That's how we roll

So Big Ag and I are walking through a nice property our real estate gal is showing us over at the coast.  As I walk through the house and garden, I notice the amount of light in the house, mentally try and fit our furniture into the space available, and see how much weeding and planting it will take to make the garden what I see it being.  I admire the expansive northern views, the rose garden and the chicken coop. Big Ag walks through and comments on the house's need for new carpet, new tile, the cruddy condition of the walls and the probability of rodents in the attic.


That's not a perfect generalization; there are times when he spots some amazing feature of a place that I've missed or I find something that is of genuine concern that he hasn't seen, but in general this is how we roll.  Sometimes his pessimism gets on my nerves, and I'm sure my proverbial, "I'm sure we could fix this!" approach drives him similarly nuts.


But here's the thing. We're different, but we do complement each other.  Between us, we've got all the bases covered.  If we were both nit-picky and negative, we'd never find a place we'd be willing to take a risk on and put our faith in.  If we were both Pollyannas, we'd most certainly end up in a place that would fall down around our heads within a year or two.


Sometimes I think about it in terms of past relationships.  I used to have a tendency to find "fixer" men, believing I could somehow make everything better.  Usually this ended badly for them and sadly for me, when I finally realized I should have taken off the rose colored glasses a looooong time before I finally did...like before I ever got involved.  Big Ag tended to find women he thought were in mint condition, only to discover there's really no such thing and that sometimes the flaws that lie beneath are the ones that cause a house -- or a person -- to ultimately fail.  


But I didn't meet Big Ag until I was 40, so at that point I had gotten over the urge to find someone who would be a "fixer" if they were a house, and I think when he married me, he deliberately married a real person with flaws, a true partner, and not an ideal.  And thank goodness we did.  Because between us, as different as we are, we actually do have all the angles covered to make our dream come true, even when it requires work and compromise.