Looking for houses is so very frustrating. I know it’s only been just over a week, but I don’t want to look for a house. I just want to have one that I can go in and paint and tear up carpet and make into my own. Sigh.

I heard about a gorgeous sounding house last Thursday. It’s in a beautiful historic neighborhood and most of the houses near it are brick tudors. It is also $15,000 out of our price range, as I also discovered this morning. Ouch.

So what’s a girl to do when she finds what could be her dream home and she has just spoken to the sellers and finds out that she cannot afford it? She will ask her boss jokingly for fifteen thousand dollars and he will refer her to a mortgage broker. The mortgage broker will take information, names and social security numbers and call her back and give her monthly payment amounts that make her wince visibly. So she decides to go out for lunch and drive around and sing with Deee Lite to “Groove Is In the Heart” because it is beautiful outside and think.

And she drives by the house, because she is recently obsessed with houses, in case y’all can’t tell. And the house is very cute but not the kind of house you mortgage your entire future and your kidneys to buy. And the house is certainly not the kind of house you drag your boyfriend into mortgaging his kidneys for also.

So I realized something, looking at that house. I’m 24 years old. I will probably, barring weird accidents, live to be 100. That means I have more than 75 years left on this planet. Is this one house, one little house in a city of houses in a whole freaking WORLD of houses, worth doing this to myself right now? Is it worth the headaches and the ramen noodles? Because we could buy this house – I’ve seen the numbers now, I know it’s possible. But really, we can’t.

A big part of why we can’t has to do with that word – we. I cannot think of this process as being just about me, and I haven’t been, I swear. But this house would really screw up the plans we’ve made – for him to go back to school, for me to go back to school, for us to be able to travel… and if it was just me, I might buy the house anyway. But it isn’t, and I’m not, and so there is this “we” to think about. And this we has made me happier than I’ve been in a long time, possibly ever, and it would be so unfair of me to mortgage not just my own kidneys and future but his too.

So we’ll keep looking. We will find a house we can actually afford that we can love and make into a home and not just a pile of bricks and wood and tile. It will come.

I guess this is part of being an adult. How terrifying. Though if I can do things like borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, I had damn well be able to act like an adult. Right?