When my fiancé and I moved in together the move brought about some big changes in both of our lives.  For her, it meant having to share everything for the first time in her life. For me, it meant making my mother uncomfortable.

Because of our space constraints our first move was to consolidate.  Our strategy was to gather all of the things we had too many of and put them into a closet where they would be out of the way until we could throw them away two years later.

The biggest consolidation involved cars. I came to the relationship driving a Toyota Corolla that my dad bought from our 100 year old neighbor whose house smelled like ginger bread and who had a stain on her carpet that looked like it was caused by a moose.  The Corolla was O.K. but smelled like a wet towel and was generally unsafe and uncomfortable.

My fiancé’s ride was a  2002 Oldsmobile Bravada, which is Oldsmobile's best selling car other than all of its other cars, and was nice as long as your only priorities were being taller than many other cars and being able to smell gasoline at all times.  The Bravada was problematic for a few reasons – first, it got approximately eight miles per gallon at a time when gas was near $4 a gallon and second, because it stalled, frequently. The only other issue with the car was that the transmission was shot, or on the verge of being shot, which was obvious because of the loud grinding sound it made whenever you attempted to go in reverse, or forward.  Our concerns about the transmission were confirmed when my mother in law took it to her local mechanic who told her it instead needed a clutch fan.

The first car we thought about buying was a Toyota, from a guy named Mark, who looked like an aging weightlifter and had skunkish black and silver hair and would have been equally at home managing a Bennigan's.  Mark gave us a lesson in economics and geopolitics which was designed to support his offer of a Swiss Army knife in trade for our Bravada.  We found his grasp of the oil market fascinating but decided to look elsewhere, even though he told us how much the car we wanted cost the dealership to acquire (this, he mentioned four times, and was apparently a big secret) and showed us the dry erase board which indicated that he had sold at least six times as many cars as everyone else at the dealership.

After a series of dealerships told us they would give us somewhere between a box of crayons and a month of Net Flix in trade for the Bravada, we decided it sell it in a private sale, which we did rather quickly, to an obvious drug dealer who paid for the car with $20 bills.  Once I had finished counting the bills, we took my Corolla to a few local dealerships to inspect their selection.

Next we test drove Volvos with a guy named David, who was 90 years old and who, according to him, had previously been too good to sell cars.  After telling David we were interested in used cars and carefully describing our price range, he immediately put us into a brand new car which was approximately three times as much as we said we'd be willing to spend. When he was wasn't hitting on my fiancé and making sounds and smells consistent with long-term alcoholism, he told us about some interesting results from a study in which it was determined that Volvo drivers only use 30% of their Volvo's capability.

Even though we liked David, we ended up purchasing a car from another local dealership, one which prided itself upon its “negotiation free smart price” which, according to the dealership, is exactly fair because it is calculated using at least four pieces of information including: how much they paid for the car, and how much they expect to make off the car, how likely you are to leave, and how uncomfortable your fiancé will get with a hostile negotiation.

The final chapter of the deal was less than cordial and involved my doing the “get up and pretend you are going to leave even though you promised your fiancé you would not” and the manager doing the “pretending to be offended and having to speak to his boss even though nobody important was at the dealership because it was 10pm on a Wednesday”.  In the end we got the car we wanted and with relatively little trouble, the only fear we have now is that the drug dealer won't be in jail when his transmission fails.