Then there’s that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence-post into a fishpool: practicality.
Over my life I’ve seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason.
‘It just isn’t practical,’ they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there’s the mortgage, and the children, and the dog; also, the joint ownership of things. ‘I just couldn’t face sorting out the record collection,’ a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 1075–81
Amalgamate:
Amalgamate means to unite or merge two or more things into a single body. It’s also used to describe joining organizations or groups to form a larger one.