Finding My Home (Part 3)

In Finding My Home (Part 2), I talked about how we had to learn to start telling each other what we needed before we could commit to home ownership.

Today, I’m going to discuss the second thing we did in order to strengthen that trust and communication.

Part 3. Careers

I didn’t realize how much the enjoyment of our jobs factored into our decision to buy a home, until we both got jobs we loved.

I had a job that gave me a 50/50 split; 50% like and 50% frustration, but that I wasn’t always consistently happy doing because it didn’t allow me to write 100% of the time, which is what I wanted to do 100% of the time.

He had a job he absolutely hated and was miserable doing. He also didn’t have a clear career trajectory and therefore felt that he was stuck in his current role with no way to move forward.

For us, job satisfaction (or the lack thereof) had a huge impact on our willingness to commit to any long-term decision, for two reasons:

1. Having jobs we both enjoyed made us genuinely happy, and that genuine happiness helped us build trust by improving the way we communicated.

I don’t think that our jobs were something we actively thought about until we started working on improving our relationship, but again, looking back on it now, I realize that it was a huge factor in the way we interacted with each other every day. When we were unhappy with our jobs, we were more prone to moodiness, snappiness, unresponsiveness, and just downright unpleasant to be around.

Now, getting better jobs wasn't going to fix everything—we still had to learn to improve the way we communicated with each other—but it went a long way to putting us in the right mindset to effectively and appropriately communicate how we were both feeling towards each other. Let me explain.

When he had a bad day at work, he would come home and zone out, not wanting to talk about it at all because he knew that nothing would change and he would just come home feeling the same way tomorrow. I’d try to get him to talk about it because I felt it would help him figure out what he could do to make his work day better. Maybe he’d find some better way of coping or decided that he needed a new job. The problem was that, instead of accepting his feelings and letting him process things his own way, I’d push and push him to open up about his day, and—after repeated failed attempts—would assume he just didn’t trust me and would end up locking myself in our room all night feeling frustrated and offended.

When I had a bad day at work, I’d vocally dissect every aspect of my feelings to him, in an effort to pinpoint the problem, whether he wanted to hear them or not. I’d basically usurp the precious time he had after work to talk about everything and anything I could about my bad day in an effort to make my frustrations go away, and I wanted him to engage with me. I wanted him to help me “troubleshoot” my feelings in a back-and-forth process, in an effort to help me cope with them. As someone who was less inclined to share his feelings, he didn’t understand my need for this vocal back-and-forth. He also wanted to just sit back, relax, and watch some TV, because he was reasonably tired. His responses were very autocratic and often challenged my opinions because he wanted me to understand how he looked at the situation. Instead, his responses put me on the defensive because it felt as if he were siding with whatever side of the argument I wasn’t on or simply not caring about my feelings at all.

This annoying loop usually lasted until one of us (usually me) got angry and left the room.

When either of us were unhappy, it made it harder for us to effectively communicate with each other. It made it harder for us to positively interact with one another. It made us sad and unwilling to engage with each other, and these things were critical to improving our relationship and building trust in our marriage.

What changed, you may be wondering?

Well, aside from making more of an effort to ask for what we needed, we each got jobs that made us happier and that happiness changed how we interacted with each other. In order to change ourselves, we chose to change our situations.

He was the first one to find the courage to change careers. (I wouldn’t get a full-time writing position for another two years.)

After thinking about what he wanted out of a career, considering the small elements of his current job that he didn’t hate, doing research on what he wanted to achieve each day, and weighing the amount of schooling he would need to undergo, he decided that he wanted to become an electrician.

To me, the coolest thing about his situation was that it was almost like the world was just waiting for him to make a decision, because he went from being a utility locator to an apprentice electrician in like a month. He researched companies, applied to a great company that he really liked, and was offered the job immediately after his first interview.

Now, it is true that there is currently a huge shortage of employees willing to take on labor-based trade careers, but that only worked in our favor.

He freaking loves his job and that makes interacting with him each day so much better. He’s almost always in a good mood when he gets home, and that makes him more talkative and more open. As someone who is more of an introvert, this is a huge change for him and not a very difficult one either. He wants to tell me about his day, the things he did at work, the people he talked to, etc. As an extrovert, I want to hear about his day, make comments on his anecdotes, learn about his co-workers, and so on.

Like I said before, I had a job that I loved some days and hated some days. I’m also super extroverted, so even if I had a hard day, I was more apt to talk about it openly in an effort to find a solution to my personal difficulties. That being said, I still noticed more of a change in the way I interacted with him after I got home from a job I loved versus a job I sometimes liked.

In April, I got a job as a full-time Copywriter, and I’ll never go back to doing a job I only “sort of” like. Never, ever again.

I went from coming home bummed and frustrated some days to coming home happy and elated everyday. I’ve been in a full-time writing position for the past six-months, and everyday I come home he asks, “How was work?” And everyday, for the past six months, my response has been “Amazing. I’ve been writing all day.”

We both are happier in our professional lives, which makes it easier for us to be happier in our personal lives as well.

That back-and-forth communication built more trust between us than almost any other decision we’ve made thus far, because we learned to be happier together and as individuals. Having that “base level” happiness improved the way we looked at the world, improved the way we interacted with each other, and ultimately improved our marriage.

I stopped demanding that he review every single aspect of his job with me in an effort to open up. As I backed off, he started volunteering more information about his day, his co-workers, what he liked and what he disliked.

And he started recognizing when I needed support from him versus when I needed an objectionable view. I haven’t had a bad day yet, but there have been times when I’ve come home and said, “I’m nervous about writing this thing or that thing because of these reasons.” When I shared my concerns, he started asking follow up questions about what I was feeling instead of jumping to his own opinions.

It’s awesome.

The other reason our previous jobs negatively impacted our situation was because...

2. While we were each in jobs we didn’t enjoy, we both were unwilling to consider committing to a long-term financial obligation.

For me, when I was in a job I only occasionally enjoyed, and thought about getting a home, my thought process went something like this:

“It would be so nice to own my own home, but then we’d have a mortgage.

A mortgage is a long-term financial commitment.

If we’re going to take on a long-term financial commitment, I would need to have a stable job.

Though I have a stable job, I don’t 100% love it. What if I get tired of my current job? I couldn’t just quit—I would have a mortgage to pay. What if I wasn’t able to find a new job that I liked more than my current job? What if this is the best it’s going to get? I would be stuck in a job I only sometimes like forever because I have to pay that huge, terrible, overwhelming mortgage. Am I really ready to commit to that future of only partial unhappiness? Nope, nope, nope. I’ll pass on the home, thank you very much.”

You want to know the worst part about this thought process? I knew it was wrong. I knew it was illogical and that I was overreacting. I knew that I was capable of having a home, and a mortgage, and a job that I loved, and still be financially stable. I absolutely knew it.

What I didn’t know is whether my husband would support a decision to buy a home when he had a job he hated. If I wanted to change the way I thought about getting a home, I would need to trust my husband by openly talking about what I wanted, and whether or not he wanted the same thing.

Later, I learned that his thought process was somewhat similar. He was absolutely miserable in his job and had convinced himself that he wouldn’t be able to learn a new skill and thus would be stuck where he was forever. This made him less likely to want to even broach the subject of something that would require a long-term financial commitment like a mortgage.

When we started communicating more openly with each other and building up that trust, we started talking about our jobs. He said that he felt that getting a new job would make him happier and thus open up more about his day. At the time, I was content with my job, but later in the year said basically as much to him about my own employment situation.

We also both admitted to each other that neither of us would have even considered buying a house while we were both in the jobs we weren't happy in.

Neither of us wanted to commit to something as financially demanding as a thirty-year mortgage because we were both worried that it would make us feel obligated to stay in jobs that we knew were financially lucrative, even if they were also making us unhappy.

We both felt that, if we got into a home, while we both had jobs we didn’t really want, we would feel financially obligated to keep those undesired jobs because we were committed to a thirty-year mortgage.

Looking back on this mentality, I realize that it was kind of dumb. It really doesn’t matter if you’re in a one-year apartment contract or a thirty-year mortgage contract, you’re still committing to a contract. Plus, you still have a ton of other bills to pay, and life will still throw unplanned situations at you (like trips to the hospital) that will shake up your financial plans.

Honestly, like most of the other situations I’ve described, our problem in committing to a thirty-year mortgage while in jobs we didn’t necessarily enjoy was more of a mental barrier. But the thing is, our mental fears were the hardest to overcome, so the more obstacles we removed, the better we felt about our decision.

In part four of Finding My Home, I'll talk about the next thing we did in order to build trust in our relationship which was to openly talk about our finances together.