Day 20 - House Hunting Edition · Mental Load Basics

Day 20 - House Hunting Edition

Partially inspired by one of your videos I saw recently, I wanted to talk about some of the invisible labor my fiancee took on by default when we were house hunting the past ~2 years.

-I don't have a lot of strong preferences. I previously thought this would make things easier on a partner but in practice this means she has to make all the decisions. So she had to look at things like "Garage or no?", "What color paint?", "How many bedrooms?", etc, and rather than make a decision I was like "What ever you like most!"

-She would often see open houses in our neighborhood and coordinate our plans to go to them, even if it was just for comparison/learning what we DIDNT want

-She set up an automated search with our realtor so new houses were sent to her nearly daily and she exhausted herself looking at all these "not quite what we're looking for" houses

-She bore the load of thinking of future concerns like School District and proximity to her friends/activities

So even though I came along to all these visits, gave some mild inputs/feedback, and ultimately put up the down payment when we found one, she had shouldered tons of daily mental load that outweighed those one time tasks.

1 comment