On Young Love at IKEA

IKEA sells a frying pan: the 11-inch carbon steel VARDAGEN. I’d heard great things about it online, and unlike the other carbon steel pans I was looking at, it was only 20 minutes away from my house.

But IKEA is not a place where you can just drop in and out for a frying pan. It is a labyrinth. The layout is designed to take customers on a journey, with arrows projected onto the floor from above to point the way forward, lest you get lost. For me to get to my frying pan, I had two options - either fight the flow of traffic and walk backwards into the labyrinth, or go with the flow.

It was my day off, I had nothing to do. So I went with the flow. The past few times I’d been through IKEA, I had a much bigger shopping list to worry about, so I was focused on the furniture and showrooms themselves. This time, I only had the one product in mind. So, I was free to pay less attention to the furniture, and more attention to the people looking at the furniture.

In doing so, I realized something I’d missed before - IKEA is full of young couples.

Why? Why here? IKEA is not some hub of romance, no park with cherry trees in bloom, no singles bar with hiked-up skirts and blushed faces. It’s a store that sells cheap furniture and housewares. But the more I looked at it, the more couples I saw milling about the showroom floor, the more things came together.

See, some places act as checkpoints - places where cross-sections of the population congregate at specific points in their lives. If you go to a college campus, you’ll find people who are finding themselves and building their future. If you go to a nursing home, you’ll find people whose futures have passed, coming in for final approach.

I wasn’t expecting IKEA to be one of those places, but it makes perfect sense. Young love doesn’t burn hot forever. There comes a time in every relationship where the butterflies die down. The luckiest of us will find comfort in a new pattern, more sustainable and comfortable than the rollercoaster of early romance. But the journey from the first date to two-and-a-half-kids is long.

On this road, IKEA is one of the first places where young love comes in contact with reality. It’s the place you go when you’re coming up on the one- or two-year mark and you’re talking about moving in together. That’s where the work begins, where two young lovers look each other in the eyes and say: “You want to spend the rest of your life with me? Prove it.”

The store layout itself encourages this dynamic. The first thing you’re greeted with when walking into an IKEA is a hall full of rooms. Each one a simulated space, furnished and decorated entirely with IKEA products. Each little room a simulated life, a menagerie of problems which have been smoothed over with carefully selected Scandinavian furnishings and appliances.

The lovers eat it up. They see a sneak peek at the good life, the life they’re trying to build together. They see the home that will await them after the “big days” ahead, good and bad. Over one shoulder, there’s a couple taking a picture of a lamp that’s PERFECT for the new place, over the other is another sharing a cheeky joke in the fake bathroom. Just down the way is a third, looking at a baby blue room centered around a crib, saying “not yet… but soon.”

None of these showrooms are perfect, they’ve all got fake windows and fake laptops. Some of the couches are too hard, some of the bookshelves too chintzy. But they’re incredibly evocative - close enough to the real thing to reach out and touch them. Fantasies made manifest, right before they become problems to solve.

Intermixed with the full-layout showrooms are category showrooms. Every couch IKEA sells in one place, or every table, or every desk, or every wardrobe.

Each little showroom brings a boatload of little-big decisions. It doesn’t really matter whether you go with the SKOGSTA or the DOCKSTA for the dining room, certainly not as much as a decision to get married, have kids, or move states.

Except it really does. For every KALLAX shelf that a young couple can easily fall in love with, there’s some other piece of furniture that forces some little-big questions. Maybe your amour insists on the SKOGSTA dining table, which costs twice as much, but you’re trying to pay down your credit cards. Maybe the SKOGSTA is your favorite, but your lover thinks it doesn’t go with the SVARTSENAP tablecloth or the DOFTSKÖLD flatware.

This is compounded when you enter the shop. There’s no simulated life to fall back on here. Just a set of cold hard decisions between different cookware sets, pillowcases, trashcans, etc. The superpositions set by the showrooms collapse here, as couples compromise over colors, materials and thread counts.

And God forbid you did some research before you went in, and had your heart set on an 11-inch carbon-steel pan that was out of stock. Lucky me, there was nobody over my shoulder pressuring me to “just get the 9-inch and be done with it.”

I exited the shop into the warehouse, empty-handed. It is here in the biggest and most open part of the building where the doors close. All the decisions have been made or waylaid for another day. Flat-packs get loaded onto carts, checked out and loaded into little sedans and hatchbacks. Couples drive home with their tailgates open and their hazards on to their new apartments in Tempe or Mesa or Buckeye to build their new lives.

What I didn’t see after I left was perhaps the most important part - flat-pack furniture is cheap, but it’s not always easy. The bargain you get with IKEA is furniture that is cheap and portable, but that must be assembled by hand. If the fantasy of the showroom was a Sparks movie, the assembly is a rom-com. A microcosm of hard knocks, loose screws and bad decisions. If you want the fantasy, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

I did get a glimpse of this - I took a second trip to IKEA later that week, when the pan was back in stock. Then, I drove all the way home and opened it, only to find it defective. On my third go, I had to stand at the customer service desk to exchange it. Ahead of me was a couple who lugged in some kind of shelf or cabinet that didn’t fit in their space. Even then, they were pawing at each other as they waited for their refund. Seems like their love had survived assembly.

Whether or not IKEA courts this demographic specifically, I can’t say. If they’re smart they would, but I think what’s happened is more organic. They offer low-cost furniture that can fit flat-packed into a small SUV. No U-Haul or friend’s truck needed.

And the brand is strong, everyone knows what IKEA is and what it stands for - minimalist “good enough” furniture for 20- and 30-somethings. What followed next, what I witnessed in the Tempe store, was a convergence of brand recognition and smart market placement. The furniture itself isn’t heirloom-quality, but it’s purposefully designed and functional. It’ll last about as long as that first apartment, and by the time the veneer starts to bubble and peel off, you’ll be onto the next chapter.

All the other checkpoints in life that I can think of carry an institutional and emotional weight. College dorms give way to graduations, hospital waiting rooms lead to funerals. Nobody gets monogrammed flasks and matching dresses to celebrate their first couch.

So what a joy it is to come across one of these checkpoints birthed entirely by accident. The first brush with domesticity, the first dress rehearsals for a life spent together, the first aisles before the aisle.