Partnership is Presenting a United Front
But it's also ensuring one person keeps it together when the other goes ballistic.
Before there was a Bean, R. and I spent our Saturday mornings hauling three pups to a gigantic dog park many towns away. The entire journey took 45 minutes each way, and to treat ourselves for being the best pet parents on the planet, we often stopped for lattes at a cafe called Summer Moon that is known for its wood-roasted coffee. You can’t really taste the difference, but the drinks were delicious, and we enjoy rituals.
Much like Starbucks, Summer Moon asks for a name to write on your cups when the cafe is near capacity. The gesture is intended to keep things organized. R. usually gets the coffee while I wait in the car on my phone, and since he has a shortened name that is both easy to pronounce and spelled in the traditional way, we generally get cups that have “Randy” written on them.
Except this one amazing time when R. handed me a cup that read “Brando.” Not Brandon. Not even Rando like “some rando ordered this coffee.” Just two lattes for a man that another man thought was named Brando. R. says the cashier didn’t even question this. There was no, “I’m sorry. Did you say Brandon?” or “How do you spell it?” Apparently, the guy heard “Brando,” thought that was a perfectly normal response to “what name should I put on the order” and sent the cups down the line to the barista without a second thought.
I can’t even explain to you how much this story delights me. I’m dying laughing even as I write this. And not in the way where I let out a few giggles. No, every time I remember this, I cackle hysterically wherever I am. “Remember that time you got us coffees and the guy thought your name was Brando?” is something I say to R. on a regular basis. I don’t know why I find it so hilarious, but I do, and frankly, so does R. We laugh about it a lot (although admittedly, R. doesn’t lose it like I do). Any time I feel a little down or R. gets a little gloom and doom, remembering this weird little exchange inevitably lightens the mood.
Why am I telling you this? Because lately, R. and I have relied on the levity of this memory more than usual. We’re ass deep in the logistics of moving six lives from one A-named city in the south to another, and it is going…interestingly. From R.’s perspective everything that could possibly have gone awry in some way has. I don’t quite see it that way, but I do agree that most of what’s happened has been far from seamless.
Are you sick of reading about a house that you’ve likely never been to? I’m certainly sick of talking ranting venting thinking about it! But alas, I will be writing about it one last time in this newsletter because the chaos that has gone down is a lovely illustration of my opinions about partnership from the titles above. Buckle up. Here we go…
Now if you haven’t been following this saga from the beginning, here’s the TL;DR recap: R. got an amazing new job that he has to relocate to Atlanta for. This is exciting news. While I love Austin, R. hasn’t been totally happy here. This change of scenery will be good for all of us, and despite the weird small talk-y conversations I have to keep having about how much traffic there is in Atlanta (as if this is not the case pretty any place worth living), we are looking forward to a fresh start in a new place.
New company gave R. four months to relocate. When we got that news, I immediately reached out to the realtor who helped us buy our house to see if he’d be interested in helping us sell it. He was and told us he worked with another woman now, so we would have both of their expertise to get this house sold. This all seemed great. It has been less than great.
The long and the short of it is that after a ton of work on our part to get this house on the market in 10 days, we did and promptly left the country. The offers rolled in quickly. We had two within a few days of our “vacation” to Colombia. After a ton of discussion and hang wringing, we decided to turn down a full price cash offer because we had listed on the lower end, hoping to get multiple offers. We accepted the offer that was $7k above asking.
Everything went forward as planned. Part of the deal was that we would replace our roof, which had suffered an abundance of wind and hail damage. That should have been straightforward, but after 23 days of hemming and hawing, the insurance company we currently have told us that the damage was before their time and therefore not covered.
This meant returning to the company that previously held our policy and asking them to cover us after the fact, which, miraculously, they did. With all the delays, our house which was set to close on 6/25 won’t close until after the roof is fixed in mid-July. The main source of the delay now is having the equipment to remove our solar panels, which the roofing company won’t have until other jobs are completed early next month.
But that might not matter so much given that a criminally low appraisal nearly fucked the deal. I say nearly because we are still in limbo. The buyer really wants the house. We want to sell it to her, but we’re also not willing to give it away because her lender won’t budge on an appraisal that everyone agrees is low. Yes, this is the short version of the story. I’m almost done, I promise.
Now, if you’ve been following along, I’ve been at war with our agents because they don’t listen to me, only want to talk to my husband and consistently do whatever they want supposedly in our best interest without consulting us. Unfortunately, they had to have a conversation with me alone last week, and although I laid out two very clear courses of action that I was OK with (and thus, R. was OK with), I never heard back until we received a text saying that the buyer would like to look over the property again to see if she wanted us to throw anything in with the sale to help her bridge the gap between the appraisal and the asking price. This prompted R. to send me a text asking when we approved a fire sale on our belongings. I was livid.
What I had said was that I might be willing to throw in some additional furniture to get us closer to the deal price. I know that I made this clear because I said selling at slightly above the asking price would be “a complete travesty.” I definitely didn’t say I’d be OK with getting to the asking price while also undercutting our profit by giving away all of our things. How would that deal possibly benefit us? It would be like accepting the cash offer but then lighting all our possessions on fire, so we still had to start from scratch after we moved. Fucking what?!
R. and I were about to leave for a relocation trip to Atlanta to find a place to rent when we landed. After I sent an email to our agents saying this was not acceptable and received the most condescending response imaginable that basically attempted to gaslight me about the conversation I’d had with our agents and told me that asking for more would be “unethical” given our agent had already negotiated to get us to the list price, I was so pissed I couldn’t respond. This deal had been going tits up for a while, and I was over it. I told them not to contact us while we were gone. The buyer could stop by the house after we got back. We would see what happened then.
What happened then was that the buyer came back with a list of everything we own. I’m not kidding. She wanted everything we had, right down to the Nest thermostat and the “stripper pole” in the garage. That’s when one of us went ballistic. It was me, friends. I did. In probably every other instance I can think of, I’ve been the cool head that prevails.
This time, I wrote a molotov cocktail of an email. I’m a writer, so you know that shit cut deep. It definitely had an impact. I’m certain our agent’s panties got seriously bunched because she’s been on her best behavior ever since. I wouldn’t know since I told her she wasn’t permitted to contact me and she would get her wish to only deal with R. from here on out, but when you accuse your agent of working on the buyer’s behalf, they tend to straighten up pretty quickly. An accusation, it should be noted, that is not unfounded given the circumstances. But now, we wait. If the buyer wants to pay the deal price, we’re happy to give her almost everything she asked for. But not my stripper pole. That shit is mine, and I’m taking it with me.
The point of the dramatic retelling is that one of the things that most annoyed me about this exchange is that our agents seemed to think that they could go around me to R. and get a different answer. That’s really not how our relationship works. We may disagree in private, but when it comes to dealing with outsiders, we are a united front.
I know this because it is one of the most important things I believe about being in a relationship. Even if I think R. is being a little unhinged, I’m going to back him. I might tell him later in private that I thought he was in the wrong, but I’m not going to do it in front of a third party. That’s the deal. It’s us against the world. Our daughter is not ready. This will be very annoying for her.
But the other piece of this is that both partners can’t be over-the-top angry at the same time. There has to be a balance. When one person feels like they’re going to cry because trying to find a rental in Atlanta that allows three gigantic dogs has been a marathon-length exercise in persistence, wheeling and dealing, and an uncomfortable amount of extroverting, the other has to be the immovable anchor in the storm of overwhelm.
When someone wants to throw in the towel because everything that could go wrong has (including getting a salad at the airport and receiving a package of to-go cutlery that only has a spoon), the other person has to remind you of the Brando story and bring you back to the silliness of what life can throw at you at any given moment. This is partnership. One person goes down—sometimes unexpectedly—and the other person is there to pick you up.
This is a very good thing. We all need someone to see us for our abundance of flaws and love us anyway…even if it means dealing with the aftermath of a scorched-earth email, a circumstance that requires you to become the go-to go-between because you don’t make big life-altering decisions alone (obviously). As long-term partners, we ultimately spend some moments as the light that uplifts and the dark that needs to be lifted. And sometimes, every once in a while, we spend a few of those moments as a latte-buying man named Brando.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix