Nice job :)
You got me thinking again about the topic that I've been pondering for a while, how significant others can undermine the deluttering process.
I'm considering excluding my boyfriend (who does not live with me, thankfully, making this easier) from my decluttering efforts. I've been trying to share my process with him, both because it's an important part of my life right now, and because he has his own problems in this respect. However, I think he's nowhere near ready to deal with his own issues, and he makes my process even more difficult than it already is for me by second-guessing things I want to get rid of.
For example, I recently asked if he thought his niece and nephew would like some children's books that I had, and said that otherwise I would just donate them to the library. His response was: "But they're your children's books!" I don't have children, and these aren't my childhood books (he knows this), they're simply things I've bought over the years because I found them delightful. I still do, but it makes no sense to me that they're sitting on my shelf when they could be used by actual kids. He tried to talk me out of getting rid of the books, which of course made me feel like he was sabotaging my progress. Definitely did not turn out to be a shared positive experience I was hoping for. On another occasion, I tried to talk about cutting apart and scanning one of the course packets I had from college that contained professional articles I might want to reference in the future, allowing me to get rid of the paper. I was musing about how to break it apart in a way that would feed the sheets into the ScanSnap cleanly when he said that he didn't understand why I didn't just leave it the way it was (in a box) and that he found the conversation really stressful.
This is probably a combination of his own issues, plus him knowing that it's a difficult topic for me in general, although these two examples weren't about items that were very emotionally charged. I sort of worry about his reaction, actually. But aside from that, for my own sanity, if I'm going to make this work I need to be doing it on my own unless he's able to detach from the process and help. Which is a shame, because I could use all the help I can get, and he's my main source of emotional support.
