Finding My Home (Part 1)

We recently bought our first house.

It’s an adorable little brick rambler, built in 1955, with four rooms, one and three-fourths baths (yes, that’s right, one and three-fourths baths), a teeny tiny garage, and a huge back yard. And I freaking love it.

We can see the seams in some of the drywall, the downstairs bathroom isn’t finished, the microwave buzzes really loudly when we use it, the breakers occasionally flip while watching TV and heating something up at the same time. And I freaking love it.

Now, I have no doubt that this feeling will go away the first time my water heater breaks, or a pipe bursts in my basement causing it to flood, but that hasn’t happened yet. For now, I’m basking in this awesome feeling of homeownership because I’ve wanted it for a long time, and it took me a long time to achieve it.

At one point, I was convinced that this dream of homeownership was never going to happen. We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the credit scores, we didn’t have the energy, we weren’t capable of making big decisions, it was never the right time, our kids were too old, we were too old, the industry was too complex, we weren’t smart enough, we didn’t know words like “qualifying ratio,” or “escrow,” or “amortization,” or “balloon,” or “back-end debt-to-income ratio,” or “cap,” or “market,” or “FHA,” so it was too much, too big, too late, and the sooner I could just accept that, the easier my life would be.

But it did. It did happen.

Yes, it was scary and sometimes I still get a little anxious when I think back on how quickly it all happened. But it did happen. And now I realize that we made it way harder than it needed to be.

When I look back on the journey we took to get here, I realize that the only reason we didn’t buy a home sooner was because we got in our own way. We made our journey of homeownership way harder than it needed to be because we ultimately failed at a critical thing that all struggling couples fail at…

communication.

I know that sounds reductive or overly simplistic. But I'm serious. Yes, we had to do some planning and some arranging and some managing of finances, but that wasn’t why it took us so long to buy a home.

When it came down to it, we really started making progress after we learned to consistently and effectively communicate with each other. And that took...seven years...before we really started focusing on it.

Does that sound like an insane amount of time to live with someone before learning how to effectively communicate with them? It probably is. I guess our justification is that we’re both deeply in love with one another, but also have very strong, very opposing personalities, which makes it hard for either of us to look at the other person’s point of view and not feel like we’re compromising our own opinions.

I’m telling you this because it wasn’t easy. Oh my gosh, was it not easy. At several points on our journey I thought, “This is just too much work. There is no way that other couples have to work this hard.” I’ve never been able to verify that assumption, but I’m guessing it’s not true. And it doesn’t matter anyway because we had fears and struggles but we got to a point where we could overcome those fears and struggles together. It was hard and took a lot of work, time, and commitment, but it was absolutely worth it because, in the end, we got so much more than just a home.

We built a better, happier, more meaningful relationship with each other. We got a home that is a safe space where we are both comfortable opening up to each other in an effective, healthy way. We got a place where my family feels safe and my step kids feel comfortable bringing their friends over. We got a puppy who loves being with us, and reminds us of how to be kind. We got a place that’s kind of broken, but allows us to learn new things as we work to fix it up over time. I got a garden and a place where I can unwind and be myself and feel safe and happy surrounded by the people I love. In essence, I am a happier person because I pursued, struggled through, and conquered this goal of homeownership. And I learned some pretty cool stuff about myself and my husband along the way.

So, here’s how we did it.

Part 1. Trust and Communication

For us to be able to create the home we wanted to live in, we needed to learn to trust each other through effective, open communication. Now, that may seem really obvious, but let me tell you, it took us a while to figure that out.

Our journey to homeownership didn't start by calculating our savings or assessing our debt-to-income ratio. We eventually got to that point, but it wasn’t the first thing we needed to solve. It took us a while but we eventually realized that the justification of “We just don’t have the money” or “Now just isn’t the right time” were just excuses we used to avoid confronting the real problem: my husband and I weren’t happy together because we didn’t openly or effectively communicate enough to instill trust in our marriage.

You may get tired of hearing that, but I’ll say it a lot because, to us, clear, effective communication was the key to making successful decisions—big or small—in our marriage. In fact, I don’t think either of us realized that our relationship was sort of broken until I got to a critical point where I realized that I wasn’t happy anymore and decided that it was time to let go of our life together.

Let me explain.

When we met, there was instant chemistry, and for me (and I think for him too), a lot of that appeal was because we were so completely different. We fell in love with a person who was completely different than us, who would be able to see the gaps in our lives where we weren’t necessarily excelling and cover them as a partner would.

What we didn’t take into account was how difficult our differences made our ability to communicate with each other.

I am an emotionally charged, creative-thinking extrovert with a big mouth, and a dominant personality. At the same time, I’m also incredibly, almost excessively, sensitive to the words and feelings of others, and often have a hard time understanding people who freely share their opinions and feelings without considering and being sensitive to the impact they may have on the people around them. The ridiculousness of this idea is really crazy when you take into account how loud I am and how much I swear.

He is an analytically-charged, logic-driven introvert who keeps to himself but also openly shares his opinions freely without fear or inhibition. This also means that he needs very little emotional reinforcement and can find it difficult to understand a person, such as I, driven by emotion, who needs a lot of emotional validation.

Because we both consume and process information so differently, we communicate differently. In the past, when problems would arise, we would generally approach them from completely different directions, and our potential resolutions are often completely different than what the other person came up with.

For example…

I once had a hard day at work and came home crying. (This was maybe two years into our marriage.) Upon seeing me, he raised his eyebrows and said something like, “What’s the matter with you?”

Now, from his perspective, this is a perfectly logical, rational question. What he’s really asking me is, “What’s wrong? What happened? Are you okay?”

But to me, because I’m so sensitive, his question came across as, “There’s something wrong with you. What is it?”

You may think these two questions/statements are the same, and you’re probably right, but to me they’re not. In my mind, his question first makes the assumption that I’ve done something wrong and that, whatever my experience was, it’s my fault.

Let me be clear, this is not what he was thinking at all. It’s just how I interpreted his question...in the span of .5 seconds...after a really hard day.

So, like any rational, level-headed, emotionally sensitive person, I responded by screaming,

“YOU! If you’re ever wondering what my problem is, just assume that it’s YOU!”

Though we laugh about it now, this conversation did not end well for either of us. The good news is that we got past this moment and eventually resolved our communication discrepancies. He is now more careful at how he words his thoughts and feelings, and I ask more clarifying questions before I react. In fact, this conversation is now something we laugh and joke about together. But it took us a while to get there.

Such extreme contrasts in personalities could have absolutely benefitted us, if we were both willing to see things from the other person’s point of view, but we weren’t.

We fell in love, got together, and expected that everything would be perfect without taking the time to understand each other’s needs and put in the work to fulfill them. Looking back now I can see that we both kind of assumed that the other person would eventually understand our way of thinking and get on board with it; that they would learn to cater their communication style to meet our needs.

That was a dumb assumption.

Situations like this went on for years. We sort of got into a routine where we just accepted that this difficult communication was just the way our life would always be, and so as long as we could always overcome those moments where our communication broke, we would get through everything okay.

Obviously, that didn’t work.

That back and forth difficulty we had with one another, that hard pain that seeps into the pit of your stomach and stays there until you feel like you can’t breathe, or eat, or love, or cry...it destroyed us. And it destroyed us...slowly...over time. We stopped opening up to one another, we stopped making big goals together, we stopped envisioning happy endings for each other, and we stopped trusting each other. In the end, I felt that my only option was to end things.

After a brief stint apart, he was actually the one who reached out to me and said that he wasn’t ready to call it quits. In the end, we got back together and made changes that strengthened the way we communicated with each other. Improved communication built trust, which brought happiness, and eventually put us in a situation where we were ready to buy a home.

And it actually didn’t require either of us to change that much. Aside from not immediately reacting to comments from the other person, we really only implemented three basic rules that put us on the path to homeownership:

1. We started telling each other what we needed from the other person.
2. We both found careers that made us happy.
3. We stopped judging each other’s spending habits and instead started talking openly about our finances.

These three things may seem small, but they had a monumental impact on bringing us together and helping us learn to trust each other enough to make big decisions, like creating the home we want to live in and doing it responsibly.

In part two of Finding My Home, I'll dive even more into that first step—how we learned to start telling each what we needed and how that helped us on our home buying journey.