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"FacebookPinterest\n\nArise, men, and emerge. Come forth from your caves\u2014those hobby huts and basement manctuaries. The light of day is bright, but once your eyes adjust, it'll help illuminate just how stupid it looks to keep all your stuff stashed in one protected lair, like a squirrel hoarding his nuts, while your wife's possessions sit out in the open. Do you really have to squirrel away your nuts? In your own home?\n\nDespite how rocking Physical Graffiti sounds on those subwoofers in the paneled seclusion of your rec room, doesn't the ghettoization of all the things you love sound sort of tragic? Hiding your pleasures means surrendering to division and defeat. Are you going to subdivide the whole house along gender clich\u00E9s\u2014womanly warrens and testosterooms, knitting nooks and purple-felted-pool-table clubhouses? Here's the thing: There is nothing wrong with a purple pool table. Well, there's a little bit wrong with it. But if that's your thing, make it work. Out in the open. In public.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Aren't you a little old to have your own personal\n\n Chuck E. Cheese's? \n\nMaybe yours has been a slow retreat over the years, from intimacy to exile. It happens, often from an understandable impulse to give your partner some space. Or maybe you're only now moving in with someone new. But just because you read that verse at your wedding about putting away childish things doesn't mean you actually have to put all your crap away\u2014your beloved collection of Bavarian beer steins and that drum kit you are totally going to learn to play sometime. The whole goal of living with someone\u2014of defining and designing a home together\u2014should be figuring out a way to make your lives converge with something approaching harmony. As a kid, it was cool to build forts and disappear in secret hiding places\u2014because you were living with your parents. Bachelor pads are where you live when you're a bachelor, not an escape you dig your way toward with a spoon every night when your wife's asleep. If you're abdicating the whole house for a tiny corner of freedom, you need a therapist or a lawyer, not a decorator.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n A hunter and his hunted. \n\nThere's a nice interiors-magazine word for disparate things getting along in the same room: eclecticism. So drag your giant-ass TV and retro tube amplifier up from the basement and figure out a way to make it all exist alongside your girlfriend's furniture. Chances are you've got better gear and she's got better taste. Her grandmother's vintage credenza? No reason you can't put a bar in it. Talk to her about your ideas for designing your shared space. Maybe hit the flea market together, or even a design shop or two. Find some things you both love. Dialogue restored. Dignity regained. Everyone's a winner.\n\nWe understand the fantasy. But it's time to kill the fantasy. Time to seal off the man cave. Even the unmourned murderous masturbator of Tora Bora relocated to the burbs and got cable. Bring your stuff up from the basement. Just because we only use a fraction of our brains doesn't mean we can't use the whole house."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/basement-man-cave-i-love-you-man>