Followup to "My Furniture Keeps Breaking Under My PArtner"

[minoanmiss]

I'm really glad someone wrote, and that Danny answwered.

Q. Re: “Sensitive in Seattle” (column, Nov. 14, 2020): I’m writing about your answer to the question about an “overweight” partner breaking furniture. I doubt that you meant to be, but the way in which you framed your answer was very hurtful and harmful to fat people. Fundamentally, the experience of having furniture break under you is one of the most deeply traumatic and fraught experiences someone can have in a fat body. Most of us have developed coping mechanisms like humor or nonchalance in order to deal with the abject fear of anger, blame, and humiliation that comes with the immediate experience of breaking furniture. That doesn’t mean that we’re not sorry that the furniture broke, we’re just terrified of an apology that essentially breaks down to “sorry I’m fat.”

In addition to all the emotional complication and possible traumatic history of the situation, you might also consider that most inexpensive modern furniture is indeed incredibly flimsy and easily broken! I’ve been present when bed slats have broken during completely ordinary bed activities like sitting on the side of the bed. It’s entirely possible that the girlfriend here has purchased very flimsy furniture, as she’s never had to think about whether a chair will hold up to her mass. This is not entirely her fault, but it is the fault of the fast fashion/disposable nature of modern consumer goods.

A: I think you’re quite right, and I want to both amend and apologize for my original answer; I’ve gotten more feedback along these lines, and I think they were right, too. What I wanted to get at was that the letter writer was in a different position from, say, someone who was organizing a public event and provided those awful metal chairs with the hemmed-in armrests, in that she might reasonably not have known the durability of her own furniture. But there are many circumstances in which someone should not have to apologize for furniture breaking, and I shouldn’t have said it’s “always” the polite response.

The sort of conversation I’d envisioned between the two of them was not for her partner to have to put on a show of abjection (“I’m the problem, you and your furniture are good, I’m sorry for the size of my body”) so much as shared concern for one another and the ability to discuss other options. But my answer was off-base and doesn’t truly work toward achieving that goal, and while I don’t want to make assumptions about where this ranks for the letter writer’s partner in terms of personal trauma, you’re quite right that the approach I recommended is too harsh and doesn’t take the context of hostile architecture and fatphobia into account. I’m truly sorry! I think you’re right to assume his flustered response was based in fear of being blamed or rejected for his body, and I don’t want to advise the letter writer to be brisk and dismissive here. I do still hope she can find ways to talk about making her home accessible and welcoming with him, and I hope he can be present for such a conversation, but I agree it shouldn’t be under the conditions of “Actually, my furniture was great,” but under the conditions of “I’ve learned something new about the durability of my furniture, and that it doesn’t serve the people who want to use it.” Thank you again for this; I’m sorry to have gotten this one so wrong, especially over something as important as comfort, safety, and humane treatment for fat people in a fatphobic world.

Danny M. Lavery: Thanks again for the help, everyone, especially for the pushback on last week’s question! I appreciate it, and will keep it at the front of my mind for future questions. See you next week!

Comments

[shirou]

It's good Danny recognized the failings of his initial response and apologized. I wish he had said more about how the original LW should proceed. He describes a desired end state ("I do still hope she can find ways...") but offers no advice on how to get there.

[cimorene]

Wow, I just read the original response and that was just CATASTROPHICALLY bad.

[melannen]

WOW, that original answer is really bad, just in terms of basic etiquette. (Why do some people think standard politeness doesn't apply to fat people? No, don't answer that, I know.)

Here, as someone who has both had overweight guests break my furniture, and broken hosts' furniture while being statistically underweight, and had the second happen far more often, let me get my Miss Manners on:

If a guest breaks your furniture while using it in reasonably expected ways (sitting on a chair, sitting or sleeping on a bed, leaning on a table) or using it otherwise at the host's request (standing on a chair to reach a high shelf at the host's suggestion, engaging in consensually athletic bedroom activities with the host whether in the bedroom or not), the correct response is for the host to apologize for failing to provide suitable furniture for the guest. They should say something along the lines of "I'm so sorry! This is embarrassing, that furniture was shoddily made/already broken, I should have replaced it a long time ago!"

This is not even a polite social lie, because if the furniture could not stand up to the use the host expected from it, then it was shoddily made or already broken and you should have replaced it a long time ago.

Physical characteristics of the guests are irrelevant to this. If you invited them into the house, you both expected your furniture to accommodate them, and your being wrong is entirely on you. Find them somewhere better to sit and move on.

If the guest responds to the breakage with an awkward statement about the condition of the furniture, they are not being rude - they are attempting to give you another chance to make the expected polite response.

If there is someone who you wish to spend a great deal of time with who clearly cannot be accommodated by your current home, for whatever reason, this is your opportunity to invite them to commiserate about how so much modern furniture is shoddily made or badly designed, and either how you wish you could afford better furniture, or you are in the market for better furniture and value their advice, which should open the way for further ideas on how to accommodate them within your options.

However, if a guest breaks your things while engaging in activities you as host could not have reasonably expected them to do (standing on chairs or beds without your permission, engaging in athletic bedroom activities without your consent, sitting on things not meant to be sat on), it is, instead, on the guest to apologize and offer recompense. However, for a first-time offense, the polite host should still at least nominally refuse offers of payment. (For frequently and flagrantly repeated offenses of this nature, the host should perhaps reconsider the acquaintance.)

[shirou]

I agree with this and appreciate you writing it out. I do have a question.

Find them somewhere better to sit and move on.

How do you do this tactfully? What is the Miss Manners appropriate way to direct an overweight person to appropriate furniture? This is where I struggled to understand some of the responses in the original post, and it's why I wish Danny had given the original LW a revised script instead of just retracting the original.

When I was a kid, my mother had an antique chair that was not in any way cheap or shoddily made. It was a perfectly fine chair for people of average weight. We once had a guest of well more than average weight whom we would have much preferred sit on the couch or a more study chair, but they selected the antique chair. My mother could not find a sensitive way to say, that chair which is fine for most people may not hold you. She just prayed. (This individual had seen others sit in the chair. We could not credibly claim the chair was unfit for use.)

I feel like our guest made a bad assessment and put my mother in an awkward position. Luckily, the chair held. What could she have said?

And I think the original LW's partner is doing something similar. The first breakage was unexpected, but the fourth or fifth? Surely by that time, rather than saying, "your stuff is crap," they can say, "hey, I seem to be breaking a lot of your stuff; can we talk about finding some furniture that works for me?".

[melannen]

Okay, I am not actually Miss Manners, but what I would probably do with the delicate antique chair, if I knew I did not trust it with all of my guests, is not make it available for guests at all. It's not that hard to put enough coats or extra pillows or creepy dolls or whatever on a chair to redirect guests away from it and if a guest of normal human size is likely to break it, I probably wouldn't want to risk it with rambunctious kids or, frankly, Awkward Uncle Ervin or Tipsy Aunty Mary or ASD Cousin Shelly who fidgets either. (My grandfather refinished and caned chairs for a hobby, so it wasn't that odd for us to have chairs around that were not to be trusted for sitting on.) If you're in an all-chairs-needed situation, you can apologetically say "that one's a bit rickety, why don't I/my close family member take it" without mentioning anyone's size.

It may have been well made, but if it can't be trusted with all of your guests' backsides it's still not a perfectly fine chair.

It's not on the guest to judge if they are appropriate for your furniture; a thoughtful host would not make available furniture that only certain guests can use, or assume that all guests are the same size, and that was the misjudgement that made it awkward. (A host who did not think of it in time would pray, and be ready with an apology and stronger replacement to offer if the worst happened.)

The LW's situation is complicated by the fact that they're dating, not just stopping by Aunt Lucille's for tea, and at some point you're beyond Miss Manners. Romance really isn't my specialty, but honestly I feel like if you have broken both the bed and the mattress together and you're still at the phase where you're worried about being rude over furniture, the relationship maybe has deeper problems (which tbf I think Danny tried to pick up on.) There's also a bit of a hint in the letter that possibly they are breaking things not just by their size but their behavior (that vague 'other possessions' mention is haunting) which is hard to tell in an advice letter.

But yeah, it seems like after the third breakage or so LW or partner should have been able to say "we're a good match but seems like the furniture isn't. Maybe we should meet somewhere else." I'm not sure it's up to the partner to broach the topic though; it's gonna be super awkward either way, and this is where the idea that fat people are constantly dealing with shit for it maybe means that it's LW's job to take the risk and start the conversation.

Honestly it always seems like all non-dtmfa relationship letters come down to "be willing to have the hard conversation". But if LW comes to this one thinking it's all partners fault for being partner, and not their fault for having inadequate furniture, it probably won't go great.

ETA: there's also the deeply shitty fact that furniture that will hold weight *is* more expensive, and if they're both in a place where buying new IKEA bedboards (that being the most recent guest furniture my skinny ass broke) is a real financial hardship, partner may just be resigned to breaking people's cheap furniture and not being able to replace it until they get disgusted and dump him. It's another fat tax not everyone can afford. In that case LW can probably win them forever by being cheerfully creative about improvising and making do.

[likeaduck]

...honestly I feel like if you have broken both the bed and the mattress together and you're still at the phase where you're worried about being rude over furniture, the relationship maybe has deeper problems...it always seems like all non-dtmfa relationship letters come down to "be willing to have the hard conversation".

Yeah there's a common thread in a lot of them of, whatever the reason is that you're choosing to put this on the internet/in a newspaper rather than talk about it with someone who you supposedly have intimacy with, that thing is maybe the underlying problem?

And in this case, is that:
-that the LW has been taught that fatness is a shameful thing and you shouldn't mention it?
-that the LW has some beliefs about fatness that make them place a disproportionate responsibility on their partner's size for breaking their furniture?
-that the LW is picking up on shame their partner has about their size/past bad experiences with being shamed for their size, and doesn't know how to talk about that directly?
-generic lack of communication skills/tolerance for uncomfortable conversations?
-etc.?

[melannen]

Yeah, you have to wonder what this letter would look like if the partner was 6'9" and built like a linebacker instead of "overweight".

[cimorene]

It is okay to have furniture or things out that are too fragile. In the moment, you can always treat a situation like this as your fault and apologize - "Hey, wait a second, please sit on the sofa instead, it will be much more comfortable; I'm afraid this old chair has been complaining about weight on it and we've been meaning to get it checked out and fixed if necessary, my bad for leaving it out like that - I'm just so sentimentally attached to this family object that it's hard to accept it might need to be sent to the furniture doctor!" You don't need to verbally address that they've seen other people in it, but you could always respond with something like "You're right, I should've mentioned it, slipped my mind."

[firecat]

As a fat person, I would consider "Please sit here instead, that chair is very flimsy" to be sufficient. Excuses and apologies don't cover up the nature of the request, and the more excuses and apologies there are, the more I feel othered.

[melannen]

+1

[melannen]

Yeah, I realized that my posts could be read to sound like if you don't pre-measure the load-bearing capacity of all your furniture on a daily basis, you are a bad person. Obviously that is not true, you may not know in advance what furniture is trustworthy, and you are allowed to have furniture you like in the house, and sometimes you honestly forget the missing riser is there until someone steps through it. But the fault is still not on the guest for expecting to be able to sit on a chair in a space they were invited into.

However, if you are expecting people over? It is your responsibility as a host to provide a space where they can exist comfortably. If you know in advance that you have furniture you don't want your expected guests to use, it's fairly basic to make sure that furniture is in a room where you won't be receiving them, or that it's obvious to them that the furniture is not for sitting on (via, for example, a doll or a neat pile of vintage linens occupying the seat. My aunt owned a collectible doll for the sole purpose of sitting on her fancy chair so nobody else could. Or even a sign that says "Broken, do not sit" like my friend remembers to put on her booby-trapped chair about half the times she has visitors over, and takes the blame the other half.)

This doesn't only apply to weight - when you go to Great-Aunt Lucille's by invite and she asks you into the parlor and then won't let you sit on her nice couch until she puts down newspaper, or says "Please don't let the toddler touch that chair, it's a *valuable antique* and toddlers are so *clumsy*", she is also being a bad host.

If you want to have a house full of things that half your guests can't touch, and then overreact when they do, you're allowed to, but you are also allowed to be the person who people only visit under severe duress.

Also, about weight specifically (but also parents with small kids and people with disabilities) - people who know they are at risk of breaking furniture probably have a *much* more finely-tuned sense than you do of how sturdy a chair is. If the chair doesn't, like, have missing screws or hidden termite damage they couldn't know about, they have probably made a very considered judgement from long experience that it's a chair that's safe for them, and are probably more accurate about it than you are.

[firecat]

people who know they are at risk of breaking furniture probably have a *much* more finely-tuned sense than you do of how sturdy a chair is.

This.

[ashbet]

I actually do keep several fancy dolls on stands displayed on my 16th-century carved wooden pew bench, in part to keep guests (of any size) from sitting on it!

(90% of my furniture is Ikea or one step above, 10% of my furniture is passed-on antiques from when my parents lived in Paris in the 70’s and went to the Flea Market every weekend.)

[likeaduck]

Yep. Your Miss Manners is solid.

[cimorene]

Exactly, to all of this, particularly the social contract part. You don't invite people to do something and offer them potentially hazardous objects or settings to do it in with no warning, like a floor that's probably not safe to walk on or dishes that will probably break if handled, and then blame THEM if something happens!

[ashbet]

I feel like this answer still is a LITTLE off-target -- it's absolutely not the partner's fault that having a larger body can make inexpensive furniture fall apart, but by the time he's broken her bed frame, her mattress, a chair, and "other things in her house," it's time to have a conversation about how THEY, together, can invest in sturdier furniture.

It shouldn't be entirely on the LW to financially cover the cost of multiple pieces of broken furniture -- this is something that could be addressed collaboratively, as *partners*, rather than "well, tough, it broke, so it must have been cheap -- I won't offer to chip in for the cost of a sturdier replacement."