Russ and I are moving. We have been talking about making some kind of move for a long time. As much as we love Medina, we always felt unsettled here. Even within the first year of being in our current townhouse, we were talking about where else we could go.
At first we talked about moving back to Cleveland itself, where we lived for 10 years. But we eventually decided against it. Cleveland gave us the ability to be close to a lot of people and a lot of conveniences, but the longer we were in Medina, the more we felt like small town/rural people.
Over the last five years, the idea of moving back to Western New York came up a lot. We have a lot of people we love in Western New York. Most importantly, my mom and sister live in Western New York, and there has been some feeling in me that it would be helpful if I lived close to my mom. We got very close to pulling the trigger on moving back to Western New York, but I couldn’t do it. As much as I love so many people in Buffalo, I really do NOT want to live there myself. Buffalo is, in my mind, associated with all of the worst things that happened in my life. I also think a lot of the reason my relationship with my mom has gotten as healthy as it has is because we have some geographic distance between us. In the last year, I made a commitment to get to Buffalo every four-to-eight weeks, and I think that has gone a long way to making it feel like I am living up to some obligations. But I know I would be very unhappy living in Western New York, and I am really glad I prioritized what would be healthiest and happiest for me (and Russ).
The next thing Russ and I considered was moving somewhere within Medina County, Ohio that had more space. Space has been our main issue. As nice as it is to not have to do lawn maintenance and snow removal in a townhouse, I really miss living in a house with a yard. And the more we have fallen in love with small town/rural Medina, the more we have wanted to have a lot of space and privacy and closeness to nature of our own. Part of what we loved about Medina when we moved down here was how close to things like parks and walking paths we were, and how often we saw and heard wildlife. But in the 5 years we’ve been here, they’ve built a lot of chain businesses near our townhouse development, so it’s gotten a lot louder, a lot busier, and a lot less nature-focused. We’ve been dreaming about having some nature of our own, and being back in a quiet, rural environment. We reached out to the realtor who got us into our current house and our mortgage person for this current house and got the ball rolling, with the intention of looking at places with more space and privacy in Medina County, that had enough space for Russ and I to both continue to work from home.
We came up with a list of four houses we wanted to see, and we surprised ourselves when only one of the houses was in Medina County. We finalized scheduling seeing those houses on Wednesday April 8th, scheduled for Friday April 10th. On Thursday April 9th, I was walking Doc in our neighborhood when a neighbor’s reactive dog snuck out of their front door and came after us and got Doc. It was awful, and while Doc and I are both okay (and the situation now seems to be resolved), it added A LOT of extra motivation to move as quickly as possible. On Friday April 10th, we went to look at the four houses.
The first house we saw - the one in Medina - didn’t feel right for us. Let’s just say the basement had “vibes” and leave it at that. The second house we saw was beautiful, but the area did not feel right for us as a gay couple. The fourth house we saw had a ton of character and charm, but there were things about it that weren’t going to work for us, including that it was right on top of the neighboring houses.
You might’ve noticed I skipped one. The third house we saw was the one I fell in love with. It is new construction - a spec house where a builder purchased land and built this house in the hopes of selling it. It is almost all one floor, with a loft space above the living room, but both bathrooms, all three bedrooms, and all other spaces on the ground floor. The ceilings are extremely tall. The house has so much character despite being a new build, and the property that checks all the boxes of what we were looking for, including that half of it is filled with mature trees. There were some things that Russ had questions about, so we asked our realtor to send those questions to the realtor who listed the house. Russ was being practical, but I was in love.
The house is in Oberlin, Ohio. I had visited Oberlin to see a friend who lives there right around the time we moved to Medina. I remember thinking Oberlin was so charming and that I could live there, but we had just decided on Medina, so I pushed it out of my mind. On Saturday the 11th, Russ and I drove out to Oberlin to check it out. I ended up texting that friend, Cortney, (who I hadn’t seen in a long time) and she, her husband, and their adorable kiddo met up with us in Oberlin. Russ and I really, truly fell in love with Oberlin, especially because Cortney, Andy, and Marty Joe were kind enough to share a lot of the history and story of the town. It has everything we love about Medina - rural and small town (it’s a significantly smaller town than Medina) - but also incredibly progressive, with Pride flags or stickers in the window of every business, and a long history of racial justice (including being a prominent stop on the Underground Railroad) and gender equality. It has Oberlin College, which has an incredible reputation for music and scholarship. Oberlin almost feels like a New England college town teleported to here in rural Ohio.
The builder responded to his realtor with the answers to our questions and asked us if we could meet him at the house on Sunday 4/19 at 3pm. We said we’d be happy to and sent over more questions we had. The week between 4/11 and 4/19 felt extremely long and difficult because the builder wasn’t answering our questions (he was on vacation) and I was DYING to lock in the decision that we were moving to Oberlin. I journaled a ton that week - 25 pages’ worth, to be exact. We visited Oberlin again on 4/18, this time to meet our friends Michael and Justin, who already loved Oberlin themselves and wanted to visit it with us when we told them about the potential move. I was so relieved when 4/19 finally arrived. We had a fantastic birthday party to go to for my best friend Lucky’s 3-year-old kiddo Terra on the morning of the 19th, and then we went to our meeting. It was at that meeting that we got the answers to our questions, and the builder committed to doing some things as part of the sale of the house if we decided to buy. By the time we got home from that meeting, we decided to put an offer in. By 10:05pm, we had gone back and forth - our initial offer, his counter, and our counter-counter - and we heard from our realtor that the builder had accepted our offer. Around 11:00 that night, I texted Lucky to tell her we would be living 14 minutes from her instead of an hour. On Monday morning, I told the rest of my closest friends and my family.
I could not possibly be more excited about this move. I am, in a word, ecstatic. I feel like this move represents so much.
I don’t talk about the work Russ and I do in our marriage very often, including here on DCL, and I think for a lot of the world we seem very steady. But Russ and I have done a ton of work throughout the course of our marriage, and we both feel like we are at the precipice of a new iteration of our life together. As we’ve reached our early 40’s, we’ve realized some big things about ourselves and each other, and Oberlin being as quiet, as rural, as close to the people it’s close to, and as queer-friendly as it is gives us incredible opportunities to grow into even more realized versions of ourselves as individuals and as a couple. I know this may be cheesy, but I fall more in love with Russ every day, and I feel so INSANELY lucky to be able to move into this version of our life, because I think it has the potential to be happy and fulfilling beyond what either of us dreamt was possible. And even though the idea of it seems impossible to imagine, I think there’s a pretty good chance we could end up falling even MORE in love.
Being so close to Oberlin College gives us a ton of opportunities to experience incredible music from world class musicians who are studying or teaching there. Russ and I both love music, and Russ is obviously a musician, and I don’t know which one of us is more excited in general to be in Oberlin, but I think Russ truly cannot wait to have the opportunity to possibly study under a piano teacher again. He has been saying for a few years that he’d like to get back into regular practice with a teacher, and this gives him a ton of opportunity to do so. Which means I get to hear him play even more.
Having a yard again means being able to let Doc out without walking him every time he has to go out. We’re planning on putting a fence in pretty much right away, which would allow us to just let Doc out. It would also give Doc the ability to just run around the yard instead of being tied to a leash whenever he’s outside. Doc loves going to the dog park, mostly just because he loves running free, and this will give him the opportunity to do that a lot more often.
Having a yard again also gives me the opportunity to mow. My dad took a lot of pride in his yard when I was growing up, so much so that it took a lot of convincing for him to let me help. Seeing how much joy my dad got out of lawn maintenance made me kind of love it too. Then when we had our house in Cleveland, I found mowing the lawn to be almost meditative. Mowing the lawn was a very intentional thing for my dad, and it became very intentional for me too. While I am certain there will be times when I dread that I have to mow, I am really looking forward to having mowing the lawn on a regular basis become part of my life again.
If you’ve been reading Daniel Chooses Love, you know there have been some … fluctuations in terms of my friendships in the last year. I’ve talked about two people who I considered to be my very best friends exiting my life. However, I haven’t talked much about the people I’ve grown closer to. Sometimes I worry (with an almost middle-school mindset) about making other friends feel bad if I talk about one friend being special. But I also have to acknowledge that my friends and I are all close to or over 40, and we can all love each other and feel secure in ourselves enough to not feel threatened.
The person who has really become my very best friend is Lucky. We have been very close for a long time, and it has been very clear to me for a long time that she is one of my best friends. But in the last several months, Lucky and I have shared a really intimate bond that has done a lot to heal a lot of stuff in me. She has demonstrated consistency and transparency and honesty. She’s not afraid to call me out on my shit. And she demonstrates how easy it is to ask for clarity in communication. I don’t ever have to guess with Lucky in terms of what she means when she says things, and I don’t have to ever feel guilty for asking for clarity (which I did not get in the two former friendships). I feel profoundly lucky (that was unintentional but I’m keeping it) to have such an amazing bond with such an incredible human. But Lucky has a toddler and a demanding job and a (great) husband and a lot of stuff going on in her life, and for the last 5 years, we’ve lived about an hour away from each other. Now we will live 14 minutes away from each other. And while we’ll still of course both be busy and have things going on, this means we’ll be able to spend time in person together a lot more often, including on “school nights”. I cannot wait to be that close to my best friend.
Medina is lovely, and Russ and I have never had a problem being a gay couple in Medina. Medina has a reputation for being conservative, and I think it has become more moderate in the last bit of time, but it is definitely still old fashioned. As friendly as Medina is, we don’t have friends here in Medina, I think because in some core ways, we’re not “Medina people”. I think in some core ways, we are definitely “Oberlin people”. I am so excited to already be reconnecting with Cortney, who I loved back when we worked together and have wanted to reconnect with for a while. I am ecstatic to be living close to Lucky. I am going to be living a lot closer to Colleen, who I’ve been friends with for 23 years and who met me for dinner in Oberlin last night. And I think because Russ and I are “Oberlin people”, we’re going to be able to make some pretty great new friends in Oberlin. It will be wonderful to spend time in person with people who are artsy and/or musical, who are progressive, who are either queer or vocally queer-friendly, and who have diverse life experiences and backgrounds.
I’m ecstatic. Of course moving is stressful, and selling our house will be stressful (although I’m not as stressed as I expected to be yet), and our life will be chaotic for the next few months. But I could not be more optimistic, hopeful, or happy about this move and this change. I cannot wait to be “Oberlin people” both in spirit AND in residency. Daniel Chooses Love will probably be quiet while we do all the moving stuff, but thank you as always for reading, and feel free to check in!
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