I have always been vulnerable to acute attacks of buyer’s remorse. My worst was with a house. Because I couldn’t slide it across the counter for a refund, it nearly ended my marriage.
“I think we made the wrong choice,” I said to my husband on moving day amid a sea of boxes.
“It will grow on you,” he replied, more plea than promise.
Our relationship began in Brooklyn. Introduced by mutual friends, we quickly fell in love and moved into a church-turned-condo. Our bedroom was in the steeple — romantic, unique, albeit likely against code.
We moved to a safer apartment, got married, had one child, and then another. During my second pregnancy, rats began clawing their way up our sewage pipes. For months, we found them in our toilet bowl. When I began peeing in the bathtub, my husband insisted it was time to move to Providence.
He had grown up there — and he’d be able to run his family business. “The kids will have more space,” he said. “And if we don’t like it, we can always come back.”
Wary, I eventually assented, and we rented in Providence until we found just the right house — or so we thought. As soon as we purchased the “beautiful Dutch Colonial,” I was seized with panic.
My husband already knew about, and barely tolerated, my penchant for returning things. The most Thoreauvian person I know, he purchased almost nothing in the first place. We were all burdened by our possessions; like Thoreau, he believed we had become “the tools of our tools.”
Tool or not, what was it that made me want to reverse our decision with such force, like a body in the throes of food poisoning?
Was it the basement flooding, the water filter breaking and the garage door malfunctioning all within the first few weeks of our ownership? Nope. It was because the neighborhood wasn’t walkable and I, a New-Orleanian-turned-New-Yorker, didn’t know how to drive well.
There, we were cut off from everything, the nearest playground or coffee shop a mile away. From the window of my new kitchen, I stared at our giant car, thinking yes, it was only a Highlander, but, to me, it might as well have been a 747. That’s how unlikely it seemed that I could drive it safely with our precious toddlers inside.
“I’m freaking out,” I told my husband that first night over a microwaved dinner. Our children were at their grandparents’ so we could unpack. It was our first time alone in months, and I was pretty sure I was having a panic attack.
Could we return this house? I had done a back-of-the-napkin calculation. The restocking fees were absurd, in this case, the realtor’s.
“I’m sure it will pass,” he said with an audible sigh.
It didn’t. For the next two years, inside that house, I felt grief, shame, guilt. How insane must I be to be lucky enough to afford a house, only to want to get rid of it?
But I longed for my old life. In New York, when the children were fussy, I would scoop them into a baby carrier and stroller. We’d reset all our moods with fresh air and a stop at the local ice cream shop. Within two blocks, I would interact with a guy at the bodega and an acquaintance from college at the pocket park, and we would all feel better. Here, we were isolated.
Two years in, I still had no friends. I’d left a job I loved (as a museum educator) that couldn’t be recreated outside of New York. Unable to confidently drive our children, I trudged them through New England winters, wrestling on layers and clip-on snow treads. Our new house, built in the Victorian era, seemed like it was plastered in creeping yellow wallpaper.
“We need to move back to New York,” I declared.
“We can’t do that,” he said. He was generally unflappable, stoic, but as the days wore on, he’d become increasingly irritated with my relentless negativity about the house, the city, the therapist I was hoping might save me but who had only offered me one piece of advice in three months: “Why don’t you just get a Subaru?”
Was I going to tank this marriage over a low walkability score?
Yes, perhaps. (We later learned that the couple we had bought the house from — also ex-New Yorkers — divorced after they returned to New York.)
The costs, both monetary and emotional, were high. But I needed out. “You said we could always go back,” I reminded my husband.
“Fine,” he replied. “Do what you need to do.”
We sold the house in Providence and rented a basement apartment in Brooklyn — a far cry from the heights of our romantic church steeple. I got my old job back and cried happy tears the first day I entered my local bodega, my smile beaming as I made small talk with the man ringing up my seltzer.
But it wasn’t like the other refunds, accompanied by relief. My husband, who couldn’t leave his family business, fought traffic to New England every Monday morning, staying there until he made the reverse drive Wednesday evening.
My daughters sobbed when he left. Many nights, when garbage men emptying dumpsters at Key Food rattled me awake, I flagellated myself. What had I done? I’d ripped my family apart! And for what?
Our marriage was strained, increasingly tense. How could it not be? I’d botched my husband’s vision for our life, a lovely home in a livable city. Now, he was spending half his life on I-95.
We fought a lot in Providence. In New York, we lived in simmering guilt and resentment.
“I think we should move back,” I finally told him.
“No,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t do that again.”
There are some things that are just very hard to return, I thought, and a wife, as it happens, is one of them.
As in most things, the only way out was through. And, as in most things, you’ll only go through if you’re forced. In March 2020, we were.
For the first couple months of the pandemic, we camped out in my in-laws’ house in a village in Massachusetts. There, I watched with gratitude as my daughters ran through the backyard. I learned the names of flowers blooming on our walks. I reset my need for social stimulation. While I used to only feel satisfied after seeing dozens of colleagues and friends, suddenly, each human exchange felt like a gift. Our world was going through something terrible. I was lucky to be here with my children, on a little stretch of grass, away from people.
In “Walden,” Thoreau argued that the only people who feared solitude were those who had lost their ability to pay close attention to the world around them. “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.”
Thoreau admitted to a brief moment when he felt lonely out in his cabin, but, after listening to the rain, he wrote, he soon recovered. “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.” I was finally communing with pine needles, too.
We moved back to Providence in March 2020, into a 1940s Colonial with few details and disintegrating floors, but in a denser neighborhood. I helped my eldest learn to garden. I barely spoke to anyone other than my family, yet, I was happier than I’d ever been.
We recently decided it was time to move again. We were sharing one bathroom with two teenagers. My parents, in their 70s, were sleeping on a couch for their weeklong visits.
We bought a house, only six blocks away and still walkable. (Even Thoreau lived only a mile and a half from Concord, I told my friends.)
But last month, as we unpacked boxes yet again, my husband sunk into a state of regret. He hadn’t realized it in the heat of the purchase, he said, but now he didn’t think the house was the right one for us. It was too big, he thought. Wasteful.
He said we would live there for two years max and then move.
“You’re having buyer’s remorse,” I said, taking his hands and looking into his eyes. “It’s OK. It’s normal.”
“I guess so,” he said with a shrug.
He knew I understood. He knew I wouldn’t fight him — or his feelings. We both knew we would get through it together. Because despite the ups and downs, there is one thing we don’t have remorse about. Each other.
Jackie Delamatre is a writer and educator in Providence, R.I. She is working on a book about grappling with the climate crisis by connecting to the natural world after a lifetime of urban living.
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