Middle Ground Is Site for Marriage of Minds : Couples: A successful commitment can largely depend on three C’s: change, compromise and compartmentalization.

The entire relationship came down to a cheese grater.

Bill and Becky Curry were married barely six months when they found their dream house, which meant it was time to sacrifice some of their personal belongings for the common good.

A 33-year-old flight attendant when she married, Becky had already set up a household she adored. Her antiques and overstuffed faded chairs were her friends. Same with Bill, a Pepco executive who at 38 was that rare fellow who actually knew his way around a Cuisinart and couldn’t wait to get his own spatula out of storage.

Those first few days of wrangling over whose frying pan would stay and whose mixing bowls would go were not their best. Still, they plodded along, determined to preserve their image of themselves as a happy couple.

Around Day 3, however, the pretense crumbled over two flimsy metal cheese graters.

His was new, shiny, quadrangular and could grate cheese four different ways. His mother had one just like it. There was no other way.

Hers was flat and practical and would store easily. She had picked it up at an antiques shop and it was like an old sweater. How many different ways did you need to shred Cheddar anyway?

He yelled, she cried. He stormed, she threatened.

Finally, simply worn down, she tossed out her grater. She’s never shredded a piece of cheese since. They’ve been married six years. It never occurred to them to keep both graters.

“That just wasn’t an option--this was a win-lose issue,” Becky Curry says today. “I was really dumbfounded that a kitchen implement would even matter to him, but he was feeling pushed aside . . . I learned not to assume anything.”

“Now, whenever we strongly disagree, we recollect the day of the cheese grater,” Bill Curry says. “That’s when we know it’s time to compromise. Or avoid discussion.”

This is not a story about dating or breaking up. It’s about commitment, about making a decision that you will be part of a couple even though the love of your life would rather read fiction alone than party with your friends.

It’s about being in love but wondering how you’ll ever get through the holidays because she insists on buying an artificial Christmas tree and all your holiday memories are tied up in the smell of pine.

It’s about little things with big meanings: personal tastes and styles that are so deeply ingrained in your personality that, at times, solitude is more appealing than compromise.

This is a story about becoming a couple when you’re over 30 and not a kid anymore.

“A cheese grater is just a thing which happened to represent much, much more,” says Isaiah Zimmerman, a Washington psychologist who specializes in couples and family therapy. “It was a battle to determine who was in charge and whose life style was more worthy.

“It is extraordinarily hard after 30 to commit oneself to a joint life when you truly believe it will not outweigh the benefits of an imagined individual life.”

Becoming a new couple is a fight at any age. Those blissful early days when everyone is on their best behavior quickly give way to constant negotiation, arbitration and mediation. And the closer one gets to 30 (and beyond), the steeper the hill to climb, say therapists and couples.

For one, by mating later, couples have that much more time to decide who they are and what they don’t want to be. According to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Census Bureau, the average age for a first marriage has crept up over the past 40 years--from 20 to about 23 for women, and from 22 to about 24 for men. This number is generally higher when both are urban professionals.

And while maturity may breed confidence, it also encourages rigidity. “You just want to relax,” says one 36-year-old journalist. “You don’t want to please as much. Instead of trying five new things, you’ll try one. You’re not going take up skiing just to be with the person, because you might break your leg.”

On the plus side, individuals tend to discard heavy parental baggage and expectations past 30, and become much more receptive to coupling with their opposite number instead of with a clone of themselves.

But in turn, they also develop their own intrusive quirks. The bigger issues, which may have disrupted a relationship at 22, are replaced by seemingly petty concerns about neatness, promptness or what to cook for Christmas dinner.

“He may say, ‘OK, I don’t care as much about religion--you can raise the kids Catholic,’ ” says Zimmerman. “But you’ll never hear her say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t bother me at all that he leaves his dirty socks around.’ ”

One 34-year-old woman, who has been with the same man for three years, was driven to distraction by his tardiness. A prompt person by nature, she could not comprehend his consistent disregard for the clock. So she stopped trying. In her mind, she decided that he was reliable in every other way--considerate, committed, intelligent--and she realized that if she wanted to maintain the relationship (and her sanity) she would have to resolve this without him. She simply stopped waiting for him.

Now when they go on vacations, she tells him the flight is an hour earlier than the scheduled departure time. When they go to the theater, she gives him his ticket and meets him there (he always misses the first act). And when he’s late to pick her up at her apartment, she simply leaves.

“She unhooked,” says Olivia Mellan, another Washington couples therapist. “She did a very healthy thing by unhooking. But there is a sadness here because they didn’t try to meet in the middle. The ideal is not to change each other but to try to move toward the middle.”

A happily married man of 17 years refers to the middle ground as a coming to terms with the three C’s: change, compromise and compartmentalization.

If two people know they are in for the long haul, they are apt to move closer toward the center. What they can’t change or reach agreement on, they simply won’t. They’ll each do their own thing--or compartmentalize.

Consider the outgoing Washington editor in her late 30s and her self-contained consultant boyfriend. She likes to party and play tennis. A dinner for 20 is her idea of a cozy gathering. He prefers reading fiction, discussing movies and driving to the country--activities that generally require, at most, two participants. Anything over four is a mob to him.

“When I was younger I definitely would have tried to mold my personality to his personality,” she says. “I would have gotten heavily into fiction.”

Now, instead, she says they have happily compartmentalized some areas. “He can watch his movies on the VCR while I read nonfiction,” she says.

And compromised. “I’ve come to enjoy weekends in the country, and sometimes we stay in town and go out,” she says. “It works. We bring our own interests into the relationship . . . We’re more accepting.”

And there are obsessives with similarly narrow views who do find room for acceptance and negotiation if everything else seems right. Take the doctor and the businesswoman.

He is slight, eats yogurt and rides his exercise bike every day. Food is her friend and sweat is not in her vocabulary.

The minute they met while vacationing in Mexico he was compelled to comment on her weight--which, it should be noted, is quite average. “Guess you decided not to lose the 10 pounds everyone else loses for vacation,” he quipped as they ogled each other on a beach in Mexico.

His preoccupation with her waist continued through their initial rendezvous, picked up during the subsequent long-distance courtship and intensified during their engagement. He always brought it up in a lighthearted manner, and it was even a subject of a few jokes at the rehearsal dinner.

She never thought it was funny, but she waited until after the wedding and finally exploded.

“I had had it,” she says. “I told him he was superficial and shallow. He told me I didn’t care about myself. But when we talked about it, I discovered that it had to do with an obesity problem in his family--not me. He was petrified I was going to become fat.

“So I just said, ‘Look, this is my natural weight. You just have to accept it. I’m not going to become a closet eater.’ ”

After two years of marriage, they both have changed: She makes an effort to watch what she eats, and is careful to stay within a few pounds of her ideal weight.

And compromised: He still comments on her weight but now only raises the point by saying how “perfect” her body is and how “much more perfect” it could be.

And compartmentalized: He exercises without her.

He was an advertising executive earning six figures, but dreamed of helping the underprivileged. She was finishing law school at an expensive university, and was anxious to secure their future.

A few months into their marriage, he told her he was going to quit his job and become an inner-city social worker. She told him she didn’t marry an inner-city social worker, and besides, who will pay the mortgage now?

To say they had different notions about money is an understatement. They sought counseling.

“Money,” says Olivia Mellan, is “never about just money. It symbolizes other things: love, power, security, control, self-worth, freedom and dependency . . . If an individual has belief in any of the money myths, it’s very difficult to reach agreement unless you discard your myths.”

The executive, as it turned out, was what Mellan calls a money-avoider and a dreamer. The law student was a worrier and a money amasser. In the end, the couple determined what their needs were. He really wanted change and a chance to give his life new meaning. She wanted security.

They struck a compromise: They moved to a new city for change, where he continued to work as an executive but also took courses in social work while she finished her last two years of law school. Upon her graduation, he found a job teaching inner-city kids and she joined a high-powered law firm.

Mellan says many couples are not as fortunate in resolving deep-seated money differences efficiently. She cites some of the most common money conflicts in relationships:

Hoarders and Spenders: She puts every dime in a special bank and counts her change regularly. He visits the money machine daily.

Mergers and Separators: He sees the benefits of pooling resources and operating as a unit; she tends to feel more secure keeping her checking account in her own name.

Monks and Amassers: He (or she) marched in ‘68, and still thinks money is corrupt and Ralph Nader pays well; she (or he) graduated from Harvard Business School and accepted the highest-paying job upon graduation.

Avoiders and Worriers. He has never seen the power bill; she balances her checkbook every day.

“The trouble always comes when each person polarizes into the opposite extreme,” says Mellan. “So what I advise my clients to do is practice the non-habitual. If they spend, I tell them to try saving. If they dream, I tell them to think practically. By putting themselves in the other person’s shoes, there usually is a middle ground.”

“The idea,” says Zimmerman, “is to constantly recall your original love feelings, and the belief back then that you would always work everything out. And then, hopefully, you will again.”

Amazingly enough, there’s something about Christmas trees that creates a call to arms among new couples--how to decorate them, what kind to get.

It’s the ritual, not the tree, says Zimmerman, and it’s all “part of powerful feelings from childhood, your vision of how things should be . . . I’ve had couples where one person believed you just couldn’t have Thanksgiving without a certain kind of sweet potatoes. Basically, you’re giving up your youth to share your holiday with a stranger.”

Again, as one gets older, couples say that maintaining the traditions of their youth becomes less consuming. “It took about two minutes to decide we could have both a crucifix and a Star of David in the house,” says a male Catholic banker married to a Jewish real-estate developer.

“If I want to go to Mass, I go to Mass. If she wants to go to temple, she goes to temple. We won’t let it become larger than life.”

Another newlywed couple found themselves at odds over how to decorate their first holiday tree. His family always used tinsel and hers preferred imported, delicate things. They ultimately scrapped both styles and invested in some new glass bulbs.

“We developed our own tree, our own tradition,” she says.

But sadly, even when some think they’re committed and ready to compromise, they soon discover that no matter how hard they try, the timing is off, the partner is wrong and the tree is fake.

The retail executive and the television anchor had been dating nearly a year when the battle of the trees occurred. A few weeks before Christmas, he invited her out to buy a Scotch pine. She said she already had an artificial tree in the basement.

He said, “That’s not Christmas. We have to get a real tree.”

She said, “But it’s so much work.”

“The tree represented romance to me,” he said, “going out in the snow and picking out a big tree, being a family unit. I could just picture our kids carrying it back with us.”

She tried to change. But a few days after they put up the tree, she complained that the smell was making her sneeze. “And that she had to vacuum the needles off of her carpet was just too much for her,” he says.

She told him, “Never again.” They broke up four months later.