Contractors Schools In California
Should I change my life for this woman?
I am madly in love with my fiancee. She is the most incredible person I have ever met. We get along very well and are very happy together. When we met I knew she was moving to san francisco for school. We have been together 5 months, and she moves in 3 days.
I have a great job in southern california, and I make decent money. However I don’t think I can live months or potentially a year+ without her. She has already paid for the entire year with a student loan and it is non-refundable (housing etc). She will be there for a year or more. We have talked about me moving up there to be with her, and starting a life there together.
Should I drop my job and move to a new city where I know no one, try to find a new job and try to get us to scrape by?
I work as a contractor also, so I can get jobs at home over the internet to get us by but they are by no means stable. I just want to be able to support the both of us and not fail.
So you have a choice — and it’s not the one you’re thinking of.
The choice BEHIND the choice you think you have (that is, do I keep my job or do I move up with her and look for work) is this:
Can you and your fiancee choose to be partners, to support each other and do whatever it takes to build a life you both love?
It’s a big step. It takes courage. It takes the ability to declare yourself responsible for your life, and to give up holding anybody else responsible for it. If you decide to move to San Francisco with her, you have to make it clear to yourself that you’re choosing to do it — she’s not making you, and if you ever hear yourself starting to say “but honey, I gave up my job to follow you,” you have to thank that voice for sharing and then make it shut the hell up.
Are you up to that? And if you are, is she up to acknowledging you for it, and matching that level of commitment and responsibility?
If so — then you two have a wonderful adventure ahead of you. Oh, yes, it’ll be frustrating at times, you’ll get disheartened and discouraged and things will be tough. But you’ll have something that 99% of the people in the world don’t have — the knowledge that you can shape your own life and make it what you want it to be.
Oh, and for the record? My wife and I have done things much like this half a dozen times since 1979. I don’t regret any of them, though most of them involved a lot of dislocation and effort and frustration, but with great reward afterward. Jumping off the edge like this never gets any easier — but if you try, you can make the rewards bigger and sweeter each time. And the life you two can have together will be something very, very rich because it’ll be all your own.
From a practical perspective, the Bay Area job market is very good, especially if you have any kind of technological skills — Silicon Valley is still very much alive and well as a growth engine. Housing is expensive, but there’s a lot to recommend the Bay Area as a place to live. One of our “jump off the edge” decisions involved a move from LA to the Bay Area, so I speak from experience. (Two old cars, two old cats, two new parents and a baby girl, driving from the San Fernando Valley to Sunnyvale on the hottest Labor Day weekend since they started keeping records.)
And… if you’re not ready to grow up quite that much all at once, it’s only about a six-hour drive up 101 from LA (well, depending on what part of LA you’re in) to the Bay Area. You can leave work early on Friday and be in San Francisco in time for a late dinner.
But what kind of a life would you have if you always played it safe?
Montgomery College Commencement 2010
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