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Fighting after buying a house :-(
Hey girls, I'm new to this board, but need to vent somewhere...
Me and my husband moved in together when I was 21...we lived in 5 different apartments over the course of the last 8 years, and got married in Nov 2009. We fought a lot when we first moved in together. but I guess that's to be expected. Since then, we had a great relationship and only argued about the usual stupid things. We had our finances in order, were able to save a decent amount of money monthly, and pretty much had a great time. I have always controlled the finances in our household and hubby has always been fine with this.
We bought a house in December, and initially everything was fine, but we are now having arguments, mostly about financial stuff, like every 2nd day! Also, my husband works nights and is off on Mon. and Tues. so on Saturdays when he is sleeping, I have always gone to visit my parents, and I come home when he wakes up and texts me. Now he says he wants me to be home and not visit my parents as much...my opinion is that he shouldn't care because he's sleeping. We moved about half an hour away from where most of our friends live because we were able to find a much nicer house with low property taxes that is also about a 5 minute drive away from my job (and a 45 minute train ride away from his) and even though we chose it together, he is now saying that I tricked him into moving here.
It seriously feels like we just moved in together, meanwhile we have been together for about 10 years. Right now, I'm wishing we never bought this damn house.
Thanx for listening.
TTC 17 months. Dx: MFI (morph=2,) LPD due to poor quality of ovulation because of mildly blocked fallopian tubes. B2B IUIs with injects were pending, but we had a surprise BFP after HSG!
Re: Fighting after buying a house :-(
Regarding financials - are you really in over your head? Post your budget on the Money Matters board and have them critique it.
Do your parents treat him poorly? Does he feel that he compromised more than your did on location?
It sounds like it is time for a talk with him.
I don't think we are over our head...we can pay our bills, but don't have much left for saving...also, I just started a new job where I get paid every 2 weeks. He also gets paid every 2 weeks, and now we have this really big mortgage bill we didn't have before. This is going to take some adjustment.
As for my parents, my dad is great, but my mom just isn't a sweet/caring kinda person, and she just rubs hubby the wrong way, which is why I would rather visit them myself and only subject him to her bs on holidays (he has always appreciated that)
My issue is that this whole conflict seems weird to me...has anyone else had to deal with this kind of thing? How do you fix it? We have tried just sitting down and talking, but he always ends up just getting angry and saying "I don't care...do whatever you want." Am I selfish for wanting to live close to work (and therefore close to our kids when/if we have some) if we agreed on this house together? I always encourage him to go visit friends when I'm at work...half an hour isn't far...but instead, he gets on my case for everything! I thought we had pretty good communication and a really good relationship before this whole thing started.
My other issue...and why I posted...is that I don't have a very close relationship with my mom and I don't tell my friends or coworkers about things like this because I don't want them to think any differently of DH, so I figured, who better to vent to than a bunch of people I don't know on the internet :-P
Thanks for your input.
TTC 17 months. Dx: MFI (morph=2,) LPD due to poor quality of ovulation because of mildly blocked fallopian tubes. B2B IUIs with injects were pending, but we had a surprise BFP after HSG!
This IS one of those big decisions in a marraige where both parties have to agree on it. Did the two of you discuss all the pros and cons of buying this house BEFORE you signed all the contracts? If so, I can't understand why he'd accuse you of "tricking him" into moving there if he initially agreed on the location and mortgage price in the first place.
There is a lot in this post that I don't like. The first, now you have a really big mortgage bill that you didn't have before statement. Did you not consider what you could and could not afford in terms of a mortgage? Are you living pay check to pay check just in order to pay for this mortgage? I agree with PP who mentioned that it would be a good idea to post your budget on MM.
Secondly, I think your mom is who she is and you're not going to do a lot to change her personality. With that being said, you do have control over how she treats you and your husband. Are you addressing the things she does to her that upset your husband? What does she do that makes your husband upset? I'd say if she's insulting him, disregarding him, etc. and you're doing nothing about it than it's perfectly understandable how he would feel like you're on "your parents side". I'd also find it a little weird if my SO/DH left our house every Saturday before I was awake to visit his parents and only came back when I sent him a text telling him I was awake.
Did you discuss travel time/commuting from both jobs before you purchased this house? Did you discuss your financial situation prior to and what it would be after you bought this house?
I understand exactly what your DH is feeling because for the first three years we lived together, it was in a town that was over a half hour away from everything I wanted including my job, while all of his friends, family and job were five minutes away. I never complained about living there but I complained constantly about how we saw his family more, how I couldn't attend parties or events with him because the time driving made it not even worth it and how I felt completely isolated. One day when I was complaining about this he said "Well you are the one that agreed to move here. If you hated so much, why did you agree to move here?"
That's where I realized that my compromise was actually more of a letting him get his way, and we both resented each other greatly for it. Maybe your DH has come to that point earlier than I had. The problem is that you can't do what we did.
I waited until the lease was up in four months, researched and found about eight or nine different wonderful places in other towns and areas that were at our current rent or lower with the same amenities. I then told him I was moving going to one of these places (some were great because they were twenty minutes from both our families, work, and friends) with or without him. He didn't react well at first but after thinking a few days he realized that this town wasn't worth losing me.
Is there a way to make a plan that would work? like you both admit that your faults in creating this problem and you live there for x amount of time until you can sell the house/get out of the loan.
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Red. Flags. Everywhere. He's obviously upset and not communicating it with you. You need to make him talk about it, and maybe even try counselling, because this kind of communication issue will make your entire marriage very difficult. Also, it sounds like you moved around a LOT before this. Maybe he gets restless? He probably was a bit trusting of you since he is in the dark about the finances (you said you handle them) and now that he is working and having to commute and having less expendable income to "have a great time" with and being further from his friends... I'd be annoyed too.
I see everyone's points, and agree that we need to communicate more effectively, and if this keeps up, we probably will go to counselling to see if we could work it out with a non-involved 3rd party.
My mom is just a bee-yatch. There's no fixing it. I talked to her about it many times, but she just doesn't realize she does anything wrong. Example...when we got engaged, I called my mom because I was excited to tell her. Her answer was "What did you do that for? You were just in Vegas last month. You should have gotten married there." She doesn't realize that what she says hurts people and then doesn't care when it is brought to her attention. My dad is awesome, and when I visit, I usually spend more time with him. DH likes my dad a lot and deals with my mom when he has to.
Everyone we know, including my family, his family, and a majority of our friends live half an hour away. We don't have any friends in our neighborhood. DH recently joined the volunteer fire department to try to keep busy and make some friends, but it takes time to get close to new people, so this might work out eventually. Since our hours at work are different, I always encourage him to visit his friends or meet up with his brother for lunch, but he choses not to. Also, his best friend moved to Tennessee in the beginning of February, so although they can talk on facebook, its not as good as having him around..
Before we bought this house, we discussed everything. We were originally looking in towns that would be about half an hour commute for each of us, but all the houses in our price range were either really old, or just required more work than we could handle. Btw, in our last apartment, I was commuting about 1 hr 15 minutes to work on a good day and his commute was 20 minutes...in fact, my commute has always averaged about an hour (I was definitely getting bitter about that, but didn't complain.) He works regular 8 hour shifts and I work very long hours, so with the additional commute time, we would only get to spend about an hour a day together like 4 days per week. One of those many apartments we had was about halfway for each of us, and that was one of the towns we were originally looking in. Before we signed anything, we had the talk about whether this was a good idea, and he thought about it for a while and decided that he would rather have me home to spend time with him and have me commute less, and that a 45 minute train ride would be fine with him because he could just relax and play video games or read magazines. Plus, he agreed that this house is nicer and newer than anything else we were looking at. Today is a non-fighting day, and I asked him if he just wants to sell the house and go back to renting and his reply was that he's never selling it. Unfortunately, if I bring up any of the bad things today, we'll start fighting again, and I just want to enjoy the calm right now.
Being that I do the finances, I don't see us as struggling at all once I get a hang of our new financial situation and get a kinda expensive AMEX bill paid off for an unexpected car repair that came up during our closing process. The apartments we had were all just super cheap and allowed us to have lots of expendable income to go party every weekend, take frequent vacations, save some $, and pretty much do whatever we wanted. This last year, a lot of our friends have had children, purchased homes, lost jobs, etc., so we haven't really been doing anything too exciting anyway, and we were fine with it.
I think/hope this is something that will just eventually blow over because it has only been about 3 months since we moved here, but after being together so long and thinking that we had it all figured out, its a very difficult transition. Otherwise, I think we will be off to counseling.
TTC 17 months. Dx: MFI (morph=2,) LPD due to poor quality of ovulation because of mildly blocked fallopian tubes. B2B IUIs with injects were pending, but we had a surprise BFP after HSG!
People get caught up in the home buying process. If you were looking at older rundown homes in one neighborhood then all of a sudden you saw this nice shiny new one in another area, it was probably easy for your DH to say, oh yeah, I want that one, sure I can do a 45 minute commute. Now that he's been living in the area for a few months and realizes that he doesn't like it much and he doesn't like commuting so long, he's realizing he made a mistake. It also sounds like you might be in over your head financially if you had to put car repairs on a credit card. It sounds like you've drained a lot of your money to buy this house and now he probably misses the things you mentioned like vacations, going out, etc.
Also, you sound kind of unappreciative about your DH's work. Oh, he works these nice tidy 8 hour shifts while I'm stuck working all these long terrible hours. Well, maybe so, but he has 1.5 hours to and from work (not counting any time it takes him to get to and from the train stop, since I'm guessing it doesn't run directly from your front door to his office) and you have 10 minutes. Plus, you drive yourself and he has to deal with the stress of catching the train, sitting by stinky strangers, etc.
Basically, it sounds like you just want to do what you want -- I want be close to my family and my work, whereas you don't seem to really care about what your DH wants or if he wants to be closer to his apparently-unimportant-to-you job. Some compromise.