That's not what I meant to say;-)

I am writing tonight since I won’t be around tomorrow, and I know you all need your daily dose of me;-) Judging by the series of tongue lashings that I took via comments, IM and email today, I feel like people didn’t like my ideas.

However, I don’t think I described what I was thinking very well...because despite not liking what I wrote, everyone agreed with me! I got a whole lot of “You are so cold and bitchy and non-romantic about this,” but virtually every message ended with “I would never buy a house with someone I wasn’t married to,” which was exactly my point.

So, a couple of clarifications, and then you can all have at me again afterwards.

1) I just assumed that any discussion about marriage, children and home ownership would be prefaced with you being in love with someone. I didn’t mean to leave out the romantic parts, I just figured that by the time you consider marrying someone, you ought to be pretty well committed to them.
2) I should have clarified that I didn’t simply mean “Joint ownership of real estate” I meant “Home ownership” as in “We are buying a house for the purpose of establishing a home together.” People co-own real estate all the time, I simply meant owning it as a place to live and as part of a broader relationship.
3) I think marriage is meaningful and important institution. It symbolizes (and legalizes) a commitment between people to devote their lives to each other. I very much look forward to being married, and I don’t take that commitment lightly. There are two parts of it…the legal and the symbolic…and for the reasons cited in Item #1, I left out the symbolic.

So, I don’t think I did a good job of writing that post because the comments all focused on something I didn’t intend (my goal was not to belittle or demean marriage) and much of the ranting ended with statements that agreed directly with my whole basic point.

Ok, now that I have that out of the way…everyone has all day tomorrow to write all of the nasty things they want about what a horrid and un-romantic person I am:-) The bad news is that your comments won’t be approved until tomorrow night, at the earliest.

The good news is that, unless I feel the need to write more on this subject, Friday’s post will be about Munchkin’s Potential First Boyfriend…yes, that makes me smile;-)

Relationship Stages

The audience was surprisingly unanimous in its belief that buying real estate together is something that should wait until a very late stage in a relationship. I figured that there would be some more diversity in the opinions, but maybe there is no great argument to do it otherwise.

I withheld my opinion yesterday, but this actually fits in pretty well with my new theory of relationship stages. The theory is that there are different steps in a relationship, and the steps should be chronologically ordered based on how big a commitment they are, and how hard they are to un-do.

Start with living together, for example. It is surely a big step and a significant commitment, and represents a major stage in any relationship. But, there is no legal relationship (except for maybe a lease, and at least not right away) and if things don’t work out, it is pretty easy to undo. This is followed shortly afterwards by the “combining of stuff”. Joint bank accounts, etc. Some of this sort of comes about with living together, I guess, but it is a further step.

The next two stages are marriage and home ownership. Honestly, I think marriage is the less significant commitment, although I won’t argue with people who feel otherwise. It certainly has a much larger emotional symbolism, but in terms of its “un-doableness” it should come before home ownership.

I suppose this might sound a little antiseptic and cold, but I think that the comments from yesterday sort of hit on this. For one thing, buying a house together likely means a joint mortgage, which exposes one person to the risk of the other one becoming a credit risk. And many more questions…What if you break up but can’t sell the house? What if you can’t agree on what to do with the house? What if one of you wants to keep it and you can’t agree on how to buy out the other? What if BOTH of you want to keep it? Buying a house together is, in my opinion, a larger commitment because it is so much harder to get out of it if things go wrong.

My summation of this would be: whether you are married or not, owning a house together means that you have to get “divorced”. Hence, I feel like getting married is the step that should come first, and the ownership of the house should be a part of the already existing marriage institution. (Just to confuse things more…I think that the commitment to marry, in this context, is as important as the actual marriage, so I sort of agree with Ella that the engagement is really the important step in this…)

Finally, of course, comes having children. That is clearly the biggest commitment and one which ensures that your relationship can never really be completely dissolved. You can’t sell your kids and settle the relationship (well, I guess you can, but that is a whole other series of issues.) I guess you can argue that having kids doesn’t have to come after buying a house, since they are very different kinds of commitments, but I put it last because it is clearly a larger commitment.

Now that I have thoroughly confused you, I have to add the “Dependent Addendum” which says that the pre-existence of children changes all of this. If you are bringing a child into the relationship, then moving in together becomes a MUCH bigger deal. It is one thing for me to move in with my boyfriend, it is completely another for my little sister to move in with my boyfriend.

I am going to get a little judgmental here, and I apologize for that, but I feel like people are too quick to intimately involve boyfriends and girlfriends in their childrens’ lives. Especially little children (if your kids are like 17, it’s a totally different story). Even when I was like 10, I always got weirded out by kids who talked about “Mom’s boyfriend moving in.”

I am certainly not one to preach morals, so I don’t want this to come off as snooty of me. But I know that I always hated the idea of my mother bringing boyfriends around and of random guys staying over. I felt like it made her trashy and cheap…I always liked when she had people that made her happy, but that doesn’t mean I wanna see them walking out of her bedroom at 7:00 am.

Anyway, I am not sure that last couple of paragraphs came out the way I wanted it too (I hate people telling me what is “good” parenting and “bad” parenting.) But it is what it is.

As this applies to me, I have been very sensitive about having The Boy spend nights when Munchkin is around, and about spending nights at his place as well. Her presence also dramatically alters the aforementioned relationship timeline. If it were just me, I would probably be ready to move in with The Boy now, but it ain’t just me. I would like to wait until we are married before he moves in with us, and I won’t even entertain the idea before we are engaged.

So, I guess that is kind of a lot, fell free to tell me I am an idiot…

Co-Ownership

Sorry to be late in the day with this, but I had some real work to do. The nerve of them, making me push back my blogging time!!!

Anyway, I promised a discussion topic, which is kind of going to stretch over two days. Today I will outline some of it, and then I will collect everyone’s opinions, write my own tomorrow and then get responses to that. Kabish?

The subject involves a back story (shocker, huh?). We graduated from college in May of 2005. Smoking Hot Roommate bought a run-down condo in February and had it rehabbed, and we moved in right after school (well, I ended up staying in Chicago for a month or so to deal with dying Mom and stuff related).

The condo is really great…it is three bedrooms, two bathrooms, about 1,600 square feet in one of the best locations you can imagine. It is within about 100 yards of Boston Common (the State House end, for the locals) and is about a quarter of a mile from Munchkin’s school and my work. It is also within a very short walk of both Papa Bear and Big Sis’ places.

In October of this year, we moved…right around the corner. The place we live now is much bigger (3,000 sq. ft., 5 or 6 bedrooms, depending on what you count as a bedroom). This is most definitely the kind of “home” that Smoking Hot Roommate could conceivably live in for a very long time. Meanwhile, she kept the old place and her fiancée, The Rocket Scientist, currently lives there with a friend of his. The plan is that eventually Munchkin and I will move back there and he will move in here. The timetable on that is up to Smoking Hot Roommate.

Well, after I got a big bonus earlier this month, I set myself a long-term goal: I wanna buy our old apartment from Smoking Hot Roommate. I know she would let me live there forever and pay her not nearly the rent that the place is worth, but that is not the point. I would love to be independent enough to be able to buy my very own super-fabulous pad, and to be able to assure Munchkin that she will be in one place for the foreseeable future. Since that apartment is in the absolute ideal spot (and holds some sentimental value), I would love to figure out a way to buy it.

Now, the caveat…if I really want to buy it for what it is worth, I am gonna need a LOT more money than I currently have;-) Not only would I need to save a lot more, but I would need to make a lot more.

But…the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wouldn’t just be me. This is likely a 2-3 year idea (at best) at which point I could very well not be making this kind of a purchase on my own. And, I mentioned this to The Boy in passing last week, and he was pretty much in agreement on the long term plan (like where, and in what kind of place he would want to live…no white picket fences and back yards for either of us.)

So, the question is…at what point is it ok for people to buy a house as part of a relationship? Clearly, it brings with it significant legal issues, in addition to financial and interpersonal issues. How do you reconcile differences in assets and income and all that stuff? Should you wait until you are ready to combine ALL of your finances before you should think about combining this largest part of them? How much of the decision is financial and how much is personal? Is there room for both?

And no, we are not thinking about actually doing this anytime soon, but I am just thinking about when might be the right time. (Ignore Munchkin for the time being…I am interested in people’s opinions in the absence of children…we will deal with kids tomorrow.) I think there are times when people move in together for reasons like “Our leases were both up, so we figured ‘What the Heck’?” I have sort of an open-ended arrangement, and The Boy owns his place already, so we will fortunately be on our own timetable.

Anyway, that is my subject for the day…fire away.

Teaser alert...

Monday, Monday, Monday…phooey. I like weekends better. It is not shaping up to be too terribly busy this week, although I do have to go to New York on Thursday, but just for the day.

I’m also going to Chicago the weekend after next. Munchkin’s brother was gonna come out to visit, but I would like to see Tinkerbelle, and it is always good to see friends and (some) family. So, I told him to just sit tight and we would come and see them. The big news this time is that The Boy is coming…he has never been back home with me, so he is in for a couple of days of immersion. We will see how he does;-)

Then I am going skiing the weekend after that. OK, there is no way that I will do any actual skiing (although I have always wanted to be a super-cool snowboard chick, I feel like that would be a good time.) Munchkin’s friend’s parents are bringing five girls up to their ski house for the long weekend, so I volunteered to go with them and help out. I have no idea what I was thinking…lol. Actually, it will probably give me a lot of time to read, do some work and relax…I imagine that everyone will be out of the house all day and I will have some quiet.

I was going to present a discussion topic today, but I’m gonna hold that off until tomorrow. I have already heard from some of you via IM with your thoughts, but I wanna open it up wider. So, you have that to look forward to;-)

Oh, so "that's" what you mean by dinner...

I thought that I was going out with The Boy and his parents for dinner last night, which was only partially true...we were actually going out with his parents, sisters, brother, sisters-in-law, brother-in-law, two aunts, three uncles and three cousins. This was actually somewhat of a family gathering...

Which is all good...I have met them before and like them all. Truth be told, I know that he and his twin sister don't see their older brother and sister nearly as often as each would like [OK, that seemed confusing. He has a brother (35) and a sister (34) that are both married with little kids and live in New York...he also has a twin sister that would qualify as his closest friend and lives near us. Got it?]

I have a super weird follow-up to my running commentary on the weird psychic connection that the boy and his twin sister have, but I can't say what it is yet. I have to wait a while to write it here (but if you ping me off-line, I can tell you...yes, that is an invitation).

Anyway, Munchkin came with because she got home from the birthday party she was at in time. That was good, too...Smoking Hot Roommate was on babysitting duty otherwise, and this gave her plenty of alone time with the Rocket Scientist. She was maybe a little flushed when we got home...hee hee.

So dinner was good, and we went for a drink afterwards, and had the Munchkin home and in bed by 10:30. The Boy hung around for a bit (ba chica wow wow...) and then he got home pretty early, too.

It's finally not as grossly cold anymore, and I think is supposed to be ok all week. I have sort of come to terms with winter, but these last couple of days were just asinine...

Smoking Hot Roommate is in Mexico for a couple of days...F her...lol