My poor real estate agent is very confused by me. I’ve been looking for a house for a while now, but we haven’t found one that’s quite right.
My agent is used to giving standard spiels about the school district to help people decide to buy a house, but I don’t have kids, so I don’t care if the house is in a primo school district.
So…what do I care about? I care about the house giving me the best chance of not killing my future relationship.
I don’t mean kill, literally. Of course I know not to buy a house with electrical issues. I wouldn’t want a fella I love to get burned to death while he sleeps.
But I do know enough about psychology to know that there are features of houses that may explain, in part, the high divorce rate.
Here’s how the wrong house can kill romance and relationships.
1. Layout
In most of the houses I see, the bedrooms are clumped together on one side of the house.
I’ve dated men with kids, so I know this can be a problem when I’m considering whether I want to develop a relationship with a guy. With kids in rooms so nearby, my attention would undoubtedly be divided when we’re trying to jumpstart some bedroom action.
I imagine I’d have one ear listening out to see if the kids are nearby. I imagine trying to be very quiet to make sure the kids don’t hear me if it’s nighttime and everyone’s in bed. I imagine feeling a bit bothered if the guy is being so noisy that the kids can guess what’s going on in our room.
Sex-noise shyness is just as real a thing as pee shyness. Seriously!
I almost missed a flight once because I couldn’t pee for a drug test after a running race. The drug-testing official and I were the only ones in the bathroom…for hours…while we waited for me to produce urine.
Rationally, I knew it was stupid to dread the official hearing the whooshing sound, but psychology of humans isn’t rational…Good luck getting me to enjoy myself when I know some kids might hear me getting busy.
You may think this isn’t a problem when there’s shared custody, but shared custody just means that your physical intimacy is reduced by time constraints, a la Flight of the Conchords’ Business Time.
Meaning y’all better be in the mood on the nights you can get it on and not be in the mood on the nights you can’t.
Surprise: Not everyone can get ‘in the mood’ on demand.
Sexual libido can be as finicky as an orchid, needing the exact-right conditions to thrive. Saying, “The kids went outside. Quick — let’s get it on before they come back inside” may be the equivalent of potting soil lacking fir bark.
All this concern about kids overhearing physically intimate noises is just a hypothetical scenario for me in dating. Fortunately I’m in a great age bracket where most of the guys I date have grown kids.
But from married couples I know, this scenario plays out in their daily (or nightly) life for years. YEARS of not being able to get it on when the mood is on. YEARS of muffling sound. YEARS of “Shhh, the kids might hear you!”
Even if kids aren’t on your horizon, those clumped-together bedrooms may be filled with guests. Or your partner’s visiting grown kids. Or, in this economy, roommates you have in order to afford to own a house, or aging parents you tend to because who the heck can afford nursing homes.
Lawd knows I don’t want to hear any of these people’s bedroom antics nor have them hear mine.
Either way…I told my real estate agent that I’d really prefer a house with bedrooms on both sides of the house. I didn’t explain why, but perhaps she knows.
Turns out, this preferred layout isn’t common. Perhaps architects are partially responsible for the massive divorce rate. What were they thinking when they clumped all the bedrooms together in close proximity?!
2. Shared Bathroom
I don’t have research to back me up on this (yet), but I’m hypothesizing that many of the people who get divorced in modern times shared a bathroom.
Some of you readers are going to argue with me on this. You may be one of those people who are highly comfortable with your bodily functions.
You may even be with someone who, like you, is comfortable taking dumps while you brush your teeth and the two of you converse about what you’re having for dinner. You do you.
But.
Slowly but surely, dump-by-dump, you may be killing your relationship on an unconscious level.
Your conscious mind may be saying, “How wonderful that we’re so comfortable with each other that we can do this”, but your unconscious may be saying, “I’m not feeling romantic towards the person who produced those unattractive noises and smells.”
Plenty of research shows that amount of attraction, including smell-based attraction, corresponds with amount of sex.
Perhaps the more unpleasant odors one associates with a romantic partner, the less sexual activity they have over time.
So…separate bathrooms may prevent the slow deaths of marriages.
3. Bedroom-to-bathroom Proximity
What were architects thinking when they thought up master bedroom suites?!
We need bedrooms to be as far away as possible from toilets. We don’t need to be lying in bed, waiting for our romantic partner to finish up in the bathroom so we can get it on only to hear our romantic partner make THOSE noises.
The 2023 Porsche 911 may be able to go from 0 to 60 mph in 4.3 seconds, but it may take a little longer than 4.3 seconds for me to go from thinking, “That guy just produced some of the foulest, most disturbing bowel sounds I’ve ever heard” to “This guy is sexy”.
Maybe in our 20s, our sex drives were such that we could rapidly erase those disturbing, auditory turn-offs.
But in our latter years, our sex drives can be more sluggish, taking more to get revved up and being more prone to collapsing rapidly like a deflated balloon when something smells or sounds yuck.
No, I don’t know of research that says the farther away the bathroom is from your bedroom, the more sex you’re likely to have. But there is plenty of research that suggests smells and sounds are related to sexual arousal.
Women especially can be turned on — or turned off — by auditory stimuli. There’s a reason lads all over the world pipe in Barry White when they’re trying to get laid.
I get that we can’t all afford separate bathrooms, and maybe we can’t get architects to design houses with bedrooms far from the bathrooms. Can we, at the very least, get sound-proof doors between the bedrooms and bathrooms?!
Or…choose the smaller bedroom that doesn’t have a bathroom attached as your primary sexy-time and sleeping-together room.
4. Single-income Price
Generally, I’m optimistic about relationships, but realistically we know that relationships might end. When they do, two cohabitating people need two separate residences.
Maybe the recent rise in housing prices is due in part to gray divorces.
Before the gray divorce, the couple only needed one house to house 2+ people. After, 2 people need 2 homes. So now we’ve got a lot more people demanding houses in an already-low-supply-of-houses’ market.
Anyway, here’s the tip: Buy the house that one of you can individually afford without needing your partner’s income to pay the mortgage.
That way, if there’s a split, the house is affordable for just one person. The other person can go find another place that is also affordable on a single income.
When people have a house that can only be afforded with dual income, that’s an extra stressor any time the relationship is going through a rough patch. Wondering, “If we split, how the heck are we going to afford two separate residences?!” puts extra pressure on the relationship.
Whether conscious or not, people are doing the math in their heads and recognizing that if they split, they’re not going to be able to afford the nicer home and nicer neighborhood anymore. They’re both going to have to downgrade.
You’d think this would make people a bit more careful in their relationships, to be a bit more willing to do what’s needed to keep the relationship healthy.
Instead, the dread of losing the posh house doesn’t motivate some to actually do the work needed to repair the relationship. The dread just adds stress which they try to endure rather than do the work needed to prevent the thing that stresses them from actually happening.
They merely ‘suck it up’ as long as they can to prevent themselves from losing the more-posh living situation
Then add this doubt: “Is my person staying with me through these hard times because she digs me or because she doesn’t want to give up the house she wouldn’t have if we weren’t together?”
If you get a house that either one of you could afford solo, this is one less stressor and one less doubt for a couple to wrestle with.
Also, before you cohabitate, work out the details of a legal agreement that you both agree to detailing who pays how much while y’all live together and what y’all will do with the house and equity if y’all split. Include who has to move out and how long they have before they have to move out .
I realize that sounds unromantic, but it really is a good relationship test. Plus your relationship won’t have to suffer from the “What will we do if we break up?!” stress because you already have the answer hammered out.
And if your partner refuses to discuss this kind of pragmatic agreement? Or the two of you aren’t able to come to agreement on this? Well, now you’ve certainly learned a lot about each other.
5. Tiny House
Yeah, no. The smaller the shared space, the smaller the libido over time.
Bottom Line
Do what you will. Pick a house that’s in the ‘right’ school district even though the layout is wrong, then watch the amount of sex y’all have ‘mysteriously’ decline.
Keep thinking you like being with a partner who is comfortable with you defecating in front of her, then wonder why y’all lost that loving feeling over time.
Enjoy the convenience of not having many steps between your bed and toilet, and watch her number of sudden-onset ‘headaches’ increase.
Live in terror that the only reason your person stays in a relationship with you is because she doesn’t want to give up the posh house that only dual-income can afford.
Or…be aware of the how your housing choices can affect pre-sex auditory and olfactory stimuli and libido in the long term, as well as create stressors in your relationship. Then optimize your housing choices to give your relationship the best chance possible of booming.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
 What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? |
 My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me |
 The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex |
 The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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The post How to Choose a House That Will Save Your Sex Life — and Relationship appeared first on The Good Men Project.