It's been a while internet. Last time I posted I was not a HOMEOWNER. This time, I most certainly am and let me tell you something, it's been a helluva ride already.
I closed on a three story townhome on Jan 14, 2015. It's got 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, two living rooms, a front and back patio, and a detached one car garage. It's humungo to the point where I still don't have any furniture on the bottom floor, haha. I bought something this big for two reasons. First of all, the price per square foot for real estate in Colorado is astronomically low, at least in comparison to CT. It's a matter of public record so i don't mind telling you that I paid $179,000 for 1916 sqft which translates to a mere $93.42 per sqft. By comparison, some friends in CT bought 1491 sqft for $270,000 ($181.08/sqft). Almost DOUBLE for less space! As far as cost of living is concerned, you should stop what you're doing and move to Colorado. It won't be as easy to find a single family home as the market for those is hot hot hot, but what you do find will still be cheaper than the northeast.
Secondly, before I bought, everyone told me to buy something that I could grow into. At the time I was looking, I was about to turn thirty and was dating a great girl. The advice, coupled with those two other factors got me thinking about settling down, starting a family, and making sure that the space I was about to buy would be able to accommodate the potential increase in family size that could be a real possibility in the next five-ish years.
Turns out that the girl and I didn't work out, but that's a completely seperate blog post... The long to short of it is that I didn't feel the same way about her as she felt towards me, and we had fundamentally different views on certain big picture ideals that I felt neither of us should have to compromise. We only dated for six months and I wanted to end it before marriage was the expectation, both from her and from everyone else in our lives. She's a great person and I wish her the best in life and hope that in time, we can be friends.
But this whole scenario leads me to the second major topic of this post. Pair bonding. Relationships.
Before I moved to Colorado in 2013, I was very happy being single. I did things because I wanted to do things and because they were fun. I did things for me. I had a bevy of close friends to experience things with, but i was equally happy to do things alone. I will fully admit that I've always been and probably always will be a romantic, but I was happier to not be tied down with a relationship. And I think in itself, that drives at my point. In the past, a relationship was a burden. Something that you carry with you because of some sort of need for another person. It was a co-dependancy. I didn't want that. I've never wanted that. I still don't want that. But the change has come in the bevy of friends department. Whereas I have friends here in CO, they're not the same kind of friendships that I had in CT. To be sure, every close friendship that I had in CT was in itself, just like a typical romantic relationship. Each was cultivated over time with ups, downs, and all arounds. There was a history with each person that was something special and was not- could not be replicated with the next person. Indeed I am very lucky to have that in my life.
That being said though. I don't have that here in Colorado. There aren't years of history between my friends and me because at this point in all of our lives, we all have that history with other people. That's not to say that we're not building relationships... It's just that at this point, the relationships that I'm building with others are for the most part, not as deeply rooted. I fully acknowledge and take some responsibility for not putting in the effort to build the deeper kind of relationships, but neither are others. People already have husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends, and everything else that comes from a lifetime of living. Which leads me back to pair bonding...
Most people don't have the intricate and deep network of multiple friends that I've built over the course of my life. People have people, but I fully understand and respect how lucky I am. The search for a pair bond is the search for what I've had throughout my teens and twenties. It's the search for one other person to share things with. It's the search for one other person to experience things with. It's the search to interact with someone on a level deeper than how you connect to all the other great people in your life. We're looking for one other person to really live with. I'm glad that I left CT because now that I'm "alone" here in CO, I'm ready to try and find that one person.
Till next time, internet.
j
