Elodie Mercer & Nerion Ndlovu

The chair was mustard yellow, slightly crooked and, according to Nerion, a bargain. According to Elodie, it was an expensive way to bring somebody else's dust into the house.

They were not living together then. They had been seeing each other for four months, which Elodie considered much too early for a disagreement about furniture to reveal anything important. Later, she would admit that the chair was probably their first useful argument. Before it, they had mostly been pleasant. Afterwards, they began to understand what being honest with each other might actually require.

Their beginning had been smaller and considerably less yellow. Elodie mentioned in her WaBanja profile that she was finally learning to ride a bicycle. Nerion asked whether she had progressed to corners yet. She told him stopping was the current priority. He admitted that he could mend a puncture but would not volunteer to demonstrate a graceful dismount. They spent the next few messages discussing the indignity of learning a new skill when nobody could call you a child prodigy.

Four months in, the chair brought them into less polished territory. Nerion found it at a secondhand shop while looking for a bookshelf. He sent a photograph to Elodie with the message, “Tell me you see the potential.” She was having a difficult day at work and replied, “I see an object that needs to stay where it is.” He bought it anyway, which was entirely his decision. The problem came when he asked her to help carry it upstairs.

Elodie heard a request to spend her only free afternoon solving a problem she had advised him not to create. Nerion heard her hesitation as another sign that she enjoyed making decisions about his life without enjoying the consequences. By the time the chair reached the landing, both were speaking in the careful, overly polite voices people use when they are annoyed and would like credit for behaving well.

They made tea. Neither wanted it. Nerion finally said, “You could have said no to helping.” Elodie replied that saying no should not require a legal argument. That sentence landed harder than she intended. He went quiet. She looked at the chair, which had scraped a small line along the wall, and felt the afternoon getting worse.

They might have left it there. In other relationships, Elodie had often preferred a quick return to normal over an uncomfortable explanation. This time she stayed. She said she was protective of her free time because she had spent years agreeing to things and then resenting people for asking. Nerion said he sometimes made an invitation sound like a settled plan because he was afraid a real invitation might be declined.

Nothing dramatic happened after those admissions. They did not discover a perfect method for communication. They measured the landing and discovered that the chair would block the cupboard door. Nerion suggested asking the shop to hold it until he could clear a place downstairs. Elodie offered to help with the return journey, but said she was leaving by four. This time he checked the time before agreeing. But they stopped treating the other person as the entire problem. Elodie said she could help for an hour next time, not an afternoon. Nerion said he would ask before assuming. Both had to practise those promises more than once.

Once he cleared room, the chair stayed. Nerion re-covered the seat but kept the yellow back, partly because he liked it and partly because Elodie admitted that the colour had grown on her. When they eventually discussed sharing a home, they talked about money, chores, visitors and time alone before they talked about where the chair would go. That order felt like evidence that they had learned something.

The garden photograph was taken on an afternoon when they had dressed up for a family celebration. Nerion had wanted to stand beside the steps. Elodie had wanted the pale flowers behind them. They compromised by moving approximately half a metre, a solution so ordinary that neither noticed it until afterwards.

People looking at the photograph might see a couple who fit easily together. Elodie and Nerion would not call that entirely wrong. They would only add that fitting together had involved asking clearer questions, making fewer assumptions and occasionally putting down one end of a very ugly chair so they could have a proper conversation.