Boyfriend has this thing where he has a lot less junk than me. Case in point: I have stuffed two bookshelves with STUFF. Boyfriend's contribution was a small dinosaur model on top of one, because we have this dinosaur thing going on. I had a huge IKEA bag full of stuffed toys I couldn't say goodbye to. I think Boyfriend had maybe five.
So he's tidier than me. He knows where his stuff is and never has to dig through oodles of junk to find what he's looking for. Don't get me wrong, I'm relatively organised, but Boyfriend simply doesn't need to be. If it's not in its place, he's either using it or it's not there. Simple.
But he still has a video game habit, a NERF gun habit and a varying trading card game habit. Oh, and he likes to paint miniatures and go skateboarding with his friends.
He manages to not cram his house full of stuff maintaining those, though.
How? He can let stuff go before it's decrepit and broken. If he finished playing a game and it didn't wow him enough to replay it or share with friends, it goes on the internet. If a NERF gun didn't live up to his promise or got broken modifying it, it gets sold, either as a whole or in parts. And once he tires of a trading card game, the cards get sold, too.
He has a better understanding of how the Western economy works. Yes, he might lose money (or make it, but that's more rare) selling things, but not as much as he would have lost letting it get old and dusty. He knows that if he wants a gaming console, sometimes an older model will do, or waiting a few weeks until the new one comes out will make the one he has his eye on drop in price. He's patient. I want instant gratification.
So he's selling most of his NERF collection now. Because he's stripped these of all the parts he wants. That way, he'll have more money to invest in the newer models coming out in August. I get attached and won't let go.
I have two NERF guns. Both are quite good. One was cheap and is the most powerful currently on the market, because I wanted to try it out. The other's a good basic model, in a special edition to keep it apart from the one Boyfriend has. Boyfriend has offered to modify my neon green special edition. I have told him I will hurt anyone who touches my precious. I'd like a better gun, but... Well, it's mine, and I'll be sad if it breaks. Also, I'm a girl. I grew up watching Barbie movies on how to love things and people for what they are. No one is going to lay a finger on my shiny, shiny gun. It doesn't mean I don't use it--it's easily reachable and loaded in case my man (or, more realistically, me) gets any funny ideas while I'm at my desk--but it means that Boyfriend's gun loads faster and will soon shoot further and harder than mine.
The one thing he doesn't get rid of are his solid basics. Like, for painting miniatures, he needs good brushes and paints. Those don't get sold, even if he isn't painting for weeks or months at a time. It's not attatchment so much as it is good sense. They might come in handy at some point, so they get kept. When his first skateboard turned out to be crappy, it got returned and replaced with one that is more solid and durable. And it gets used, don't ever doubt that.
I occasionally feel like I can't even get that right. I like writing with fountain pens, but I have yet to spend any real money on a Parker pen or something like that. No, I'd rather write cheap pen after cheap pen into oblivion, listening to it scratch rather than flow on the paper. I bought a very good basic knitting kit... Provided I never want to knit socks or gloves. For those, I have one or two sets of good knitting needles, and the rest is all crappy. My go-to yarn is an acrylic meant for experimenting, even though I love the far more durable and higher quality superwash merino. Sometimes it's a matter of expense, sometimes it's sheer laziness on my part to look harder or save more.
So my Boyfriend does some things a lot better than me. It makes me happy. I can sometimes tempt him into buying something whimsical, like model dinosaurs, and he can rein me in and point out I can get better for less money with a bit more patience, a bit more work. It's compromise at its best.
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