Getting a couch past a security guard is hard work. I know this because every five to ten days, my friend Steve needs help smuggling a couch into his dorm room. He finds them on the street. Highlights from his eight-piece collection include a black pleather piece from downtown Brooklyn, a leopard-print chaise lounge found buried under snow in Jackson Heights, and a cream colored loveseat he picked up in Clinton Hill. Garbage men love Steve. Our school’s Residential Life office loathes him.

When I mentioned Steve’s constant collecting habits to a professor, he told me how in his college days he picked up every stray mattress he found and covered his dorm room floor with them. He laughed, then shrugged as though such obsessive collecting was normal. I began to think that maybe this sort of behavior was more common than I originally assumed.

I considered other men I knew. My father has an obsession with collecting furniture from relatives. Our living room contains two couches my grandparents bought in the 1960’s, a record player my uncle bought in 1957, and a chair my great-grandfather gave up after years of begging on my dad’s part. My grandfather used to buy a recliner every year, rotating the older ones around the house until my grandmother put her foot down and threw several out. These collections serve virtually no real purpose. Steve couldn’t fill up his couches with friends if he offered free food every night of the week. My dad isn’t going to win any prize because he has the most hand-me-down furniture in the state of South Carolina. My grandfather could only occupy one seat at a time. So why do these men hoard such useless articles?

I have a theory. I talked to these men some more and discovered that each man began gathering these items around the age of twenty, when first feeling his independence-or had just gotten his first apartment. This trend led me to believe that as men cross the threshold into adulthood, they feel the need to possess “adult” things-namely furniture. Consider this: Have you ever been in a store and heard a child throwing a temper tantrum over his mother’s refusal to buy him a Serta or the latest La-Z-Boy reclining couch? Probably not. Mattresses and couches are adult possessions that generally don’t interest anyone below the age of nineteen, yet are necessary to own once an individual becomes a grown-up.

Looking at the habits of the current generation, material possessions mean adulthood. Guys like my dad and Steve can’t afford a driveway full of Benzes, so they collect furniture, and if owning a few adult possessions makes you an adult, owning lots of these items erases any doubts you may have as to your “grown-up” status. This obsession with proof of maturity obviously isn’t a conscious one. Men often do things “just because [they] can.” This was the reasoning my professor gave me in regards to his mattress carpeting. His having his own space was what gave him the ability to say “I’m doing this because I can,” though. Obviously, admitting insecurity in his adult status would make a man feel, well, un-manly, I guess.

In the film classic, The Godfather, Sonny Corleone takes a stand, saying, “It’s an all-out war-we go to the mattresses.” This statement has permeated popular culture, used by young and old alike in reference to preparing for battle. In the case of this argument, it’s an ironic term, to “go to the mattresses.” The young male adult tendency to form a collection of virtually useless possessions, like couches and recliners, may be a form of “going to the mattresses” in their unconscious battles for self-esteem. It’s a tough world out there, boys. Go get another mattress.