Hi sweetie- Its important that you read this now. so I am sending it. Please read this today if you can fit it in, before things get busy or during a short break. This is highly important to me and with the stress we've been under lately- it is likely to continue to rise or build into higher tension if not resolved and that is why sharing this with you now is vital and it would be detrimental to everything including our health, to not tackle it now.
Its nothing to worry about - rest assured, as it isn't anything we havent spoken of and seems to be a continuous source of tension b/t us so its nothing bad or shocking and nothing to fear but it is a touchy thing and it is too pressing for me not to address right now. Since its one of those things I can only approach via email to avoid adding further fire to the flame, I feel it best to share/express myself to you via email. It just feels safer that way and I dont want to keep piling stress upon stress on you. I know it seems like I am right now but it's not my true intention. My true intention is resolve and cohesiveness in our relationship, minus the tension/stress as of late. So, its vital there be open communication to talk and that you truly hear me now. Some things I feel shut out on and there are times where email seems only appropriate. This is one of those.
So to preface things, I will explain:
I got this note from my favorite/friend diarist C., she asked I give you some wise advice and tell you she said it, so I chose to share with you the gist of the entry I wrote yesterday before you got home from work and now her following comments and feedback that I saw just recently. I think she knows what she is talking about and I also believe she means well and is trying to be helpful to you and I.
I also think her note makes me see how important it is that you hear how I feel in this entry and what I think because what I think or feel should be important and worth something to you, even if you do not agree in the slightest of anything I said. Most especially because it is causing me great stress and because if you love me, you would want to know and hear how I feel, to take that into consideration.
Please read this carefully and think about it, deeply and please think about C.'s wise advice. Its exactly how I feel - maybe you need to hear it from someone only ten years older than us who has had more than one home in her life and knows what it is like firsthand and isnt someone close to you or connected or pushing you to buy a home now. It's important you understand that she isn't attacking you - nor am I- but I think in a roundabout way she wants the best for you because she cares about me and knows the choices you make in this circumstance will all-around affect me, too.
By the way - the following journal entry was written yesterday afternoon before we even spoke or mentioned Yvette had written you. It is important that you know that. This was not written tonite or just now. It took me hours to write what Ive chosen to share with you and Ive summarized this to be to the point for you and concise/clear. I do not feel its malicious or meant to attack/hurt or anger you, and that is not my intention in sharing this, so I strongly want to emphasize that you not take how I feel the wrong way - please try to listen to what I am really saying in this without jumping to conclusions or negative assumptions.
I will feel anxiety over this because I don't want to upset you or cause you any negative emotion. It will worry me until I hear some reply or reassurance and you talk to me more on this. Please do at some point today.
I love you so deeply and hope you can just separate yourself enough for one minute to understand where I come from and put things into true perspective with out feeling hurt or on the defensive or even angry again, at me. Please try to hear what is truly at the heart of all that I am saying. Thank you in advance for your patience and again I apologize for the way I have caused you such stress in recent days.
I am aware that there is much going on and much to be stressed over in many areas of your life especially in this wedding preparation, that is why sharing what I wrote below is vital.
To minimize stress for both you and I, I need you to listen to what I am saying and hear this, heed it, because adding more stress to the mix is definitely the last thing we need so let's find a way that we can work together productively and find a happy medium please.
Please be gentle in your reaction and reply to this. I don't think my heart/mind/body can handle another day of arguing or crying. Please, my hormones are off balance w/ my period and I am sensitive, tired, stressed, drained and I just feel emotionally taxxed right now. I feel runned down and not at my best emotional state so please be gentle, its all I ask.
I love you-
April
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the stress + strain of house-hunting 7.28.08 [Monday]
A home is an investment and if we can't see ourselves there down the road ten yrs plus, we should not make that committment or investment. It is a huge [life-altering] decision that you can't just correct if you make the wrong choice, you are stuck.
I do not want our final home choice to be the result of pressurized selling or the home of our nitemares simply because we settled feeling desperation to pick anything just to get a home period.
I am not desperate and refuse to settle. I believe that anything good is worth the wait. I also believe in making a decision that I can commit to for a lifetime and not being rash when it comes to choosing a home and buying one.
I refuse to settle because if nothing is coming our way OR prices raise or it's NOT meant to be right now, then I am content to accept that. I would much rather wait until the time is right and have a home I love than end up with a dump I settled for just because we made decisions based on fear and desperation. But Jimmy thinks differently. He wants a home right away and he thinks in the negative, that he will never be able to afford a home if he doesn't buy now. I have to disagree. He has a high enough income that he can afford a home and will one day and he has pristine credit.
There is no reason why down the road he couldn't ever buy a home but he is so restless, anxious, antsy to buy a home before the market changes and prices raise that he has lost sight of his prior ambitions to find a dream home that is affordable which we both love and is almost ready to settle for homes I couldnt even see him ever wanting to live in if it were an apt we were renting. its just his ideals have gone down the drain due to desperation and FEAR of never owning a home.
I feel that he lacks trust in himself and the future and I don't know how to instill some faith and hope which I do have. I would ask why but I'm afraid to because he never reacts well to confrontation and seems to always become defensive, closing up, whenever I want to talk. He would only deny this and downplay what I sense and feel and dismiss it as if it were not true if I said my true thoughts right now.
I've tried to make him see and I think its opened his mind a lot as he even wrote Yvette a lengthy letter explaining we wanted a break and didn't want to settle for just any home [all the things I told him I felt recently] and that he had decided he'd gotten lost in the excitement of it all and lost sight of what was important to him and ourselves so he wanted to re-evaluate his choices and start over from scratch, stick to his ideals and not settle even if we have to wait til something pops up that we can afford. I think he finally realizes and agrees with me that it's better to wait than to regret, in the long run.
Unfortunately Yvette's reply to him was short and impersonal/unfriendly, abrupt. I don't think she is happy about the decision and she has never wrote anything saying she understands where we are coming from or supporting our decision. I fear this non-reaction will cause him to cave and re-nig on his decision, the one we made together and my anxiety is building with worry over this.
He even expressed his regret in wasting her time and apologized in two different emails saying he felt awkward with her and hoped she understood. He showed me her replies and none of them acknowledged his apology or her giving us any understanding. I don't feel she is truly genuine or wants the best outcome for us. I believe it is only the promise of a sale and cash that counts to her. She may no longer want to work with us but if she does, I think it is only money/sale- motivated.
I really do not want to work with her anymore after some of her actions/behaviors in all this and she has hit a nerve on more than one occasion with me coming off catty and snarky in an effort to get a rise out of me. She's hardly organized, professional or competent at her job and frankly I am at the end of my rope with her and sick of having to deal with the likes of her .
Jimmy on the other hand thinks he will ask her in the future to show us more houses again once we take a break. He acknowledges he senses the same discomfort in her replies or lack of acknowledgement or hurt and seems to think she will get over it and seems completely oblivious to the fact that his decision was taken very personally by her, in my opinion, and the fact that he has in a sense damaged the business relationship and I would not be surprised if she thinks I am behind this and feels hostility towards me. I have never felt that she genuinely likes me as a person, anyway.
She is NEVER going to be comfortable now even if time passes and she lets it go. I feel it's time to move on and find someone else especially someone who is not connected to his best friend. I feel choosing someone with a connection was a big mistake. This whole time I've felt his eagerness to do what she says, no matter how rash and irresponsible and hasty, has been effected by the fact that she is his best friend's sister-in-law. It is almost as if he feels obligated to impress her or he feels he has to impress her and give her a good sale. I do not want to buy our first home with someone he is out to impress or consumed by the fear of disappointing her just because she is connected to his personal life. That is how mistakes and bad choices occur. I feel and believe it was a HUGE mistake to go with her because if it doesn't work out or he makes a bad choice, he is going to have to see her in the future outside of the business relationship because its his best friend's relative.
I can't force him to do-away with Yvette because of his loyalty to her which seems quite wrongly misplaced due to the fact that she is his best friend's sis in law and he feels pressured to not disappoint and does not want to go outside of his 'comfort zone' to find another simply because its too much work for him so he will settle for this.
I am a person who has a real dislike of people who "kiss-up" or put on a facade just to make someone else like or respect them just because they are afraid to be themselves. The truth is I can't and I won't tell him what to do but I will not keep quiet about the fact that I do not like Yvette and do not wish to continue with her and that if he does, he can expect more future outbursts/arguments in front of her from me if provoked by her w/ sarcastic/catty remarks because my patience is wearing thin and my level of tolerance is growing weak. She has already seen me blow up in controlled ways a few times and I was sarcastic and snappy towards or indirectly irritated at her and it showed - it was subtle but anyone could feel the sense of tension spilling over in the air.
When Jimmy did tell me he wrote Yvette a lengthy letter about us making a decision to take a break from house hunting and pull homes we had bidded on that week and cancel them based on realizing we were settling and making bad decisions and needed to re-evaluate our priorites etc, I felt SO relieved. These were all the things I have been saying for months now and had argued over with him.
It moved me to know that he finally listened to what I was saying and on his own and had come to the realization that I was right and that he was being very hasty. I feel that him waking up has helped lessen some of the tension that got kicked up in our relationship..HOWEVER his mother has already expressed extreme disapproval this past weekend, and it sounded like from what I could see [he was on the phone with her], that she was unhappy and critical of his decision and was encouraging him to rush in finding a home and to settle before prices go up, rather than waiting for the right home. I heard him explaining and reasoning with her and defending our decision however I could tell his mother was discounting what he thought best for us and planting doubt in his and our decision together. After this talk, Jimmy seemed anxious over getting a home prior to our wedding in november this fall, all over again, AFTER we had spoken of taking a step back and going slower with this only days before.
I don't know what is in his head today. He is going back 'n' forth between rational logic and impulsiveness to find a home before the market changes. I feel he is being influenced back to his previous thoughts prior to deciding to take a break - all because of the way his mother was pushing him to find one and not take a break this past Saturday and I am aggravated as hell that she has gotten him all stressed out again making him feel as though he will never find or afford a home in his lifetime and that she has undone, unravelled the decision we had made together, only days ago, to take a break and reevaluate everything, change our game plan and so on. I am frustrated with it all and don't even know what we are doing now. He is so all over the place and indecisive about being decisive that I am confused/lost and it is causing me more stress than I can handle right now.
I mentioned recently that he probably felt desperate to buy a home because of his mother's constant calls everytime she knows that we are going to look at homes to see if we found one yet or if we have bid on it...And then when we haven't found anything, lecturing him he's got to hurry and buy a home. He totally denied this when I mentioned this gently last week but then my point was proven when his mother called and he said his decision this past wkend and she kept him on the phone for longer than usual just to lecture him about how she disagreed with him waiting etc.
I didn't hear her exact words but I was sitting next to him the entire time and I saw his face, his reaction and you could tell, that she was pushing him and pressuring him and making him doubt himself and I could tell after that convo - that it affected him because we've looked at more online homes after this to add to check out in the near future AND he made statements a few times after making the decision to cool things off that sound like he is getting desperate again and I sense that he is ready and ripe to contradict his and my decision.
In fact, I have the distinct feeling he will talk to yvette via email - if not today- sometime this week- and I think he will, without telling me, try to fix things in order to make near future plans. I feel anxious over this and think he will not voluntarily tell me about it or will ease it in light hearted conversation very soon just to prepare for a soon-to-be outing with her and act like we never made the decision we just did.
I sense that the resolve he and I decided on, is slowing slipping away and disintegrating and that he is going to retract all that he had said about taking a break because we have so much to do with planning the wedding and all and it is quite stressful.
The way I feel is : the wedding + impending marriage ARE top priority, therefore making sure everything is together for our day should come first!! We committed to this date way before we even started looking for homes and that should be our primary focus.
Planning a wedding causes extreme stress for most and he has been recently expressing this, and so, to top it off with trying to find a home before the wedding makes absolutely NO sense and is asking for it.
Things are stressful enough and even he is coming undone over the stressors of putting a formal wedding together and it really bears no logic to try to add more stress to your life by doing the second most stressful thing in the average couples' life- buying a first home.
I am not certain my mental state can handle that much stress and strain. it is just too much for me and i feel it is causing enough distress in the relationship to cause damage. i just feel the timing is all wrong.
There is no emergency, no rush to find a home before our wedding, but I can't convince him otherwise and he doesn't see the affect it is having on everything. It is like asking for suicide to add that to the mix and his idea originally was to get a home and move in, a month before the wedding. That is f***in' crazy and makes absolutely NO SENSE at all.
I can be a person who lacks common sense in areas that involve emotion and scary decision-making HOWEVER in this situation, I feel we have switched roles . He is the person I typically am and I am the logical one this time. It baffles me because he is very grounded, a logically oriented person, stable. J. does not jump to conclusions, make hasty choices, do things he regrets. Normally, he is slow, safe, cautious, guarded - slow to take big steps and make decisions, perfectionist about what he buys or chooses [must be flawless] so when I think of all this and I have told him this, I am completely confused as to why he has not been this way in the arena of choosing a home/buying our first home together.
I feel that my fiance is a successful person in many facets of his life and has wonderful potential for more success in his future however I feel that his parents high expectations/attitudes push him too hard and this truly blocks him and is a source of inner confliction and self-doubt. It makes me both sad and angry and also frustrated that I cannot do anything and I am helpless to make him see this without offending him.
I am dizzy with the whole thing. Things change so much. One minute you're told you have a good chance or are within the right price range then the next minute you're told 'oh sorry someone else already has a contract, outbid you, or you were not in the right price range.' We've had so many of this lately that all the homes are beginning to blend together and I can't keep up on it all. I feel utterly drained, burned out over it all.
It has been a whirlwind of homes, overkill of looking and being told to bid on what we can lay our hands on [according to Yvette which I thought unwise-] ..WHY bid on things you don't love as backup? Why not focus on only what you love and what you would settle for as the best? I had been telling this to Jimmy for a while now. It finally dawned on him and in his letter to Yvette late last week he did state this.
I fear he will regress though because her lack of acknowledgement and lack of attempt to reply to what he said to her or accept his apology may cause someone like him to fold and give in, and because he has a need to please/impress others to be liked. I can already envision him writing her out of the blue like nothing happened and suggesting to look at his next set of homes.
I hope he does not do that. It would look very flighty, wishy washy, and I would resent it after all we talked over and how I helped him compile his letter to her and took the time to discuss the situation with him, listened to him, and made a joint decision together. IF he were to turn around and change everything we talked out and decided days ago, I would feel very disappointed and unsettled..not to mention pissed.
When you make a decision together, you stick together. Not to mention the fact that he wrote two very decisive and to the point emails to Yvette stating clearly his decision and my approval of that decision to take a break, go slower, and do things entirely differently. And so if he were to start planning outings right away again, it would seem like he never meant what he wrote and it would come off as desperation and lacking ability to stick with what he had said when we had clearly made a decision and took the time to write out his feelings to her.
Her unacknowledgement of what he had written about our decision/apology clearly is her way of not putting any weight into what he said, knowing that that is the best tactic to get him to start talking again about our next planned meeting.
I fear he is not going to stick to that decision we made and that I cannot handle the stress that will follow and ensue. There are too many other important things going on that involve a heavy amount of stress like finalizing all details of our wedding and this added to it, causes deep confliction, anxiety, and is distressful to my mental state of being. I do not want to go backwards from this!! but that is what i sense is going to happen. I don't know what to do :/
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Thank you for listening and I think you should think about what I've expressed. Please do not take it personally or think that I am trying to attack you. The whole situation is going to cause me to crack mentally and my mind can only handle so much stress. Be mindful of this. Please.
You stated to Yvette via email and right in front of me that we were taking a break and I agreed and told you I felt it necessary and essential and even if you have changed your mind at this moment [within days, it is not even a week since you wrote her], it would be unfair to yank me back into that gruelling process of doing what we were doing prior when it is so obvious I am in great need of a break right now, emotionally and mentally. It is too much. Please heed my warning. I do not want a mental breakdown before our wedding .
Here are C's notes. Please know that I believe in my heart that she has good intentions and that she truly just wants the best for both and is looking out for your and my future. She does like you and always compliments you when I write so it's not like she looks down on you. Anyway here are her notes:
I would recommend that he not tell his family at all the next time you look for a home. When we were considering building we never mentioned it to Freds' family because they would just harp on him. People who harp on other people are controlling. They are NOT looking out for someone's own good and that "need to impress" is why so many people are in foreclosure right now. All Jimmy has to do is read the paper. Does he really want to have to turn around and lose his home and his credit?
Yikes! Sorry. I don't mean to be inciting you against him if you're already having hard feelings, but Jeeze Louise! Tell Jimmy I said it's a very wise decision, that people overextend themselves and that if you wait for your dream house, you'll both walk in and go, this is it! But if you buy a house because you feel you have to, you'll be settling! *hugs*
You definitely need to be included on decisions. Maybe you can just sit on this stuff for six months. It's never a good idea to be trying to do too many things at once. In this world where everything is so stressful, it doesn't make sense to invite more! [C.] [p]
