Living in a small urban apartment makes it impossible to acquire "stuff." Even if you wanted more "stuff," there is simply nowhere to put it. In any event, the rent on small urban apartments is such that there isn't all that much cash left over, after wining and dining and amusing yourself going out, to spend on bringing "stuff" back home.
This might be why urbanites are credited with aquiring good taste. When you only have the closet space for two pairs of jeans instead of twenty, you're going to make sure you find the best damn jeans you can. There simply isn't any room for things you don't or can't use, and instead of filling a home with the cast-offs of trial and error, or tolerating the proliferation of mediocrity, you learn to come up with the best because you haven't got extra space for hanging on to the rest.
The urban space crunch is most apparent when it comes to closets and kitchens. Ask any formerly co-habitating couple of young urban professionals why their relationship ended, and I guaruntee that whatever else contributed, the fighting over closet space was the final coffin nail.
And the kitchen? Well, there is a reason most city-dwellers don't bother to cook if they can help it. To help suburbanites understand, picture yourselves in your home's half-bathroom. Now imagine whipping up dinner in a room that size. If that makes you feel a little cramped, imagine trying to store all of your kitchen equipment, appliances, and pantry goods in there with you. Uh-huh.
Which is to say that you learn just what is actually necessary for cooking, and just how much you can do without. Those kitchen supply stores? Turns out they are not so much selling people helpful kitchen gadgets as they are selling people gadgets with which to fill up the excess of kitchen drawers and cabinets plaguing suburban McMansions.
While we have no expendable storage in our apartment, the Russian lover and I still took the opportunity to stock up on Lennox wine glasses when the price was right. We prefer very over-sized wine glasses; perhaps because we prefer to put back a good amount of wine without feeling guilty about it, perhaps because in a small apartment you've got to super-size where you can. If you can't presently enjoy a sectional sofa or a king size bed, you can at least have extra-large bath towels and grandiose stemware.
The largesse of our wine glasses does make them more vulnerable to destruction. However, we prided ourselves on not having broken a glass in over a year, between ourselves and several curious and clumsy cats, this was quite an accomplishment. But then, in the space of a week, we managed to break three of them.
I broke the first, and managed to do so after an argument which left the Russian lover fuming in the other room. I was doing dishes (my preferred method of coping with a domestic disturbance) when my overzealous towel-drying resulted in the top of the glass breaking off the stem and falling on the floor to shatter spectacularly. This was unfortunate not only because I had broken a nice glass and sent sharp miniscule shards of it everywhere, I had also timed it in such a way that the Russian lover was bound to take it as a passive aggressive gesture for effect. He was nice enough not to mention if he thought so as he helped me sweep up the mess.
The next two incidents were all the Russian lover's doing. Both times it was his flailing or reaching limb that sent a glass sailing off the table and splintering into a million bits on the floor. I simply helped him clean them up; it was inevitable that a few pieces of our holy-grail-sized stemware would meet an untimely end at our oft-distracted hands. And as we do with most things, we simply shrugged it off and noted the silver linings: We'd bought them on sale, and now we had that many more square inches of space on a shelf somewhere.