THE STUFF THAT GUYS ARE MADE OF
I’ve yet to find a book by decluttering gurus that coaches guys on how to divorce ourselves from our stuff. I need that book now.
It’s seldom that this always-in-a-hurry guy welcomes being stuck in traffic. I had one of those rare moments recently at an intersection stoplight near where my wife and I live. For once, I was hoping the light would not change too quickly. I had just pulled up behind a large truck. As I waited in the line, my eyes drifted to the sign painted on the truck’s rear tailgate. I just had to take a picture of that.
I struggled to pull my cell phone from my pants pocket, bring up its home screen, open the camera app, and then hold it up for a shot through my car windshield. Luckily the traffic light held up the truck long enough to snap the photo.
The image shows the back end of an ordinary large dump truck. The tailgate’s left panel displayed the name of the company, “1-2-3 Junk.” followed by a phone number and email address. On the right panel was what interested me most, a list of the company’s hauling services: “We Haul Away Anything” and below that “Your Stuff” and below that “Ex-wife’s Stuff” and below that “Ex-Husband’s Stuff.” The truck’s signage cleverly reflected the entrepreneurial savvy of the company’s owner, who clearly was well-attuned to contemporary societal trends. My wife, I was sure, would find that sign hilarious. Maybe.
Admittedly, purging yourself of a spouse and their stuff is a rather drastic way to declutter. After 50 years of marriage, I guess the accumulation of stuff is inevitable. Both hers and mine … but mostly mine.
My wife and I have now arrived at the point in our lives when we need to get serious about simplifying our lives. We’re ready to move to a smaller place to spend more time traveling, , reading, volunteering and visiting children. But we’ve been having trouble getting there because our material possessions have become greater obstacles to moving. than we expected.
I figure that to rid myself of stuff, I first need to understand why I accumulated so much of it. I’ve concluded that (surprise!) it’s a guy thing. Relationship counselors and decluttering gurus, being largely of the female gender, just have not grasped in their how-to books the nature of guys’ relationships with our stuff. In part, that’s because nearly all of them cannot appreciate how our things help sustain our relationship with our life’s partners.
First, when something breaks or doesn’t work right, a guy will look for ways he can fix it. Throughout my married life, I could be found periodically puttering in the garage or basement fixing stuff, even if it was inexpensive to replace. I welcomed the challenge of making it look and work like new again. Fixing it was validating. Macho. Role fulfilling.
Fortunately, much of my stuff often comes with an owner or operator manual and instructions, maybe even a list of repair parts and dealerships where I can purchase them. In short, I tell myself, “I can do this,” and set about trying.
However, when a guy’s relationship with his life’s partner starts ‘running rough,’ as will likely happen at times even in a long and mostly happy marriage, he often finds himself at a loss in knowing exactly how to get it working smoothly again.
There’s no “relationship manual” with explicit instructions to guide him like there is for operating or repairing a power tool or a lawn mower. With stuff, a guy’s confidence in knowing how to fix it is high. A life’s partner, however, leaves him guessing and that’s not a place where a guy likes to be. Not this guy, at least.
A guy can set a timeline for fixing stuff, mostly. A look at my basement and garage reveals fix-it projects scattered about. I’ll get around to it, but first I must buy some replacement parts at a junkyard or yard-sale. where there’s a similar model from which I can pirate the pieces. Or maybe I need a special tool to fix it which means a run to the hardware store. Or I can wait till my neighbor is home and ask to borrow what I need. Stuff often imposes no urgency for its repair.
Not so when my marital relationship needs mending or patching up. In those cases, I need to adhere to her timeline, not mine. I’ve lost control. Not as good a feeling. My malfunctioning stuff can wait patiently on my workbench. Not my marriage.
Finally, a guy knows how to make stuff respond to his touch in a predictable way predictably, mostly. I’ll spend whatever time it takes listening to a car or lawn mower engine until I decipher what the pings, clicks, or ka-chunks reveal. Then, with a few basic tools, I’ll make adjustments or repairs to get it back into smooth working order.
In my marriage, however, I’m always trying to figure out what I should be listening for, let alone what it means when I hear it. Often, it’s not just her words but also tone and body language that I need to analyze not just her words but also her tone and body language. That’s a lot of moving parts for a guy to handle at one time. I know that whatever the issue to address, she won’t respond the way my stuff does to the twist of a screwdriver or the tightening of a wrench. Much more subtle tools, often beyond my capacity to understand or use, are required in marital relationship repair and maintenance.
Better to retreat to the basement or garage to work on the physical stuff I know.
Over fifty-plus years of marriage, I’ve kept both our stuff and our marriage humming along reasonably well. However, there’s one problem. As I approach the autumnal years of my life, I would like to believe I can look down from the mountain top of experience and share my accumulated wisdom about life. What I’m discovering, however, is that I’m also looking down from an accumulated mountain of stuff.
My material possessions - working, damaged or worn out - now far exceed my needs or wants or the time I have to give them the attention I had hoped. I’d like to divest myself from much of the same stuff that I’ve turned to as stress relievers and character builders through the years. Things that often have been my lifeline to sanity. Things that have partly defined the purpose of my existence, or at least my reputation as a handy spouse.
I’ve made some attempts reading books and viewing TED talks and YouTube videos by the decluttering gurus like Marie Kondo. Her motivational words and helpful tips have made me realize the advantages of reducing stress by purging myself of stuff. One of her books - a small 200-page New York Times bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, is sitting unread by my elbow right now.
The one thing that’s helping me break loose from my stuff is the awareness that out there somewhere is someone who might appreciate it as much as I; someone who just might be even a better steward in its maintenance and repair.
So, my spouse and I have agreed on a simple four-step decluttering plan:
Find and purchase the smaller, low-maintenance place where we want to live;
Move what we want and what will fit comfortably at our new down-sized location;
Invite our kids to take anything they might want and then engage an estate liquidation firm to sell whatever they can convert to a few dollars;
Call “1-2-3 Junk” to clear out the rest to be donated, recycled or sent to the landfill.
I’m ready to put our plan into action. First, however, I want to repair a few things before I pass them on. But my wife is very reluctant to include that preliminary step in our plan. About that, I have no difficulty discerning her verbal tone and body language. ###