Selling the place we called home was our final blow.
I could feel his arm shaking as I hugged his tall, slim body. His nervousness seemed to echo through the historic bank’s prewar marble conference room and soaring ceilings. I sat down in the empty chair next to him at a large oval table where several strangers were reviewing piles of papers. “No crying today,” I whispered in his ear.
I’ve had closing days before on investment properties I fixed up and sold, but never on a house I owned with a man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. But after the nerves subsided, it was surprisingly civil—maybe even enjoyable on the top layer of skin. Lots of smiling and congratulatory handshaking to distract me from the failure flag in the room announcing that I had not been able to keep my home a happy one.
The soon-to-be proprietors of our house were there too, adorably excited. After our very first showing, they had made an offer in fewer than 24 hours. The only stipulation was that I would leave our kitchen table—the dream French ball-leg farmhouse table I found in a friend’s musty garage and brought back to life by repairing a long crack in the middle of the wood. Their eagerness and ease made a process that could have otherwise dragged on far less painful. At inspection, they even decided to take on finishing the gutted upstairs bathroom that marked our fallout fight without asking for a credit.
A good real estate deal has a certain magic to it. I’ve spent the last two decades working as a principal interior designer and renovations manager in hospitality and residential development. When everything feels right and everyone is happy walking around a space, I know I did my job well. In its own way, this was one of those moments—just without the same satisfaction.
It already felt like this young couple’s home. What would I do with a five-bedroom house all on my own anyway? The original goal had been to make the extra rooms artistic spaces, he was a painter and I wanted him to be able to create at home as much as possible. It never happened. We mostly just sat around and watched movies, snacking until our stomachs hurt. I told myself it should go to a family with young children, and here they were saving us from a very bad legal situation.
Some couples have child custody to agree upon, others have alimony payments to battle out. My partner and I were unmarried and had no kids or pets. What we had was a house and a deed with both our names on it, along with everything inside it to argue over, down to the ratty Persian rug neither of us ever liked. Selling the place we called home was our final blow.
I gave the buyers all the important info they needed: the garbage day, the phone number of the neighbor whose eldest son mows our lawn, and a heads up about not blowdrying your hair in the bathroom at the same time as running the air conditioning upstairs so the fuse doesn’t blow. My ex just sat there in a daze. He was waiting, as usual, for my instructions. “Sign here honey, and here.” As he signed where I told him to, I was instantly reminded why selling this house was exactly the right move. I wanted an equal companion, not another person to take care of. Someone I could be in a foxhole with, unharmed.
When it was my turn to sign, I took a deep breath in. All the work I had done on my own after he left—keeping the pipes from freezing on long, cold winter nights, staging our home to make it feel warm and loving while he ignored my pleading calls—swirled through my mind. How did we even get here, to closing day, to this midlife Splitsville club? Suddenly I could see everything—the gut-wrenching moments, the embarrassing behavior—all laid out in five messy steps.
Step 1: You Say (or Do) Something You Can’t Come Back From
For Valentine’s Day he gave me a rectangle tablecloth. It was meant for our round dining table in a room I had designed for us with so much care. When we first met he was so attentive to my efforts and interests, but years later, it seemed to have deteriorated into blindness. After I opened the gift, I looked him dead in the eye and prematurely said, “I don’t love you anymore.”
His moment of no coming back was going to a local bar, getting blackout drunk, and hooking up with the bouncy bartender half his age in front of all of our closest friends.
Step 2: Someone Moves Out
Not too long after these incidents, I came home from grocery shopping to find his closet cleaned out, his study bare, with absolutely no notice. Thinking of people being in our home, helping him take things out without me present or even a conversation, felt like a sharp slap in the face.
I started throwing every sentimental item he left behind straight into the trash bin. Bags and bags began to fill up with gifts we had given each other over our five-year relationship, thrift store keepsakes we had found together, postcards from vacations, and handwritten letters marking our milestones. It all ended up piled at the foot of the driveway and I went back to the house and cried making my Yogi bedtime tea. In the morning, the garbage men came, and everything was gone.
Step 3: The Real Pettiness Kicks In
Even more resentment began to consume us both. We started to partake in petty jabs; blocking each other on socials, deleting photos of us together, as if these immature acts could actually erase the years we spent together. I did this at work because all of a sudden work no longer made me happy. Not much did.
Social gatherings became relationship funerals; the first thing anyone would ask me was, “What are you guys doing about the house?” So I started drinking at home, alone. I restlessly roamed the vacant halls and chain smoked American Spirit Yellows on the back deck much more than I care to admit.
It seems like the person who remains in the home, in this case me, becomes the psychological prisoner of the other who is out in the world moving on, building a new life, under a new roof.
Step 4: You Bring in the Lawyers
In the fourth act I hired a lawyer who notified him that he must swiftly hire a lawyer as well. Suffocating questions like, “Who will pay the mortgage now?” and “Who will pay the utility bills and the construction loan back?” needed answers. I could start to see a light toward resolution flicker on and I began to feel some relief. But then each of us decided to take long trips out of the country that would mess with the legal process and drag out the sale of the house. Both our attorneys got automated “out of office traveling the world living my best life” email responses to offered settlements. The light of compromise was now a full fire of holy shit, we will never agree on anything again.
Step 5: You Have One (or Maybe Several) Last Hurrah
I landed back at the airport from a solo cruise feeling refreshed, sober, and strong. I turned on my phone and there was the first text from him in 12 months. “Hey” was all it said. That night he came over and we slept together in the home we both still owned.
We began to meet weekly and our rendezvous were filled with laughs, tears, even “I’m sorrys.” You could try to quit smoking cold turkey. Yes, it’s been known to happen, but generally speaking weaning off your addiction is what’s recommended for long term success. We both knew we weren’t getting back together but sleeping together a few last times somehow made it easier to handle the weight of listing the house with the same broker who had originally sold it to us. We both got more and more used to not knowing where the other was going every time we said goodbye and we finally started to work with each other’s lawyers. Then one day the promissory note to sell the house was fully executed—fairly. We stopped sleeping together and went no contact.
It took 21 months to get to closing day.
Losing my live-in partner left my nervous system completely shot. For so long, my body didn’t seem to know how to function properly without him, starting with the struggle of making my morning coffee for one instead of two.
Since the days of living with my parents and my first Brooklyn apartment, I’ve lived in every kind of place imaginable. All the while my dream remained constant: to someday buy a home with a man who loved me and to live happily together inside its walls. A life full of creativity, security, and of endless love making, of course. But here I was, selling that dream on a regular Tuesday in an average October and turning the next corner keyless.
Is this closure? Or just a successful closing on a house? Who is to say, but I picked up the pen and signed, breathing out a steady, unexpected, sigh of relief.
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by Alessandra Iavarone
Alessandra Iavarone was recently awarded a Poet & Author fellowship at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She is passionate about funding the arts and sits on the Board of Directors for Delaware Valley Arts Alliance. Previously, Alessandra toured the nation for almost a decade in the Brooklyn psych band Tomorrow’s Friend but is not too proud to admit that New Kids On the Block was her very first concert. She is still hangin’ tough.
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