Making A Home With Your Spouse I have lived in many houses an | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Official Telegram Channel

Making A Home With Your Spouse

I have lived in many houses and I have renovated three almost from scratch – with other people’s help, obviously – but I have done a lot of the renovation and design work myself and so has Tammy, and so we know the house. Any place in your house that you have not attended to in detail – and that might mean cleaned off with a cloth or brushed or sorted or organized or arrayed, your bookshelves, your drawers – is not part of the habitable order that is good. It is part of chaos still, and you react to it as if it is unfamiliar and foreign. That makes you uncomfortable and makes you feel not at home.

The advantage you gain by pouring your attention into every nook and cranny in your house is that the house becomes familiar. The house turns into a home and that is all a consequence of dedicated attention. And if you jointly dedicate your attention to that, then it is the house that you both inhabit. If you do that properly, you produce a better house as a consequence of your dialogue than either of you would have produced in isolation even if you would have got exactly what you wanted. That is a really good deal, and that is a good mantra for negotiations.