Tag: Marriage

The Collapse Pt Three – Fractures and Faults

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.

The Collapse Pt Two – Getting Married

My memory is fuzzy on some of the details, especially concerning time, so I will do my best to represent it all accurately. But somewhere in here my girlfriend and I had driven her car and a bunch of stuff from my native Indiana all the way to California. We turned this into a road trip passing through the northern tip of Texas on historic Route 66. This meant stopping in St. Louis, Missouri then Amarillo, Texas through Los Angeles, California ending somewhere just south of San Francisco, California. I hope I’m getting these details correct as she and I traveled a lot. It was here, close to San Francisco, where we stayed in another place with another couple and her mom who had come from China to visit. Obviously by this time her parents were aware of our relationship. This was a difficult summer for both of us, as I was unsuccessfully trying to break into the video game industry as a developer/engineer and she was saving up to buy a home. In the end this took too long for me. The games industry isn’t a very lucrative trade especially for those starting out and is not easy to break into. Money and timing pushed me to career pivot. She was already established and was ready to buy a home. I still hadn’t landed my first post-college job.

We moved into the home she bought and I prepared to instead become a Software Engineer, an option I kept in my pocket as a Plan B since college. Becoming a SWE (software engineer) is not easier than building games but it is certainly more lucrative. After many months I was able to land my first job at a company pretty close to where we lived, now in the East Bay close to Oakland. This interlude of no income made her and I both pretty unhappy and landing that first job meant a lot for both of us. This would’ve been sometime in 2017.

It was around 2017 but before my first job that she began asking about marriage. I didn’t want to propose yet as I didn’t feel comfortable doing so without more job stability and I wanted to do something grand and romantic. However she has a habit of ignoring what I say I want and pressuring for the answer she wants continuously. I don’t know how long it took but every night in bed she would ask when I’m going to propose and every night I would say when I have a stable career. Until one night I didn’t. I was so tired of hearing the question that one night out of frustration I said something like “You want to get married? Fine, let’s get married”. And that was my “grand romantic” proposal. So idiotic right? If I could’ve kept my cool it would’ve been a nice moment, instead now I regret proposing so foolishly. So one day we went to our local county clerk’s office and exchanged vows in front of a judge. This was also another moment I lost my cool as I was worried about my job security, as a co-worker was recently let go, but the whole process took much longer than expected and I grew irritated. It was unpleasant.

Later that year we had a formal ceremony at my parents which was a lot of fun and my first time back home in at least a year. Then later that year we had another formal ceremony in China with her family which was also great as my parents were able to visit China for the first time.

Finally we both had jobs, a home, and weren’t crushed by the stresses of post-graduation. This was a really good time with the inevitable hiccup here and there. It was also around this time I started collecting games, one of my main hobbies for a while and a focal point of this blog early on. Life seemed great and great things seemed to be coming our way. My job was close enough I could bike there, so I was exercising everyday, had hobbies, and disposable income. However there was a large gap in our incomes and this constant pressure to make as much as she did weighed heavily on me. This was one of the greatest stresses for me at the time, meaning I didn’t like taking unpaid time off and felt uncomfortable with large expenses. She loves to travel and not only do I not enjoy it as much as her, it ate into my savings and income after I ran out of PTO. So much so I stopped any of my own traveling, like visiting family back in Indiana, because I felt so pressured to make more money. Again the cracks in our foundation should be obvious here.

After roughly two years at my job I was let go as a part of restructuring. This would’ve been in October of 2019. We had moved into several successive rentals closer to her work at this time so her house could be rented full-time. Which meant while I was still at that job I would be commuting roughly an hour north in the mornings, something she had done going south previously. I lost my job and wouldn’t get another one for another eight months. These gaps of unemployment affected her greatly and continued to be a sore point for her, understandably. There is some blame to be levied at me but it’s not easy to change jobs as I’m sure many know.

All of the stress that I was experiencing, no job, no income, living with other renters (something that stresses me quite a bit), and pressure from her put me into a heavy depression. We had planned a trip to the northwest during this time but I backed out at the last minute feeling guilt over not being employed. This really pissed her off and I spent the two days she was gone crying alone in our bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped, unable to land a new position and provide for my wife.

Fortunately I was approached for a contract position at Google that I interviewed for and was accepted into, though it took a couple of months before I started in early 2020. After getting this job we hit our sweet spot of marriage. We were both doing well at work and had a healthy work-life balance. This all occurred before the Covid-19 lockdowns, which changed everything for everyone.