home sweet home?

[angledge]

This entry is full of personal relationship angst, so if you're not interested, don't click here.

My trip home over the holidays was .... well, let's just say it wasn't all sweetness & light. Due to a number of small factors (illness, jet lag, hormones, stress, exhaustion, holiday madness, family factors, etc.), Stacy & I were both in tense, irritable moods when I first arrived home. This led to our first fight ever, which I started over nothing more major than her not asking me how my day went when I got back from a day of activities in Philadelphia. I'm happy to report that our last week together was really good, far superior to the miserable first week home. But the first week home was pretty bad - bad to the point where I was considering moving-out options.

In light of that experience, I've been mulling over numerous "big issue" questions. My relationship with Stacy is a weird one. It's never existed without the pressure of deadlines where I'm leaving for some faraway location (South Carolina, then Scotland). We started living together really fast (less than three months after we had our first date), but we haven't ever lived together for longer than a few weeks. Furthermore, the whole time we've lived together, I've been more or less unemployed. This leads to two big imbalances: free time (I have lots, Stacy has none) & money (Stacy has lots, I have none).

I'd like to try to make an opportunity out of our forced absence from each other, & try to address these things via email. The advantage of email is that each of us can take time to compose a question, & the recipient can take time to answer it thoughtfully. Some of the things I'd like us to talk about:

• Kids - No (or Yes) from Stacy. If it's Yes, then we're going to break up. But I want to hear a definitive answer one way or the other.
  
• Money - Spending priorities. Budgeting strategies. Debt & how to pay it off.
  
• Location - urban vs. suburban, or at least Claymont, Delaware vs. Somewhere-Anywhere, More Interesting.
  
• Goals - where do we want to be a year from now? Five years? Ten years?
  

There are other, more detailed things (chores, television, food issues), but the ones listed up top are the Big Issues. The Relationship Killers. The kids ones is especially important, but the money one is also pretty crucial.

One question for me - how best to initiate an email conversation about this? Maybe talk about it on the phone first? Suggestions welcome.

One question for all y'all - if you're in a relationship, how do you & your partner communicate about issues like these? Do you make goals together? How do you handle money? What about career conflicts, or dividing up chores? Let's hear it.

Comments

[mrsjadephoenix.livejournal.com]

Usually we discuss things when something relevant comes up. Like if we're at a restaurant and we see a couple with kids, one of us might say something like, "Aw, those kids are cute, but I'm so not ready for kids right now..." and then it might segue into a discussion of how we feel in general about having kids.

Similarly, when we both had to start paying for large items together like furniture and stuff, we started talking about who would be paying and how finances between us would work. (Separate accounts? Joint account? Split everything down the middle? Each person pays for what they consume and only split the things we share?) Something that makes this a bit easier for us is that we're both employed right now, so we're both able to pitch into things pretty equally, but I currently pay propotionally less on rent because I make less income than he does. Things like that.

I guess this is why I'm really glad we've been living together for a while. We've already had to discuss these issues and get a sense for how we stand on things, and now (hopefully) there will be no big surprises when we get married. *crosses fingers*