Four Hours

It came up again on the television the other day. The lesson I learned back in the fall of 1992. Everything takes four hours. It comes from the sit-com Mad About You, starring Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser. If you weren't watching television back in the early nineties or have a "thing" about either of the stars, or just couldn't stand being exhorted into "must see TV," it was a vital component in the earliest years of my marriage. The pretty blonde lady marrying the neurotic funny guy opened the door to what would be all kinds of life-affirming wisdom. The number of times my lovely bride and I would be watching this half hour NBC program that I was able to point to the screen and say, "See, there it is!" was significant.
And the idea that everything takes four hours is perhaps key among those revelations. The idea that nothing takes "just a second" once you have embarked in a relationship of a most any kind was calming for me. To have someone affirm the idea that all tasks, in this case purchasing a new couch, takes four hours because you can never do just that one thing. Paul Reiser, who played Paul Buchman on the show insisted that you would have to get something to eat and then complain about where you ate and then do the thing and worry that you didn't do the thing exactly the way you might have all of which tallies up to four hours.
You can't rush something like buying a couch. Or, at the time that I watched that particular episode with  my wife, you can't rush buying a mattress. "This will be," she said tearfully, "the mattress that we will sleep on together for the next..." And as she trailed off, I began to understand that there are moments that become bigger than the simple act of acquisition. Getting just the right mattress was a discussion that, I confess, for which I was singularly unprepared. Getting something to eat beforehand slowed down the sleep train to give me a chance to come up with opinions and preferences about mattresses. It took us right about four hours to accomplish the task, not including the actual delivery and setup.
Which was, as a newlywed, a shock. But as I have traversed the years since with my mate, the four hour rule doesn't seem as oppressive.  Not when compared to the decades we have spent together. Made up of four hour blocks of couches, tile, and the like. Totally worth it.