The Ikea test

I've heard that buying property can be a powerful aphrodisiac. "It's what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they're too pious for affairs," writes humorist David Sedaris. "A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing." If real estate can rev up married couples, then buying furniture is the Spanish Fly for those moving in together.

At Ikea, the furniture megastore divided into pre-arranged, perfectlyaccessorized rooms, more couples canoodle than at a German bathhouse. The mammoth warehouse is mapped out along a start to finish route, rather than the traditional aisles built for browsing at Wal-Mart or Target. Before the Ikea trek even begins, couples hold hands in the parking lot and nuzzle on the escalator. Once inside, they happily jot down notes with little golf pencils, smiling at one another as they measure sofas and imagine what life will be like with all that cool Swedish furniture in their new home.

But Ikea is immense, and somewhere into the third hour the spark starts to fade. The couples will stop in the cafeteria for coffee or an order of Swedish meatballs, where they'll sit together quietly before rallying for the final push. But you get the sense that reality has already set in. They begin to realize that all that cute furniture will never look the same in their tiny two-bedroom. They start to understand that it's easy to play house in the Ikea showroom, where shiny espresso makers sit in perfectly backlit kitchens, but the real world has dirt and mess and jobs and responsibility. Sometimes children and often pets. All the things that keep a real home from looking like a furniture store mock-up of one.

Dr. John Gottman, famous for his groundbreaking research on relationships and profiled in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller "Blink," can predict, with 90 percent accuracy, whether a couple will divorce in four to six years. His test involves a complicated measure of human emotion and minute face gestures. But, really, he should just go to Ikea.

Not to the beginning of the store, where happy couples make out on living room floor models, but to the end of the line. There, tedium has set in, and weariness — the kind that follows intense shopping and major life decisions — has seeped into the space between lovers. Some are angry; they glower over boxed bed frames and bicker between packaged end tables. Others stonewall; they stay sullen and silent. But some couples stand together; they hold each other up in the final moments of the Ikea excursion. My money says

these are the ones who will last. They seem to acknowledge that life is messy, that the sofa-loveseat-coffee table combo will never look as good in their own place, and that no amount of throw pillows will make their house Scandinavian hip. But they weather on anyway, convinced of the rightness of their purchases and, ultimately, of each other. Perhaps we would all be wise to give the Ikea test a try. And if the relationship doesn't last, at least we get cool furniture out of the deal.

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