move a household together. If the two of you can manage to work as a team in these circumstances, then it won’t become so daunting to work together to clean up your toddler’s mural of Vaseline, paint, and boogers on the living room wall. Because for those moments when no one feels loving, you’ll still be a team. And that’s the ultimate compatibility test!