Pursuing multiple options at once

There’s no one, clear, guaranteed way to achieve our current goal of figuring out how to pursue our careers while living together in the same house. Which is how I found myself, yesterday, interviewing with the Village of Corrales in the morning and bidding on a house in Santa Fe in the afternoon. We weren’t going to implement both – the house in Santa Fe is too far from the job in Corrales. If I got the job, we’d back out of the purchase of the house, if we went with the house, I wouldn’t accept the job. It was going to be one or the other. Or as it turns out, neither.

I did not do well in the interview. They wanted far more knowledge about the village than I possess. Either they already had a favored internal candidate and biased the questions toward him or her (quite likely), or they simply wanted us to have done a lot more homework than I had managed to do. They also annoyed me by refusing to answer any of my questions about the job, which I did not think was a respectful way to treat a candidate. An interview is for both sides to assess mutual suitability, not just for their own assessment. So I would not accept the job even if it were offered, because I don’t want to work for them.

I was not particularly disappointed about the job. It was just a waste of a morning and a bit of an annoyance. Luckily, I really do like my current job, and I love my team and don’t want to leave them. The primary reason I applied for the Corrales job is that it is a lot closer to John’s job. And there are some nice houses in the north valley (along the river), that are somewhat affordable.

Meanwhile, the previous evening we had bid on a house in Santa Fe. By yesterday afternoon there were multiple offers, and they called for “highest & best” (final bids). We looked at the house again and studied our comps (prices of comparable houses that had sold). I was confident that the house was under priced (unless the market goes down in the future, which is hard to predict). Even though we bid over list price, apparently we did not bid high enough, because our bid was not chosen.

This was a disappointment for me because I really loved the house. It was a block from the major bike trails that go through the town, which we love to use for biking, jogging and walking the dogs. Even better, it was also a block from the train station! The train goes from central Santa Fe down to Albuquerque. I could have walked to the station every day and taken it one stop north to my job, and John could have taken it south all the way down to Albuquerque. The house was also pretty inside, with a large backyard.

John wasn’t as impressed with the house as I was (which is why we didn’t bid even higher). So maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get it.

However, it leaves me with lingering anxiety, because we aren’t on the same page about what we want in a house. It’s hard for me to be optimistic about finding something that we’d both like. We can’t just buy something that has the attributes that he wants as well as the attributes that I want, because they are contradictory. I want to live in town, close to everything, and he wants to live out in a rural area.

The first house we bought together, in Albuquerque, was a compromise, but in the end, neither of us was happy with it. The suburban neighborhood lacked the “vibe” that I like, and was predominately older people with a different political and social culture as my own. It also was an annoyingly slow drive, through dozens of stoplights, to get into the main part of town. I didn’t like being way out on the edge of town. But for John, it wasn’t far enough out, and he chafed at having neighbors right next to us on both sides, even though we had managed to find a house with open space behind it.

Since returning to New Mexico we’ve been oscillating and without a clear direction of what to do next. Then I found a job in Santa Fe that further complicated everything. We are missing a clear, united goal, and are failing to imagine a specific solution that we could then implement.