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13 Similarities Between House-hunting and Online Dating
After actively looking to purchase a home in the current overblown Los Angeles market, I've found that house-hunting and online dating are eerily similar...
1. It's a numbers game. If it doesn't work out with one, another one is just around the corner.
2. Why is it that the ones that you really want are way out of your league?
3. Descriptions can sometimes be quite misleading.
4. Books on the subject can only tell you so much. There is nothing like the taste of a live experience.
5. They always want more than you are willing to offer.
6. Incredible pressure to find something, anything, before it's too late. If all the desirable ones have already been snapped up, you think that you must have missed the boat.
7. Some appear to be really nice, but unfortunately are surrounded by unsafe obstacles, thereby making them unavailable - unless, of course, you're asking for trouble.
8. If you make a commitment to the wrong choice, you could suffer for years - financially and emotionally.
9. Easy to be dazzled by cosmetics - it's not until later you discover that your property is in a "tranny" (transitional) neighborhood.
10. If you do buy something, then your friends will say they never see you any more because you are always doing something with the house.
11. Your mother will still think you could have done so much better somewhere else.
12. Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure
13. At this point, if you go look at yet another "this could be my dream house" after seeing a series of "homes that only a mother could love", you might become a bit cynical - You almost expect them to be near or on something that the rest of the country, (or your family and friends who already found what they wanted and are happily settled into), would never find acceptable - IE: Next door to a paint chip factory, a crematorium, a haunted pet cemetery, toxic oil wells, built precariously over a major freeway, drive-by shootings, etc., or basically hiding something behind the facade that you wouldn't have approved of before getting involved.
After you've gone on enough time wasting 'blind' dates, you might become a bit cynical - you almost expect him/her to be married, [or have kids they aren't aware of], an ex-con, a serial killer, serial dater, closet fetishist, commitment phobic, or basically hiding something behind the facade that you wouldn't have approved of before getting involved.
So what advice would I give the discouraged searcher?
Don't give up on your dream, but if something you really want isn't working to the point of making you miserable, then back off a bit on your search and concentrate on something that does make you happy. Time spent doing something productive and rewarding will help you regain the energy you need to jump back in to give it another try. For reading this article all the way through, you are hereby rewarded with the following cliches: Remember, Keep your eye on the prize - and - Without risk, there is no reward.
Happy Hunting!
- by Brenda Ross
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