Upon reflection I realize it may be obvious I have a lot of privilege, growing up in a middle-class family, and as much as I want to be relatable I won’t always be. I will not tailor my words for the sake of relatability but I will acknowledge that I am incredibly lucky as far as what struggles I have to undertake. If any part of The Collapse series has been depressing to read or paints me as a pitiful person know that it only gets worse from here. My intention is not to lionize myself or indict anyone, this is just how I think my story is best presented. Also as a point of clarification, I refer to my wife in the present tense as “my wife” because we are still married but the divorce is guaranteed and it’s just a matter of time until a judge signs for the dissolution.
Shortly after the Covid lockdowns started my wife and I moved back into her house close to Oakland. She wanted to invest in more rental properties but out of state, so we started planning to achieve that. However she, thinking that I should also have my own rental property, insisted I buy a home in Arizona. My father is and has been a home builder for some time, so I grew up around old homes, new homes, expensive homes, and run-down homes. This imparted a different understanding of home ownership because I had an understanding of what went into their maintenance which to me is just a headache. Not that I didn’t want to own my own home, I just didn’t want to own a home in another state that I’d have to maintain. I told X that I didn’t want to invest in a rental property. She insisted. I said no. This pattern persisted every day over months, until in frustration I said show me the numbers to make this make sense. Fast forward several weeks and I was going to buy a house in Arizona. The passive income is nice, in the winter at least when it covers the mortgage and utilities, but I still really wish I had kept with no, it’s such a pain dealing with maintenance, HOA’s, lawn care, utilities, management companies, local taxes, licensing, negative reviews, and extraneous expenses (like a new AC unit) for a house I see once a year at most.
We planned to start from my native Indiana, staying with my parents before going to Colorado then to Arizona. Initially we were supposed to stay in Indiana for at least a month but my wife has never gotten along with my parents which is a can of worms I don’t even want to look at. It was while we were there I bought my first car which would become our chariot thenceforth. So we left after only two weeks for Tennessee where she had found a rental, something I also didn’t want to do but I understood it was difficult for her being in Indiana.
So we stayed at an in-law unit at a rental in Tennessee which was basically just an office, a bathroom, and a bedroom. We were both working remotely at the time so day-to-day we just focused on work. Except my work team was going through a shift in focus and I had basically nothing to do for several months. I still diagnosed and fixed bugs, improved our testing, and wrote documentation but I was just finding work to justify my paycheck. I again became depressed and started drinking beer to pass the time. I became so stressed from my lack of work and the disorganization of my team I asked to be let go from my contract but they offered a raise to keep me on, which I accepted. X would go on to fly from Tennessee to Colorado where the first of her new rental homes was. I drove. It was a great drive, I think I cleared the whole ~1,300 mile trip by day four. I started out listening to music but after a couple of hours switched to an audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. I think I got halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring throughout the whole trip.
Colorado started out fine. We stayed in a rental for the first several months through winter waiting for her first rental to be ready. I even remember picking up a large sushi platter for New Year’s and celebrating with her. We were still having fun together.
Months later we eventually moved into her new home, we got furniture and lawn care setup before the heavy winter came in, resulting in our garage actually being completely full of cardboard. I mean floor-to-ceiling almost-spilling-out-when-the-garage-door-was-opened full. But it was here I started drinking more heavily. Same issues with work and feeling like I didn’t have a lot to do. It wasn’t really bad at first but all bad habits can start small. I remember thinking “If she’s going to do whatever she wants then so am I”. Obviously not a healthy thought. Almost every night I’d head to the den and stay up drinking and playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. We even started sleeping in separate rooms because we didn’t do much together and our schedules were too different.
It was in the second rental property in Colorado where things took a hard turn for the worse. Between the constant travel, setting up the homes, doing most of the cooking and cleaning, working, studying, practicing coding, looking for new work, and saving up for a down payment I started to drink even more. I kept up with all my responsibilities but we were both busy and she didn’t seem to really care about what I was going through so I drowned my feelings in a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. We were in Colorado so we did all the fun Colorado things outdoors. We even attempted some 14’ers, but I was too out-of-shape and overweight to finish one. My drinking gave rise to arguments between my wife and I, prompting her to request I attend therapy for anger issues, which I did. I’m not with the same therapist but I am still in therapy.
When my mom, sister and her partner visited us we went white water rafting for the first time too. Again tensions between my wife and mom existed making some moments uncomfortable. By the time they visited I realized I needed to cut back on drinking and had done so tremendously. It was also while we were in Colorado that I correctly deduced my wife was pregnant when she got light-headed and fell after standing up.
It wasn’t long after this we bought my house in Arizona, which was a great deal of stress for me and completely depleted all of my savings. We moved in and started the whole “setting up the rental” process. However I felt incredibly pressured by my wife to find a new job, complete with a pay raise, while doing everything else too. Groceries, cooking, cleaning, property maintenance, working, studying, and applying for new work. My telling her that I only had so much time and energy to get things done just pissed her off. When after months of hard work and I still had no new job, I became depressed again and told her as much, but it just pissed her off. Whereupon she shamed me for having these feelings. This is in my mind where the true cracks in our relationship became obvious. We were both going through a lot, especially her at the beginning of her pregnancy, and we had a hard time supporting each other in the ways we felt we needed. Neither of us was getting our emotional needs met. I did everything I believed I could do but every misstep or sign of weakness upset her. She also became depressed and was in her own dark place. Things didn’t stay this way but it was a portentous period, indicating what would happen if we were put into a similar situation again. My not-drinking was much better but there was a night I drank way too much, leaving her feeling overwhelmed. Eventually we moved back to California so she could deliver our daughter somewhere more stable, somwhere close to her first house.
For the sake of levity (I hope) I will share that one day we came home to a crossbow bolt sticking into our front door. I’m not joking, someone had shot a crossbow through one of our windows, into the house, into the front door so that the head of the bolt was visible when approaching the door from outside with the shaft inside. This is funny because no one was hurt and we only had to replace a window and door. I have a suspect in mind but didn’t think either of us were in real danger so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I even told the police who I suspected but there’s not much they could’ve done.
ooglykraken 