Signe Kirkegaard Cain
The pressing need to own a bread machine
On dating shows you often hear people say: ‘I’ve got everything I need; I just need someone to share it with. But that’s not very accurate. Once we start dating and become a couple, we don’t just share what’s already ours— it also sparks off a process of accumulation: things, holidays, a home, children perhaps.
As Suzanne Brøgger wrote in Deliver Us from Love (1973), one might imagine that when two people move in together, they also gain greater financial freedom. But in practice, something quite different happens: ‘As soon as two people join forces, they suddenly need a lot of expensive equipment and paraphernalia. When we are single we don’t buy dishwashers, but as soon as there are two of us we do’, she writes. `The various household appliances–the blender, the meat slicer, and so forth—are not necessarily indispensable, but we do have a sudden need for them, as symbols of our having become a family.’
So it is that love becomes growth, becomes accumulation, becomes the slow, corporeal expansion of two people who love each other. Not that we only begin to accumulate things when we become a couple. The impulse toward growth is there long before—we are drawn to acquire, to increase (perhaps even to multiply), whether or not we are coupled. Yet the two becoming one quickens the pace. Now there are two incomes to spend. Now we go out for dinner and arrange long weekends away, attempting to keep desire alive. Now we plan what to buy next—to consolidate our future and confirm our status or at least ensure that we may have something to say to each other.
Now our lives call for ever larger spaces. Perhaps new small lives are added, and suddenly we need highchairs and a cargo bike, a car with a big boot. There is a kind of inevitability in it all, a shared heartbeat of consumption: four hands swiping the same credit card. Of course, this only applies to those whose wallets expand alongside that of their partner; to those who earn enough, inherit enough, or have enough luck on the roulette wheel of the housing market to spend, to travel, to fulfil their desires, to take on a mortgage. For these privileged people, being a couple drives increased consumption, from the first flush of infatuation, when gifts are tokens of desire, to later on in the relationship when mutual devotion is cemented by buying that first sofa together.
Consumption is the scaffolding erected around love. As Professor Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, head of the Grundtvig Research Centre at Aarhus University, once put it: ‘An average wedding is significantly more expensive today than 30 years ago. I see this as plain common sense: now we invest a lot in the relationship, which is quite fragile, because there isn’t much practical stuff holding us together. We add gravity to the relationship.’
It is, quite simply, necessary to spend money to present ourselves clearly as a couple; consumption is the mould into which the relationship is poured. It becomes the emblem of us-as-one, the proof of our mutual commitment, that we feel secure enough to dare take on a shared debt.
There are couples who accumulate less stuff. Who happily live on in the same small apartment. Who never buy a car. But they are the exception. Romantic relationships are a monoculture: everyone planting the same seeds, pouring on the fertilizer, hoping it will all take root. When couples talk to other couples, they reaffirm the logic of accumulation: where they’re going on holiday next, which heat pump is best in test, or the inexhaustible topic of children—the greatest acquisition of them all. Couples face society with an aura of righteous entitlement, as though love itself gave them the right to accumulate.
Marriage arose as an economic transaction. Marriage is still an economic transaction. Once upon a time, you had to be married to get a flat. That rule no longer applies, and yet it still does, in another form, because very few singles can afford a flat or a house, at least not in the bigger cities. And so, mutual dependency runs deep, making even separation difficult, should it come to that: not everyone can afford two homes (and certainly not two homes large enough to hold the children). It takes two, baby.
You go to the bank, hand in hand. You show your bank adviser your budget, your payslips, your tax statement. Instead, though, or perhaps in addition, it would be more fitting to present an affidavit of eternal fidelity—written proof that all accumulated goods will forever rest on four shoulders, a solemn promise to support, indefinitely, the system into which you now mortgage yourself.
Even if you do not quite grasp how that system works. Like Shevek, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, raised on the anarchist planet Anarres, who struggles to understand capitalism when he encounters it on Urras: ‘He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.’
A couple’s endless accumulation can feel like such a long, stupid dream, a dream one does not quite understand. Even though the idea of this life with property, possessions and perhaps children, was conceived in your own head. Even though you yourself have chosen it, this very life you thought you wanted. Judging from the endless seasons of television shows such as Location, Location, Location or Buying it Blind, there is precious little variation in the dreams people entertain about nuclear families and their acquisitions.
These programmes typically follow heterosexual couples in their late twenties or early thirties, most of whom have small children or are expecting their first. Now they need a house and a garden, but not any old property: they simply cannot live with outdated bathrooms or kitchens; every room must be renovated at once. And they all (I must confess, with some embarrassment, that I have watched the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Australian, and American versions of Buying it Blind) demand an open-plan kitchen: ‘A place where we can be together as a family.’
We believe in love. Or at least we tell ourselves that love is our motivation. We do our best to suppress the significance of money and would insist that we did not marry out of financial necessity. We present our need for more space as something that naturally follows from becoming two, and perhaps more. We will never admit, not even to ourselves, that our relationships depend on this steady rhythm of expansion and acquisition—instead we imagine that love alone equips us to endure. Nor will we acknowledge that deep down we are driven by the hunger for growth or that part of the love contract is the spending that cements it. The need to accumulate may be unconscious, but it is endless.
We just keep on trudging along, owning and owning, because we don’t know in which direction to go, if not forwards. So, onwards and upwards it is, outperforming our parents and grandparents and all those before them; each generation consuming more voraciously than the last.
In We are the Weather Jonathan Safran Foer writes: ’My great-grandparents lived in a wooden house with no indoor plumbing and on cold nights would sleep on the kitchen floor by the stove. They never could have believed the things I have: a car that I drive for convenience rather than necessity, a pantry stocked with foods imported from all over the planet, a home with rooms that aren’t even used on a daily basis.’ Jonathan Safran Foer is of course wealthier than most, and he no doubt has a large house, but he is not the only one in possession of rooms he doesn’t enter every day. That is true of many of us. Teenagers’ rooms, for example, or a home office, a conservatory, a cellar, or an attic. If you have two bathrooms and mainly use just one of them. If you own a holiday home, or a flat in the South of France.
I’m a privileged member of Generation X, who entered the housing market before prices went completely crazy; we are a generation living in houses and flats we could never afford if we were buying them today. And those of us with the means don’t settle for just a bread machine. We renovate, add extensions, and tear down traditional brick houses to build new, sleek homes. We take up more and more square meters, while complaining about how tough it is that the builders show up at seven in the morning, leaving the dirt of their filthy work boots everywhere.
No one forces you to acquire real estate and things and vacations, because you become a couple. No one has forced me to increase the number of objects, bricks, and trees at my disposal. I belong to the small fraction of the world’s population that can choose to live like this, and I have wanted to—and yet it still feels like the accumulation has happened imperceptibly.
’If real estate is a self-portrait and a class portrait, it is also a body arranging its limbs to seduce,’ writes Deborah Levy in Real Estate. My husband + the house + me = a throuple. We started dating before the 2008 financial crisis, bought the flat my parents had bought for me and my sister—at a lower cost than similar flats in Copenhagen. We installed a new kitchen with white high-gloss kitchen cupboards and custom made stainless steel worktops. My husband sold his flat and surprised me with a visit to a Michelin-star restaurant; it was extravagant, otherworldly, and cost £500. In the four years before we had children, we visited Madrid, Malaysia, Singapore, Ghana, Greenland, Berlin, and Paris. Sometimes I wonder whether all the accumulation was also about proving to ourselves that we were normal.
Doing something other than accumulating is like having to unlearn your native language. Like imagining something you have never seen. I once spoke with a man who had been born blind. I can’t remember how old I was, but a big child, and I asked him whether it was just completely black inside his head, and he replied, ‘I don’t know what black looks like.’ Here we are. We must try to find out what black looks like. Learn new words, organise them differently in our mouths. Romantic relationships are the foundation, and the foundation of romantic relationships is accumulation. Four hands on the credit card, endless dreams of more. We dare not stop. Deep down, we fear that if we are to be together without accumulation, if we forsake renovating our houses, flying to Paris, and acquiring a bread machine, we will strip relationships and the nuclear family of their last shred of relevance.
- Excerpted from the essay Parcelhusets tilbygning røber, at vækst er limen i det moderne parforhold, first published in Danish in Atlas Magazine, August 20, 2025.
Signe Kirkegaard Cain has recently published the poetry collection Grundskyld. Her previous publications include the novel Søkvinden (2021), the nonfiction book Det handler ikke om lykke (2013) as well as poems and prose in various journals and anthologies. Signe Kierkegaard Cain also works as a translator and teacher of creative writing.
Call to action: Boycott Black Friday on 28th November. Instead of supporting retailers selling goods you don’t need, support humanitarian organisations, climate action groups, or upcoming artists. Or simply do absolutely nothing on that Friday. Less is more.