7 years ago.

My then-wife and I purchased the monstrosity.

7 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 4 car garage, swimming pool.

We hoped it would save our marriage.

It only served to torpedo it further.

A Thread.

We hoped to entertain friends.

Having a large house was a status booster, right?

We had hoped to have family over every weekend to the pool.

We very seldom did.

All the maintenance and cost that went into this house made all the dreams about it fade quickly.

We had hoped the house would fill a void in both of us.

We weren't having sex. We were running a business partnership versus a marriage.

We were trying to play make-believe and portray a happy, well off family.

Trying to impress people who didn't care.

Adding the house only hastened the demise of our now pretend marriage.

We failed to do many things to fix our marriage, so we just added crap to see if something stuck.

Nothing stuck and we were left with debt, expenses, unhappy kids, and sexless, loveless lives.

We try to fix our marriages with stuff.

It doesn't work.

Stuff doesn't help a marriage. It hinders it.

Debt, stress, financial hardships for the sake of "looking" the part.

All of it was a fucking mirage. All of it.

Two people that didn't know who the hell they were trying to pretend to be people that other people would like.

How depressing of a life that we had to make all of this up to show folks we were supposed to be happy.

How many people are in this same boat right now?

The one thing I'm happy about?

Seeing this photo pop up on my memories and knowing the hell I went through with it, I'm happy for being rid of all of it.

The marriage, house, the pretend life.

That house, as much as my kids and I miss it, was an act. A fiction. A fantasy.

It was all fake just to try to save a marriage, a life, that neither my ex nor I wanted.

We had gotten married because she wanted kids and I was desperate.

And the cracks in the foundation we had mistakenly built our lives on got wider and bigger with this purchase.

And with every mortgage payment that crippled us, with every problem that cost thousands, with every weekend we stayed in the house because we couldn't afford to do anything else, with every 70-hour workweek I pulled, we saw more and more that this wasn't us.

It never was.

With every year that passes, I still have nightmares about that house. The house that cost me thousands to sell, put me into debt that has taken me 4 years to climb out of, and stressed me out to add enough grey hair for a lifetime.

All because of a fiction we were trying to propagate.

All because we didn't know who we were when we got married. All because we wanted the idea of marriage over the actual "til death do us part" line.

We jumped in because we thought that's what people were "supposed to do".

As I look back from a better place now, finally, I resign to not make that same mistake again.

Mortgaging my future on a fiction.

Being in a marriage because I truly want to be there as opposed to doing what other people wanted.

Making my own way in life.

I won't make that mistake again.

Nor will my ex.

We learned and are never going back.

Stuff doesn't make your life or marriage.

You, the REAL you, does.