Furniture and home-goods megastore IKEA doesn’t offer in-store intervention for relationship problems, but maybe it should. There’s something about the store and its perfect, untouched fake rooms that brings issues with ourselves, our relationships, and with our homes to the surface. That’s why a comedian who likes to create fake and almost plausible signs created a “relationship saving station” to put in a real IKEA store. [More]
treacherous retail
How To Survive A Trip To IKEA Without Dumping Your Partner
By 4.22.15 — Updated: 4.11.17
Hardware stores aren’t the only retail establishments that pose an existential threat to domestic partnerships. Mega-home-store IKEA can also be a treacherous place, where the issues in a relationship surface as you search for items to fill your home together, then get them home and assemble them. That’s why one therapist actually uses the store’s flat-pack furniture as an exercise for patients: they have to assemble a piece of flat-pack furniture together and report back on how they communicated during the process. [More]
