ᐅ Choosing a Place to Live with Your Partner – How to Reach Agreement

Hello everyone,

I have been a more or less silent reader here for some time now.

But now I would like to ask a question and hope that I’ve come to the right forum and that it hasn’t been asked before (at least I haven’t found anything).

How did you and your partner agree on where to move?
Did you create a list of pros and cons?

A little about us and our background:
We are a married couple with one child and another on the way.
She is from a small town with 7,610 inhabitants and I come from a small village with a total of 8,100 inhabitants. Both places are about 13 m (8 miles) apart.

Kindergarten, primary school, and corner shop are close by in both places.
In the village, stores like Lidl are about 4 km (2.5 miles) away.

I love the peace and quiet and the closer connection to nature there, but she thinks it would be too quiet. It’s often the case that people want to live where they grew up.

I would appreciate any suggestions and opinions.

When we first met, we both lived in the same city and neither of us wanted to move, so fortunately that wasn’t an issue. When searching for a plot or house, the main goal was simply to find something. The location was almost secondary. The only important factor was that we could both easily get to our workplaces.

Do you even have such a wide selection where you live that the question "where to live" becomes relevant?

If you still have the choice of land plots, I can only give one piece of advice for your children: move to the countryside.

We step outside the house and are in the forest; we regularly use this for walks, but at the same time we're 10 minutes from the motorway and 10 minutes from the "big city." The schools in small towns are better, and the kindergartens are good anyway.

Hello dear,

It was quite similar for us. I’m a city person (a real big city, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin), and my wife comes from a small town (actually medium-sized) and always wants it quiet and green, while I also don’t like gray and noise but appreciate the (walking) availability of infrastructure and other related conveniences.

So there was quite a bit of potential for conflict regarding the location of our future home, but I was open-minded and we went to view a property on the outskirts of Berlin. It was a nice, large plot with a great house, but when we drove back home and saw only residential houses for kilometers without even a bakery in sight, my wife was the first to say that it just wouldn’t work.

Pros and cons sound good. But especially think about your children. If they always have to take a bus for an hour to get to school and it only runs three times a day, they will thank you by moving out as soon as possible and eventually putting you into a retirement home (exaggerated, of course!). I had to live like that for two years as a teenager, and it really wasn’t pleasant. Sure, you’d have daycare and primary school nearby, but for at least 5 to 7 years, you’ll have teenagers who not only need to attend secondary school but also don’t have a driver’s license yet.

Regarding staying connected to your hometown, honestly, 13 km (8 miles) is not much of an argument. You’ll probably own at least one car anyway. It’s also a distance that can be nicely covered by bike in good weather; I do that every workday outside of winter (in Berlin!).

For me, price would matter more. Are the plots in the village much cheaper so you could afford a bigger or nicer house? That is the case here in Berlin, but for us, the disadvantages once you cross the Berlin-Brandenburg border have become too significant. Now the discussions are more about the micro-location, such as public transport within walking distance, more green spaces, a busy street in front of the house, etc.

Best regards

Tolentino

It is also important that, in the end, both of you are satisfied with the choice. You can accept a small compromise, but if it becomes too big, it will only lead to problems and dissatisfaction later on.

An example:
We live in a community with just under 20,000 residents, right next to a large city. My wife would like to move a bit further out (10–15 minutes by car). I also like living there, but I don’t want to spend even more time commuting to work (currently 40 minutes each way). At the moment, I can bike to work. However, because of the distance, that would no longer be possible. Driving would then take me 60 minutes (or even longer if traffic is bad). That is simply too long for me, at least in the long run. Adjusting work hours is only possible to a limited extent, since I will be responsible for taking the children to kindergarten and, initially, to school as well.
No matter what my wife wants, I would never buy a house there because the disadvantages for me outweigh the benefits.

Wow, it’s hard to make any concrete guesses just from the outside! We come from different countries but structurally and socially similar places. How we found our homes was always a process based on considering how we want to live together and what is affordable for us.

For you, it’s about 13 kilometers (8 miles) one way or the other, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a solution, especially since the market probably doesn’t offer unlimited options. Instead of choosing between “city” and “countryside,” it might be worth thinking together about what is important for your life and living situation now and in the future. Try using the Disney Creative Strategy (or method—there are different names for it).

The core idea is to separate wishes from their feasibility. Free wishing or “dreaming,” as it’s called there, releases resources when you stop evaluating. Developing your own and shared dreams can be childlike and without limits—even dreaming about a house on Mars is allowed—regardless of whether it seems imaginable, feasible with the available resources, or otherwise “crazy.” Protecting the dreams also helps a lot to avoid conflicts, which I find important.

After dreaming comes the question of implementation. How can it be achieved? Here, the focus is strictly on the goal—what is needed to realize the dreams, how can you agree on as much as possible, how can you get closest to it with the means available, and what steps need to be taken.

Only after these considerations about implementation does the critic come in, questioning the implementation (not the dreams), examining feasibility for weaknesses, raising objections. It is important not to do this prematurely. “That won’t work because” is the death of all creativity and severely limits finding solutions.

The method is well described on the internet in many places.

My tip: Get friends involved during the implementation and criticism phases.