My husband and I once spent the better part of three weeks selecting a sofa.
We had three children. Looking back, I am fairly certain that the decision to have any one of them received less study than the sofa.
We had a system. We visited showrooms. We debated cushion firmness, leg finish and something called “seat depth,” which apparently determines whether you sit on a piece of furniture or are absorbed by it. We brought home fabric swatches. We held them up to the light at different times of day. We consulted people who had no stake in the outcome whatsoever.
We took parenting seriously. It is simply that we never subjected the decision to have children to anything resembling the analysis we gave the sofa. We were very busy with the cushions.
The sofa, it turns out, was not an anomaly.
The same could be said of marriage. My husband proposed and I said yes, and that was more or less the whole deliberation. We had, of course, spent time getting to know one another. It is simply that we never subjected the decision to marry to anything resembling the analysis we gave the sofa. A marriage license costs surprisingly little and takes remarkably little time to obtain. Nobody asks for references. Nobody asks for much of anything, really, except a valid form of ID and the correct spelling of your name.
Buying a car requires a credit check, a test drive and, in my experience, at least two return visits to the dealership to make sure you got the floor mats.
Where we ended up living was no more carefully considered. Most people I know landed somewhere because of a job offer, a cheap apartment or because a friend said it seemed nice. A few followed someone they loved. Almost nobody I know conducted anything resembling a formal evaluation.
I did not arrive in Marblehead after an exhaustive study of New England coastal towns. Neither did my husband.
We arrived separately, each following our own series of unlikely turns, and somehow ended up in the same place.
Which is how we ended up together. No algorithm was involved.
Only later did it occur to me that we had devoted more analysis to buying a sofa than to many of the decisions that shaped our lives.
I think there may be an explanation for all of this.
The things we deliberate over longest are the things we believe we can get right.
A sofa can be returned. A car can be taken back to the dealership. These are decisions with escape hatches, and we treat them accordingly, as problems to be solved with sufficient research and effort.
But some decisions are not really decisions at all. A marriage, a child, a city to call home: these are leaps. And some part of us understands, without quite admitting it, that this is not the kind of decision that yields to research.
You cannot test drive a life. The variables are too many, the outcome too far off and the heart, which is doing most
of the deciding anyway, is famously resistant to spreadsheets.
So we jump. And then we go back to agonizing over the cushions.
Perhaps this is how most lives are assembled. We manage what we can, and for everything else we close our eyes and leap.
It turns out the leaps were the best part. The children grew up fine. The grandchildren are magical. Marblehead turned out to be exactly the kind of place we didn’t know we were looking for. Looking back, the best parts seem to have arrived through some combination of choice, serendipity and grace.
The sofa, for what it’s worth, has held up beautifully, too.
Margaret Bacon is the founder and senior editor of VeryCoolFacts.com, home of a free weekly newsletter, and Safe Harbor Media Group, an educational media platform built around verified, insight-driven storytelling. Her work explores history, science, culture and the enduring patterns of human behavior that shape how we think and act today. She has lived in Marblehead for 40 years.
