Filed under: Your Home, Storage & Cleaning, Storage & Organization, Furniture
My boyfriend and I live in the house he bought with his ex. I love the house, but I don't love the memory of her living there.Each morning I wake up in a bungalow my boyfriend bought with another woman.
I won't lie: I'm a jealous person, and living in this house has made me even more jealous. At times, it actually got kind of ugly.
After moving in two years ago, I became obsessed with the idea that his first love - a woman I had never met and who he was no longer in contact with - had shared this space too. She had slept in my bedroom, parked her car in the garage and prepared dinner for my boyfriend, Tony, in the same kitchen.
The writer and her boyfriend in the backyard of their home. Photo: Courtesy of Kristine Hansen
Even though she moved out 10 years ago, there are reminders of her everywhere: I'd find junk mail addressed to her in our mailbox. Sometimes I even imagined their lives together in the house -- If I closed my eyes, I could see them walking into the house for the first time (it was during an Open House, where Tony says he knew right then and there, like love at first sight, it was the house). Later, they might have toasted flutes of sparkling wine after ripping up the carpeting and finding gleaming hardwood underneath. It got to the point where I couldn't even take a bubble bath without thinking about how she had once relaxed in that tub too.
When Tony asked me to move in with him a couple of years ago, I wasn't thrilled with the idea of living in a house that he'd shared with his ex-wife. But I was living in a one bedroom apartment with a strict no dogs policy; Tony had a 14 -year-old Golden Retriever/Border Collie mix named Augie. Plus, I worked at home. Even if the dog wasn't an issue, where would I fit a home office space?
Then there was the simple fact that I loved Tony's bungalow. It was south of downtown Milwaukee in walking distance to coffee shops and restaurants, Lake Michigan and parks. It had a nice-sized backyard and a basement to store my wine collection. I loved the living room's piano windows with leaded glass and the dining room's built-in buffet. The house had charm and character. Except for this one nagging ex-wife problem, it was perfect.
A view of the writer's happy home. Photo: Courtesy of Kristine Hansen
And so over Memorial Day 2009, we moved my clothes, books, furnishings and more into the house. But the more I arranged my belongings in the house, the more reminders of her I unearthed. While shelving my cookbooks in the pantry next to Tony's cookbooks, a piece of paper slipped out of one of his cookbooks; she had written a dinner menu. On the front page of another cookbook she had inscribed a love letter to Tony. I asked him to remove that page. (He did.) Every morning we used her ibrik (Turkish coffee pot) to boil our water for coffee.
To be fair, I had brought my own reminders of failed relationships into the house. Two cookbooks that were birthday presents from an ex, a cobalt-blue vase that another ex's step-mother had given to me, CDs purchased at concerts I had been to with other men, and shoe boxes containing photos of these past loves. But this was different -- I was moving into a house with my boyfriend's past.
Friends told me that over time the house would begin to feel like mine and Tony's, and I worked on letting go of her memory. Some of the asymmetrical pottery urns and mugs she left behind in a dark corner of the basement I considered taking to Goodwill, but in the end decided not to. Over many months, I realized that I didn't have to erase the memory of Tony's ex-wife to feel good about living there. Instead, we needed to fill the home with memories of our own.
Two years later, Tony and I are settled in, and while I am reminded of his ex at times, I shrug her memory away. I see the house for what it is today: our happy home. And we've decorated it so it reflects our life today.
We have a Scandinavian basket that we picked up in an antique shop on the way home from a camping trip in our living room. A vintage pewter vase is front and center inside the buffet, the result of our wasting away an hour at another antique store. There are framed photos of us on our vacations and at my brother's wedding. Trinkets from my travels are throughout, from the handmade dolls I bought from an artist in Belize to a framed tile of a ship that I purchased in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While on vacation in Mexico last year, Tony and I bought a piece of folk art (a cat) made in Chiapas. In the bedroom is a lawyer's bookcase left behind by his ex; we painted over it in a shade of light-green.
Recently an ex-boyfriend contacted me out of the blue to offer me first dibs on his espresso machine and coffee-bean grinder. He was moving to a new apartment and didn't want to lug items he no longer used. Remembering that I have a penchant for good coffee and don't mind tinkering around in the kitchen to make a cappuccino (after all, he and I co-authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to Coffee and Tea!), he offered it to me. I decided to buy it. Never mind that we once used them together in the mornings at his house years ago. Tony didn't blink when I told him. He's just excited that we can move beyond French press coffee.
Maybe it's because we're in love. Maybe it's because we just love coffee and old houses and spending time together. Either way, our relationship is based on trust, and evidence of our past relationships aren't a threat -- they're just a part of our past now.
There are always going to be reminders of past relationships in our homes. But what I've learned is that they're just reminders. After all, what matters most is who we are in love with today.
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