1) You live in Pennsylvania. How many months a year does the weather even allow you play basketball outside? You probably only have to suffer with the kid for a few months of the calendar year. You may have to put on your winter coats and crank the heat, but much of the year you'll be able to leave the windows and doors open and you'll still have silence (save the sound of the winter wind blasting cold air into your house).

2) You say he's an adolescent. That means he'll probably be going off to college in four or five years which means there's a relatively finite period of time in which you could potentially be subjected to him. If he appears to be a kid who is going to to junior college and live with his parents, then you may need to move.

You jest, but your point is serious and clear. And your aim is noble: to let out the little-known truth that for a huge percentage of the population buying a home is a sucker's move.

I think that there was a really well-kept secret in all of the home ownership and appreciation fantasy tales that we all told during the last ten years ("my exact model, that hasn't been remodeled, sold down the block for [fill in the blank] hundred thousand dollars more than we paid five years ago).

Specifically, none of those tales included details regarding all of the money we put into the homes while they were in their upward value flight. When you heard everyone screaming "I have such and such equity" at the tops of their lungs prior to the crash, no one mentioned the $10K in cold hard cash that they dropped on the landscaping, the $75K that they put into the kitchen remodel, or the $6K they handed over to the guys who replaced the air conditioner five years earlier. No one discussed the home equity line of credit they took out to buy plantation shutters or the 5-10% that was going to come right off the top for transactional/sales costs (broker fees, pest inspection repairs, etc.) once we decided to sell and collect our princely gains.

And it was these inflated appreciation numbers that disregarded the actual costs involved that were part of the tale used to sell the idea of home ownership as a "you just can't afford not to buy" proposition. Yes, homes were going up at x percent per year, but you could have rented and put much of that same money into a mutual fund and a mutual fund never needs a new roof.

I really don't know what to say to you but I am really sorry that you are enduring this. It seems really painful and disorienting. You're having an identity crisis of sorts trying to figure out how to live as the "changed" you. Good luck.

I read you comment. Why do people like you exist in the world?

Fake Letter

I quoted a "Tears for Fears" lyric for the subject line because I thought it was fitting. That's exactly what you need to do: find out what this fear is really about.

There are two types of procrastinators. First, there are "arousal procrastinators" who seek the thrill and adrenaline rush of putting everything off to the last minute. You are NOT this type. Second, there are "avoidance procrastinators" who view their work, their art, their vocation, a certain challenge, etc. as a complete measure of their self-worth. So they procrastinate out of fear of having to judge themselves as failures. I believe this is you.

You need help in addressing the issues that are causing this procrastination. You have to recognize that a single failure in a professional setting, etc., is not a complete statement of your self-worth. You seem to already have a relatively strong grasp of the underlying problem. I believe work with a therapist may get you past this and past other areas in your life where you have chosen disproportionate avoidance as a means of responding to your fears.

Good luck.

I am a man, for whatever that is worth in evaluating this comment. You don't love her. You're obsessed with her because she was able to cut you out of her life and that bruised your substantial yet fragile ego, it shook your selfish world to its core. And now you have to conquer her to overcome that fact.

Let her go. You've hurt her enough. You sound like someone who may be able to weasel your way back into her world to re-write your history so that you can go back to being the abuser and erase the previous ending where she finally empowered herself and got out from under you (i.e. dumped you).

But please, move on and give her a break. And try to keep the broken, abusive, pathetic part of you that hurt her and displayed itself in your letter under wraps in your future relationships.

Dear MP:

You wrote: "I don't want him to see his friends anymore... ." Read that line back to yourself. What does that say about you? What does that say about your relationship? You are the wrong woman for the wrong guy in the wrong relationship. It's not his fault, it's not yours, it's not his friends. It's all of the above.

His relationships with his friends threaten you and so you need to find someone you don't feel threatened around.