The Rental House Incident

After my partner and I built a house together and I retired from my full-time job, I no longer needed the house I had bought when I first moved to this area. We decided it would be easier to rent that second house than to sell it in a very slow market, so I reluctantly found myself being a landlord. My handling of the communications with our future renter brought on an angry blast of verbal abuse from my partner, along with a vindictive punishment. This two-for-one pattern was starting to feel familiar by now.

The familiar pattern was this: my partner would ask me to take on a task of significant responsibility, but would then micro-manage my handling of the task and criticize it at every step of the way. Eventually, her anger and distrust would explode into an abusive outburst, followed by some sort of punishment.

In the case of rental house, she became very angry at me for communicating via email with the future renter without first running each email by her for her approval. I had started doing this at first, but quickly discovered that she never liked anything I was writing and would completely rewrite each email to her satisfaction. In other words, she wanted me to have all of the responsibility (and blame) for handling the rental house, but none of the control. This was an impossible situation for me, besides being very frustrating and slow.

Eventually (and mistakenly) I start communicating with the renter without getting my messages pre-approved, and when my partner discovered this, she exploded with the angry outburst, and punished me by dropping her promise to help me with the cleanup and preparation of the house for the soon-to-arrive renter.

The result was that I had to spend a week of full days in the middle of winter cleaning the house and moving all of the furniture to the basement myself. If you’ve ever tried to move a couch down a flight of stairs without help, you will know how difficult this can be.

As I had come to expect, this punishment was followed by a month or more of the “hypercritical mode”, where I could do nothing right.

I had already seen this pattern during the building of our house, so while it was shocking and deeply hurtful, it was also familiar. I’ll write more about the house-building incident at another time.