Willow Intimacy

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[0:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Kissing in a Tree. Romance, intimacy, and self-love are easier when we talk about them, and even more so with someone to lead the way. Here’s your host, Kelly.

[0:00:20] Kelly Nichols: Welcome to Kissing in a Tree. I’m Kelly Nichols, and today we have a great guest joining us. You may have seen her on your TikTok For You page. Nell Cortez joins me to talk about her approach to cohabitation with her partner. In this episode, we’ll discuss Nell’s living arrangement in a separate, but near space and what she has found to be the advantages and insights that come with this approach to cohabitation.

I think Nell’s story offers a fresh perspective on modern relationships and challenges of traditional norms of living together in a way that is really healthy. I am so excited to discuss this with her. Now, thank you so much for joining me.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:56] Nell Cortez: I’m so happy to be here.

[0:00:57] KN: Great. I want to go ahead and get right into it. I know that you’ve recently achieved some virality on social media, talking about your living situation with your partner. We will get to that, but first, I’d appreciate it if you could just tell us a bit about yourself so we can know you a little better.

[0:01:12] NC: Sure. My name is Nell, and I am 41-years-old, almost 42. I am originally from Anchorage, Alaska, but I live in Northeast Ohio now with my partner, and our two kids, our two only children. I have a daughter from a previous marriage and he has a son from a previous marriage.

[0:01:32] KN: Right. I like what you said, our two only children, because that is a great way to put it, especially with the way that y’all have things set up. Let’s go ahead and get into it for someone listening that isn’t familiar with your viral video. Will you share a bit about your living situation and how your non-traditional cohabitation style works with your partner?

[0:01:52] NC: Sure. in 2021, my partner and I bought a duplex, and it’s an up and down. It’s one building with two bedrooms, one bath upstairs, two bedrooms, one bath downstairs. I live upstairs. He lives downstairs. We had been together for about two years before we bought the duplex. We’ve just celebrated our fourth anniversary. We actually got engaged on our fourth anniversary a week and a half ago.

[0:02:17] KN: Congratulations. That’s amazing.

[0:02:19] NC: Breaking news. Thanks. I think, really the duplex, I’ve gone a little viral on TikTok talking about it. There’s a lot of misconceptions, but it’s really not that different than just living in a big four bedroom, two bath house. We just happen to have an extra living room and an extra dining room and an extra kitchen, and who could not use, especially with two kids, more space? I truly believe this is a really amazing way to live together, but not be fully blended, especially for “blended families,” families that have different dynamics coming to the table, a lot of different co-parents, a lot of different needs. Both of our kids have very particular needs, both sensory, emotional, behavioral, medical.

This just really worked for us to be able to maintain a little bit of autonomy, some separation, so that we could have our own time and space, just us as grownups, and then also, make sure that our kids got what they needed from us as well.

[0:03:21] KN: Mm-hmm. I’m so glad that you mentioned how it’s been beneficial for your children, because I think that’s one of the huge advantages when I hear about people who live these separate lives, especially with children from different relationships. Because I imagine that that is a lot of change for a child. “I am now living with my parent’s new partner, who I might not have gotten to pick,” right? When you’re little and you’re trying to process and learn and develop, I would imagine having a separate space with just me and my parent would be so calming at the end of the day and would really help relieve some anxieties that I would imagine as a child I would have. Have you found that to be true in your situation as well?

[0:04:02] NC: Absolutely. I’m the product of divorce myself. My dad’s been married three times. My mom was one and done. I’m the oldest of four kids, or six kids, depending on which marriage we ask. I’m from the first set and then my dad and his second wife had two boys, who are my half brothers. Then my dad’s third marriage had children from a previous marriage, so I have two steps siblings. Especially with that many marriages, that’s hard. You’re already dealing with the family life that you’re used to has been broken apart. You’re trying to adjust to that. Then all of a sudden, someone else is coming in and they’ve got a whole different parenting style, there’s other kids, there’s different rules, different everything. That was so disruptive as a child and, unfortunately, it’s very common, but I just – neither my partner or I had wanted that for our kids.

It was really important to us that they felt secure in their space, that they felt secure in their parent, that they knew that was their space first, their parent first. Then we’ve slowly, over the last two years that we’ve lived in this space, slow-rolled into a little bit more integration. I really let it be organic and child led, which is really important to me as well. My daughter is also adopted, and so she already had enough disruption and enough changes in parents and living situations when she was a baby when we adopted her, but still there’s trauma involved with that. Just really, really important to carve that out for both of our kids.

But even outside of that, my partner and I are both neuro divergent as well and really need our own space and time, and we like to call it following our own brain around. We like to have full days where we’re not really trying to be, or do anything. We don’t have to pretend to be something that we’re not. We can just follow our own brains around. That’s harder to do when you’re constantly bumping into somebody in the kitchen.

[0:06:13] KN: You’re absolutely right. I’m so thankful that you’ve been so open and honest and sharing not just your current situation, but also being a child of divorce and how that impacted your decision today. Because, I think, to hear you say it, it has worked out beautifully for your family and I totally understand why. It is clear to see that having that grounding normalcy would be such a better situation than many kids of divorce are put in. I’m thankful that you are sharing that story.

I also wanted to talk to you a little bit about what your relationship with your partner like before you bought the duplex. Did y’all live together? Were y’all separate and this is your first time living together? What was that situation like?

[0:06:53] NC: Yeah, we never lived together. We knew going into it when we first started dating – I remember, I have this very clear memory of sitting on my couch. We’d only been dating three or four months. Sitting on my couch. It was after bedtime. My daughter was in bed. He was over. We had this heart-to-heart about how we both had this tendency in previous relationships to lose ourself in the relationship, where we are so open with love in general, with connecting with people, that we just got just got subsumed, like, just fell apart. Then when those relationships end, you don’t know who you are anymore, because your whole identity is tied up with this other human being.

Being in our 40s, being parents both being divorced from other people, we both came to this particular relationship with a like, I have to break these really bad habits. Part of what I fell in love with him was his self-awareness around that, that that we were in alignment around that, that we were both like, we have a bad habit of doing this and since we both know we have this bad habit, we have a really high likelihood to do it again.

[0:08:06] KN: Yeah.

[0:08:08] NC: We had the conversation early on that we weren’t particularly interested in getting legally married again, and we weren’t particularly interested in cohabitating full-time. What did that look like for the longevity of our relationship? Over time, over a couple of months, it turned into this joke about a bridge house. We had read this article about a couple, an elderly couple who had built two houses side by side and they had a bridge built in between them, so that they had this indoor access, but they each maintained their own space.

We kept joking about, that’s what we need eventually someday when we’re millionaires, we’ll have this bridge house, and then COVID happened. COVID happened. We’d only been dating six months and COVID happened.

[0:08:52] KN: Wow.

[0:08:54] NC: Our lives got really thrown together, and we still weren’t living together. We lived about a mile and a half apart in the same town. We started homeschooling our kids together. We shared a private teacher, basically. We shared the cost of that, because neither one of us could afford it on our own. It was a trial run of living apart together, because we were coming together for school and work, but then going home to our separate places in the evening.

[0:09:22] KN: Got you.

[0:09:24] NC: We did that. Then after about two years, leases were up and we were like, “Okay, we don’t want to keep renting. We need more space. We’re definitely serious about each other. A duplex is basically a bridge house, right?” And so, we started looking for a duplex.

[0:09:42] KN: Wow. When did duplex hit your mind? Because that isn’t a bridge house. It is different, right? When did this light bulb solution come to you?

[0:09:53] NC: My partner lived in a duplex. He lived in the downstairs unit of a duplex. It was like, “Well, what if I just lived upstairs? If I just lived upstairs, then we could still do what we’re doing. The kids could do school. We could have dinner, or whatever and then everybody could go home to their own space.” Duplexes are really common in Cleveland, which is the area that we live in. About every third house seems to be a duplex. There was just a ton. There was a ton around, and we didn’t think we could get zoned for a bridge house. We didn’t think that that was going to work out for us. A friend of mine is a real estate agent. She’s amazing and I reached out to her and she was like, “Yeah, we can do that. We can find you a duplex.”

[0:10:36] KN: Wow. That’s so cool. I’m so glad that you all had that realization, because I’m not even going to lie to you. I think I’m a fairly smart person. I don’t think duplex would have ever entered my thought process. Just wouldn’t have occurred. I think your solution is genius. I do want to talk to you a little bit about how this living situation has impacted your relationship with your partner. Because I imagine, it gives you space to be really close, but also, space to have freedom for yourself. I want to have you talk just a little bit more about that.

[0:11:09] NC: Some of my favorite things. I love that we have common areas in our home, so we get the same satisfaction of building a home together that couples who live in the same space would get. We have a shared garden that we’ve worked on together. We have a basement that we have our crafting areas. He likes to build hardware. I’m a sewer. We have work benches that are facing each other. We go down there and we call it toiling together.

We have these shared spaces where we get to have that. But I have my green velvet couch and all of my plants and my tarot art on the walls and two cats and an elderly chihuahua and all of the things that make me feel at home. He doesn’t want to live in those things all of the time. He loves coming up to my space. I love going down to his space. There’s those elements of creating space together, creating a home together. We make decisions together, as far as when there’s a home repair, what are we going to do? How are we going to pay for it, things like that?

Again, very normal coupley living together things. Then, we have the opportunity to make independent decisions, too. He has this beautiful Amish-built dining room table that he adores. I absolutely hate it. It’s heavy. It’s big. It’s imposing. It’s perfect for his space. It suits him. I love it in his space. It’s got these edges on it that I bump into. I constantly have bruises. I would never be able to live with it full-time. But he loves it. He loves it so much. I love that I can love that for him without it having to be in my space, without it being a thing that’s in my way and causing me bodily harm all the time.

I really think that we’ve struck a balance between getting the experience of creating home together, creating space together, which is really important and a way to build intimacy in a couple, while maintaining that autonomy, our personal tastes, our styles, and our alone time. I sat on the couch yesterday for six hours and just binged a show. He went on a bike ride at 7 am. Neither of those things got in the way of the other person getting what they needed in the course of a day. Then we were able to come together, we played a board game, we had dinner together, we talked about our plans for next weekend. It’s just beautiful.

I don’t think it’s for everyone, but I feel so secure in this relationship, because I am able to have the things that I need for my brain, for my well-being, for my self-care. I can also support the things that he needs without them negatively impacting me.

[0:14:09] KN: It sounds like, in this dynamic, you really have the ability to let your partner be who they want to be and not have to sacrifice for your comfort. Everything you were saying, that’s just like, kept coming to me. It’s so interesting to me, because I think people hear about a couple living in separate floors of a duplex. I think that they want to assume and often do, based on the comments I’ve seen on your TikTok that that must mean that they are not close with one another. Everything you just said, it seems like, you are closer than if you were to live together, because you are not asking someone to sacrifice something that they enjoy for your comfort, because they love you.

[0:14:51] NC: Yeah. 100%. Yes, I have 6,000-ish comments on just one of my videos and most of them are overwhelmingly positive. The negative ones all seem to center around this idea that the only way to be compatible, to be truly in love is to argue, basically, this idea that you have to sacrifice part of yourself, that you have to be unhappy at a certain level in order to truly be in a relationship and it makes zero sense to me. It makes absolutely no sense.

I was legally married, lived in the same house with a man who is wonderful. My ex-husband is amazing. He’s an incredible father. He was a wonderful husband. Clearly, we are not married anymore, not because there’s anything wrong with either one of us. It just, we needed different things and there was no getting over that. There was no getting over the fact that he gets up at 5.00 in the morning, and I will straight up commit murders if you try to wake me up that early and speak to me.

It’s the same thing of just, why would I want the person that I fell in love with all the things I love about this person, why would I want them to change that, or diminish that, or stop doing that in order to be with them?

[0:16:14] KN: Yeah. To make me comfortable. To make me live the life that I want to live. Yeah, I totally get that. It also reminded me of the concept of a man cave. I think, so much of America’s heteronormative view of a relationship is it’s a man and a woman and the woman decorates all of the house, except the man gets one little done that he calls the man cave. That’s where he can hang his beer posters, right?

What I have described, everyone has a perfect image in their head, because it is so common. That true? It’s really not that different from what you’re doing, except you’re not coddling. It doesn’t feel like an insult. You can go to your man cave and that’s the only place you’re allowed to have the things that you like, right? It’s like, we are both having a home together and we get to come together to do that and it’s not my responsibility to decorate everything else. Because it works both ways.

My husband would never. But I don’t want a husband’s beer girl poster hanging in my living room, but at the same time, he should get a choice in what his space looks like. If your styles are completely different, I get why that would be frustrating. Would be something you wouldn’t want to give up. I can just tell by looking in your background, the vibe of your home. It is so feminine and I think it speaks to you. I get why you would want to have that space for yourself.

[0:17:41] NC: I want him to have that for him, too. The man cave is such an excellent example, because it shows how diminished couples have to be one way, or the other, that you’re either both living in a space that neither of you truly like. If you truly are coming at it 50/50 and okay, we’ve made accommodations to pick the least offensive couch to both of us, and now we both have a couch that we don’t actually like, but it was the least, worst one that we could find.

[0:18:10] KN: Yes.

[0:18:12] NC: You’re either living in this really sad space that neither of you like, or one person’s style is overwhelming the other person’s style, and the only place that they have that feels authentic to them, or comfortable to them even is some tiny, little relegated portion of the home. Oh, man. That bums me out. I can’t imagine feeling comfortable, having that happen either direction. Making my partner have that little space, or my partner making me have that little space.

I mean, I experienced this when I was married and I’m trying really hard. Jay, if you’re listening to this, I swear, I am not talking trash about you, or your style. My ex has been. He’s lovely. We did it. We had these sad beige couches that neither one of us actually liked. We had a bunch of furniture that neither one of us were really excited about. It was just like, just what we could agree on. Now, I see his home with his current wife and it’s beautiful and it looks like them, and it looks like, they really meld. I see my home and I know I feel comfortable here and I see my partner’s home, and I know he feels comfortable there. Yeah, it would have been great if I could have found a partner that I was on the same page with aesthetically, but that’s not the only reason to be in a – That’s our home. We can figure it out.

[0:19:38] KN: On the list of things that make couples compatible, similar aesthetics? Not it.

[0:19:44] NC: Not it.

[0:19:45] KN: Not high on the list, guys. Nell, thank you so much for sharing. We are going to head into our first quick break. But stay tuned, because when we come back, Nell and I are going to continue the conversation.

[BREAK]

[0:19:57] KN: We are back. Thank you so much for listening. I have been talking with Nell Cortez, who’s been sharing about her unique living situation with her fiancé, and how they are living together, but separate in a duplex. Nell, again, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. I am going to go ahead and go into our next set of questions.

I know that in the wake of your video, there has been so much commentary on your approach to cohabitation, and a lot of judgment. I think that that’s one of the downsides with going viral. Everybody thinks that they want to for the followers, or whatever the reason. But really, all you’re doing is opening yourself up to so much judgment from strangers online. Will you share a bit with that experience has like been for you?

[0:20:42] NC: Sure. The good news is I’ve been a social media manager since really the invention of social media. I’ve got a pretty thick skin when it comes to this. I’ve definitely been called worse by more important people, to put it mildly. At least, this time on my own content, I can respond how I would like to. It’s a little bit cathartic, actually. When I was managing professional social media, you can’t do that. You have to be very polite in your response. It doesn’t affect me on a personal level. But it is interesting.

I’m a big data person. I have a background in sociology. Data is a big part of my day job as well, so it’s been very interesting to me to see themes emerge in the comments. I actually just made a TikTok about this the other day. There really seems to be three buckets of people who have the biggest problem with this, who responded the most vehemently, and who are really, really bothered by a complete stranger doing something that does not affect them at all.

[0:21:44] KN: Right.

[0:21:46] NC: The first set is really traditional, middle-aged white guys, who likely benefit from having a live-in partner who does the bulk of the emotional and domestic labor, who they see as a traditional spouse. Me talking about there being another way to be in partnership that doesn’t involve shouldering the burden of domestic labor for two people, doesn’t include compulsory sex on a regular basis. That doesn’t include any of those things that a lot of these guys consider their entitlement as part of a heteronormative relationship, that is deeply, deeply threatening to them.

[0:22:35] KN: And dangerous.

[0:22:36] NC: Dangerous. Yeah. The good news is I love being threatening to guys like that. I am not bothered by that. It fuels me. It makes me very happy, actually. That is the brand that I am cultivating is a threat to middle-aged white men. I have purple hair. Obviously, you’re not going to agree with me. The second set is really, I think their traditional female counterparts as well, I don’t know if they have the same motivation so much. Again, I’m guessing. I don’t want to speak to what they’re thinking might be, but based on what I know about human nature, my guess is when you see someone like me who has opted out of this thing that you likely felt was mandatory, was expected of you and that you may have even been pushed into socially by your peers, by your parents, by your church, by your society. You see someone like me who is of the same generation. I am in my forties. It’s not like I’m a young and upstart disrupting things. I’m a grown lady.

That’s probably unsettling to realize, maybe 10, 20 years into a relationship, it didn’t have to be that way. They seem to have the most hurtful things to say to me, which again, I don’t internalize. I can empathize with them and it makes me a little sad for them, and I hope at some point they recognize that they can opt out, too. It doesn’t have to be that way forever. Weirdly, the third set is people who don’t fit in either one of those particular sets of age, or race, or other demographic, but are just a group of people who, it seems to be that their only personality to trait is being in a relationship with someone else.

They don’t know any other thing about themselves, other than that they are someone’s partner. The idea of someone else being able to be happy and healthy and fulfilled and secure, because that’s the other thing, too. There’s a lot of assumptions about somebody cheating. That would require one or both of us leaving the house and neither of us do that. I’m not worried about that But there’s these ideas, I think, that the only way to truly know that you are in love, that you are connected is if that is the only thing that you are.

[0:25:13] KN: Enmeshment.

[0:25:15] NC: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t want to make a clinical determination, but co-dependency. If not that, then something that walks like that and talks like that. Again, I’m not going to change any of those people’s minds. But if I can share anything at all about my life, it is that there are other ways to be, and that’s it. That’s the beginning and end of my entire soapbox is that there are just other ways to be.

[0:25:46] KN: Yup. You can be happy and you don’t have to live under someone else’s thumb, whether it’s your husband, or your wife, or whatever, right? You brought up something that I definitely want to talk about, because I think it is so important. I think that that is something that men have to gain from traditional cohabitation is the ability to skirt domestic labor onto their partner. By you coming out and saying like, “No, I have my own kitchen. I can choose to clean it or not. He has his own kitchen. He can choose to clean it or not. It does not matter. It does not affect our relationship. We are happy. We are healthy. We are in love.” That is a message that is so important, because I also think when we’re talking about earlier the things that make someone compatible, like aesthetic isn’t on the list and guess what? Cleaning styles don’t have to be either. You can be a total clean freak and you can be happily committed to someone who is an absolute slob, because there are different ways to live. We just don’t talk about it.

I really appreciate you being a voice for that and also, highlighting that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re a woman, you don’t have to grow up believing that you’re going to have to wash someone’s dishes for the rest of your life. It’s like, how bleak.

[0:27:04] NC: Well, the funny thing is, too, is people make a lot of assumptions about me being the one that would do that. I am definitely not the one doing that. I’m the one who leaves my dishes in the sink overnight and my partner is physically uncomfortable in spaces that are cluttered, or untidy. Again, it goes back to that like, why would we live in a space that isn’t comfortable for us? Why would I want him to do that? Why would I want him to have to have to suffer through that?

My ex-husband did. It was one of our biggest friction points, was he’s the same way. He likes things to be tidy. He likes things to be clean. It’s not fair to push one person into always having to be the one to clean either. I think a lot of people also assume, well, if they want it tidy, then they should just do it, which is again, it’s something that men do a lot. Then when the roles are reversed, everybody seems to be okay with it. Like, well, fine. Then make him do the dishes. But no. It’s not okay for anybody to –

[0:28:02] KN: Exactly.

[0:28:03] NC: – to have to do that. I do think me being comfortable leaving things in the sink for a day or two, having a little bit more cluttered space and him not wanting to have to clean up after me all the time is a lot healthier than either one of us being forced to do stuff that we don’t want to do.

[0:28:21] KN: Even, obviously, the two of you love each other, right? You would find a compromise. My husband and I, what’s interesting about us is he likes to relax and then do things he has to do at night. I am the opposite. I want to wake up and get done the things I have to do and then have the rest of the day to relax and don’t think about it. We have to fairly, regularly compromise on that. It’s not a big deal. We do it, because we love each other, but that is a small compromise compared to trying to live with someone where you feel like you’re having to compromise on so many things all of the time. It doesn’t mean that you don’t love them. You don’t care for them. They’re not the perfect partner for you. It just means you need to live in different spaces.

[0:29:08] NC: There’s so many things – everybody has to compromise, right? There’s no way to get through life, to be in society at all, to live in relationship with anybody, whether you live in the same space with them or not. You always have to compromise. We just decided that these were things we weren’t going to compromise about. That these just weren’t important enough to us to have to compromise about those. There’s lots of stuff that are important to us, and so we’re saving our energy. We’re saving our bandwidth for compromising about how many pumpkin plants we’re planting. Who gets the car on Saturday? Because we share a car. It’s things like that that are much more important to us.

[0:29:47] KN: It’s so interesting to me that y’all share a car, that y’all live on different floors of the same house. I think that that speaks to the commitment of your relationship, because sharing a car with someone is hard. It requires way more communication than sharing a living space with someone.

[0:30:06] NC: Yeah. It does.

[0:30:07] KN: I want to talk a bit about other advantages that you have found with this approach to cohabitation. We haven’t really talked a ton about the practicality of the situation. In some of your videos you’ve talked about the financial benefits to this approach. Do you mind talking a bit more about that and recapping that for us?

[0:30:25] NC: Sure. We have two whole apartments. We do love each other. We like each other. Our kids love each other and like each other. If someone lost their job, if one of us lost our job, if one of us was permanently disabled, I’m chronically ill, it is a very real likelihood, we could collapse into one unit. We could live in one space and rent the other out and not lose our home, not put undue burden on ourselves. If we were in one house, the same size space with the same number of rooms at the same mortgage and we didn’t have these two separate spaces, that would not be an option available to us.

[0:31:03] KN: You’re absolutely right.

[0:31:06] NC: We have that. It’s like a last resort. We don’t want to do that, because it would be pretty tight. These are small apartments. But we could. We could, or we could do it for a short amount of time until we could sell the house. There’s lots of options there. The other less dire version two is when we have people visit, we have a whole other house. If I have someone come stay, I could sleep in his bed with him and they could sleep in my bed and no one has to sleep on the couch. Even the practicality of having people over socially, like my friend, I have a best friend who lives a couple of streets over, she comes over, we are loud. We cackle and house a bottle of wine and are listening to music and yelling at the top of our lungs and doing all the things that besties do on a Saturday night, and he doesn’t have to go hide in his mancave, or in the basement. I’m not in his way. I’m not interfering with anything. He can still live his life.

That’s great, too. He can come up. He does. He comes and hangs out. Then when he’s had enough, when his social battery is run out, he gets to go back to his own space, to his own peace and quiet. I do think that there’s a lot of – there’s financial benefits, obviously, because really, we’re splitting one – the building. It’s one building. We’re splitting one mortgage. It’s actually cheaper for us to split the mortgage on these two apartments than it was when we were each renting –

[0:32:32] KN: An apartment space. Yeah, separately.

[0:32:34] NC: We have some shared utilities. Since it’s a single building, we have shared sewer and trash, and we split that cost, versus if we were in our own spaces and we would be paying that entirely ourselves. Repairs, again, same thing. When we need to repair something. This is my favorite benefit, actually, of this is Thanksgiving. We have two kitchens. We have two kitchens.

[0:33:01] KN: You have two ovens.

[0:33:02] NC: We have two ovens. We have two sinks. We have two dishwashers.

[0:33:06] KN: Two refrigerators.

[0:33:07] NC: Two fridges. We have three, because we have one in the basement, too. We hosted Thanksgiving last year with about eight people and it was great. We have all this extra space. You don’t get that when you have a single-family home. Even outside of the benefits of like, everybody has their own autonomy and I get to have a green velvet couch and all these other fringe benefits, just two kitchens.

[0:33:35] KN: Yeah. Two kitchens is a huge selling point. My husband and I bought our house. We’ve lived here for less than a year. But if he listens to this episode and he hears you talk about your partner being able to escape for a social event, our house will be on the market, because I am so extroverted. I love having people over. We have a set of friends who comes over regularly. He’s very introverted. When his social battery is depleting, he has to go to his office and play a video game and take some time apart, and that’s totally fine. It’s what he needs. No judgment. But if he could go to a whole different house and not even have to hear us, yeah, he’d do it.

[0:34:16] NC: I do think he can still hear us. We are very loud.

[0:34:20] KN: Thank you for saying that.

[0:34:20] NC: We’re going to need a little bit more sound proofing.

[0:34:23] KN: I appreciate that. We’ve talked some about the advantages. Do you think that there are any disadvantages, other than other people’s opinions, right?

[0:34:32] NC: I didn’t really count those as disadvantages. Honestly, I don’t care about other people’s opinions largely. Never have. I think the main disadvantage, the only disadvantage is if we are not careful, if we are not intentional about it, it can be isolating. We are both introverts. We both work from home, solitary jobs on the computer. Because we each have everything that we need in our own space, if we are not making a point of going and checking on the other person, it can be a while before we see each other.

I think in the beginning, when we first moved in here, that happened a lot more often. I think now after two years, we’ve gotten into a good cadence. Our kids, obviously, they’re only a year apart. They go to the same school. We walk the kids to school together every morning. We pick the kids up every afternoon, so we’ve built in some ways to make sure that we have touch points throughout the day. On the weeks that we don’t have the kids, we eat together almost every single night, and we have date nights and things like that.

In the beginning, it was really easy to, because we were so used to living alone, too. We weren’t used to living even as close as we were, so we would go whole days without checking in with each other. Now, two years on, it’s not as big of a problem, but that was the only thing initially. We had to get over the hump of making sure that we were intentionally coming together.

[0:36:04] KN: Learning where in your week do you connect. That’s also something that I wanted to talk with you briefly about is what does your week look like? Are you all eating dinners together every night? Are you eating together three times? What does your Saturdays look like, with having two separate spaces? Is it really just free for all, or do you have a schedule in the hallway? How do y’all make sure that you get that timing with one another?

[0:36:30] NC: We eat dinner together more often than not. I mean, almost every single night. Whether the kids are here or not, we dinner together as a family, if it’s just him and I, as a family with the kids. There’s a couple of nights where we don’t. If I’m in school in the evenings, we have some standing appointments in the evenings after work. Every once in a while, there’s a night where, okay, you’re going to fend for yourself and we don’t. There’s also times where – like last night, he was like, “Hey, do you want to come down and eat dinner?” I was like, “I need to not speak to another human for a minute. No offense. Nothing to do with you. I know, I want to be feral right now and I’m going to eat my bowl of cereal at 10 p.m.

[0:37:15] KN: Girl dinner.

[0:37:16] NC: That’s going to be fine for me. Yeah, girl dinner. Yeah. No. There’s no real schedule. I think on the weekends, usually, when we have the kids, he cooks. I don’t cook. Again. But I am a bowl of cereal at 10 p.m. person. Left to my own devices, I would just eat Special K for three meals a day and iced coffee, and probably die of malnutrition inside of a month. But he loves to cook. He makes breakfast on the weekends. He makes dinners most night. Sometimes when I’m especially busy, because he knows I have a hard time feeding myself, he will just bring food and put it in my fridge that I can heat up.

[0:37:52] KN: That’s so sweet.

[0:37:53] NC: He does a really job of taking care of me, even when we don’t live in the exact same space. Then like I said, we walk the kids to school together, or we pick them up from school together. I think, really, the main – We see each other every single day. It’s not like we have whole days without seeing each other. Weirdly, even though we’re on different floors and we could just go talk to each other, we also text all day.

[0:38:15] KN: I was going to ask you, do you find yourself texting him, because he’s beneath you, but you can’t quite holler.

[0:38:22] NC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We text. I really like it, because it’s very similar to when we were first dating. When you’re first dating someone and you’re getting to know them, you have that just ongoing all day every day cadence. Like, “Oh, I saw this thing on the internet and I want to send it to you. Here’s a TikTok and here’s a tweet.” We still do that four years in. We don’t run out of stuff to talk about in person either. I don’t know. I got to be honest, even talking about this, I’m just so in love with this dude. I’m just so wildly in love with him. He’s amazing.

[0:38:57] KN: It’s very clear that you have found the perfect solution for the two of you and blending your family together in a beautiful way. I do, speaking of families, I want to ask, what has been the reaction from your social circle, your families when you said, “Listen, we’re going to buy a duplex together and live on separate floors.” How did your friends and family react to that?

[0:39:16] NC: Well, all of my friends who know me pretty well were like, “Yes, this tracks. She did it. She cracked the code. She figured it out.” No one was surprised at all, including my ex-husband. My ex-husband was like, “Yes. 100%. This makes sense. Good job.”

[0:39:33] KN: Checks out.

[0:39:35] NC: Yeah. I’m estranged from most of my biological family, so I don’t know what they think, or I don’t care. Again, I don’t care about what other people think. My partner’s family, they’re a little bit more traditional. His parents have been married for almost 50 years now. They are each other’s one and only, and have been, and they’ve always had a very traditional life, but they’re so cool. They’re so chill. They’re so like, “If you like it, we love it. It’s fine.” When we first moved in, this was the moment where I was like, “These are my people forever.”

His dad came over and ran grounded electricity, so I could – because the house is 108-years-old. There was no three-prong plugs anywhere. He came over and he spent days running grounded electricity for me.

[0:40:28] KN: That’s so sweet.

[0:40:30] NC: No questions asked. No nothing needed. Even if they haven’t ever been like, “This is really cool and we’re so glad you’re doing it,” their approval is apparent in how they have –

[0:40:40] KN: Supported there.

[0:40:40] NC: – engaged. Yeah.

[0:40:43] KN: Thank you so much for giving us a glimpse into your personal life and being so vulnerable talking about something that is literally behind closed doors. Thank you for that. We are going to head into another short break. But stay tuned, because when we come back, Nell and I are going to be answering your questions.

[BREAK]

[0:41:01] KN: We are back. Thank you so much for saying tuned. We’ve been talking with Nell Cortez, and she has been so honest and open, talking about how she lives with her partner and how she’s been able to build the life that looks exactly like what she wants. Hopefully, she has given you some tips on how you can do the same in your partnerships.

We are going to answer your questions that you’ve written in. But first, I do want to take a second to highlight the clinic of the week. As always, this is not a sponsored post. This is just information that I think it’s important for you to know. This week’s clinic is the Whitman-Walker Clinic. They are a collective of non-profit organizations that strive to ensure all people can live healthily and love openly, and to feel true equality and inclusion in all aspects of their lives.

To further that mission, they offer a variety of community services, including rapid HIV testing and risk reduction counseling, as well as STI self-testing kits, which tests for gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis. All testing and counseling and their referral services are completely free of charge. They also offer a Language Access Services, including ASL interpreting for their appointments. For more information, or to donate to this organization, please visit whitman-walker.org.

Okay, we are now going to head into our Q&A section. I’m going to read the first question that was written in. It says, “How do you move on with the sadness of not speaking every day anymore? I get so used to talking to someone and they’ve become a daily part of my life. Then when we break things off, I am so lonely. What do you do to fill the void once they leave?” Nell, do you have any tips for this listener?

[0:42:42] NC: The worst heartbreak I’ve ever experienced was actually a friend breakup, and it felt exactly like this. It was someone who’s very close to me. I talked to her every single day. She knew me better than anybody and we had a falling out, and I haven’t talked to her since. Gosh, it’s been seven years and it is still an ache in my heart. Initially, it was really hard. It is. It’s exactly as the listener put it. It’s a void that you need to fill. I did that by throwing myself into hobbies and people. At the time, I volunteered at a cat sanctuary, because cats always want your attention, or they don’t sometimes. When they’re in a sanctuary, there’s usually one of them somewhere in there. If cats aren’t your thing, there’s dogs, there’s bunnies. Pick your favorite furry friend. It’s a great way to feel useful, feel loved, find fulfillment. It’s also a great way to meet like-minded people, too.

I met some new friends volunteering that had similar vibes as me and similar values. I don’t think it ever goes away. The pain doesn’t ever fully go away. That person meant something to you. That time was important. But it’s possible to lessen that ache a little bit over time.

[0:44:08] KN: I totally agree. I would say the same thing. Find a hobby. Find a place to volunteer. That’s a great idea, because like you said, it makes you feel useful. I’m a huge proponent of volunteering in general, because I think it really helps you feel committed to your community. When you feel valuable to your community, studies have shown that you have higher satisfaction in all other aspects of your life. Volunteering is a great option.

I also want to encourage you to introspect just a little bit. There’s something to be said for missing someone when they’re no longer there. If you are feeling lost and you have no idea what to do with your time now that this partner has left, that can be a sign of enmeshment. I’m not a clinician. I’m not going to say you’re codependent. I don’t know you. I don’t know your relationship, but it sounds like, there might be some codependent tendencies there if you are really feeling like, every night I talk to this person from 6 to 10 p.m. Now, I don’t know what to do, because you did something before that person.

I encourage you to lean into your social circle, really find value in your other connections. Then, I also encourage you to introspect a little bit and see if you can’t remember some things that you liked about yourself and ground yourself to what do you like? How do you like to spend your time? I know that when I am in a relationship, a lot of my energy and time goes into my partner, making sure that they’re satisfied in our relationship, making sure that I am committing enough time to them to make our partnership grow.

When that connection is severed, especially if it’s done suddenly, obviously, you’re going to miss that person. But it is a great opportunity for you to take that energy and invest it in yourself. Do what you want to do. Find a hobby that you love. Learn to crochet, or knit, or go on nature hikes and keep a journal. Or even if you just talk to that person from 6 to 7 every day, now you take a bubble bath during that time and just relax. Find whatever makes you happy and fill the time with that, because you are now investing in yourself and that’s going to make you more well-rounded. You’re going to be happier.

Whenever it is time for you to come together with another person, you now have this to fall back on. You don’t need them to fill any void, right? Miley Cyrus, you can buy yourself flowers. Remember that.

[0:46:26] NC: Or yarn.

[0:46:27] KN: Or yarn. I’ve taken back up crochet lately, so that’s why the crochet came up. Oh, she’s showing me a tattoo of knitting needles. Okay. Let’s go to the second question. It says, “I started dating a guy who has a kid from a past relationship. Recently, he invited me over to hookup, but I knew that his daughter was there in the house with him. He said that it didn’t matter and that she was a heavy sleeper, but I’m pretty loud and he knows that. I told him that I did not feel comfortable and turned him down, but he acted like it was unfair of me. I get that a single parent should be able to have fun and get laid, but I know that I would be upset if I were his kid’s mom. Was it okay that he wanted to hook up while his daughter was home, or was I right to be bothered?” What are your thoughts, Nell?

[0:47:15] NC: I think both can be true, to start with. I mean, I made a face when you were reading the question, because absolutely, if I was that child’s mom, that would not have been okay with me. That would have been so not okay that there would have been court proceedings involved. No. Immediately no from me. I do think that he knows what he’s comfortable with and what he feels comfortable with for his child. It is also okay for you to not feel comfortable with that and not to engage. Those can be both true.

That’s one of those things that you know I’ve talked a lot about, like being unwilling to compromise about certain things and willing to compromise about others. Comfort around sex, not one of those things that you compromise about at all. If that’s something that you are uncomfortable with, you were uncomfortable with, you were absolutely 1000% in your right to have turned that person down. It also sounds a little bit like, maybe you guys aren’t in alignment in general with what you think is appropriate, or not appropriate in sexual situations.

[0:48:23] KN: Could not agree more. I’m not a parent, so that’s one reason why I wanted to ask you this question, because I did want a parent to weigh in. Because when I hear this question, I think, if I were that child’s parent, I would be pissed. That would not fly, especially having a woman, who, it sounds like, she has never met in her home with her child in a sexual encounter. Not okay. The fact that you expressed that, hey, this makes me uncomfortable and he tried to undermine that is a huge red flag for me, honestly.

I think, it is important to remember everyone. You do not need validation for your uncomfortability when it comes to sex. The second that you say that you were uncomfortable, it doesn’t matter what your reasoning is, he should have respected that. I feel like, I say that everything is about consent, but really, everything is about consent. I know that we don’t think about consent in this way, because you’re not even in the same space, right? Your house, he is at his. But it is important to realize that when you say you are uncomfortable, especially regarding a sexual encounter, where there is a minor in the same house, the fact that he tried to unvalidate your feelings is something that should be addressed and you’ll need to talk about it.

[0:49:34] NC: That’s a red flag for me, for sure.

[0:49:35] KN: Huge red flag. I think, I would encourage you to have a conversation with him. If it doesn’t go well, find someone who respects your no. You don’t have to give any reason for why you’re feeling uncomfortable.

Well, that is our time for today. Nell, thank you so much for sharing. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you on TikTok?

[0:49:56] NC: I am @rebelmarie. R-E-B-E-L-M-A-R-I-E. I’m Rebel Marie everywhere, for the most part. You can find me anywhere that way. TikTok is the platform that I post the most about this sort of thing. The other platforms are really a little bit more personal and more centered on my family. Not a lot of public stuff. But definitely find me on TikTok. I love to talk about this stuff. I am constantly sharing as much as I can safely and with the comfort of my partner and our co-parents in mind. I don’t know if you want to add this as an addendum to that last question, but this just popped into my head that single parents do deserve to get laid, and there are lunchtime hours for a reason. When I was a single mom, I had a lot of lunchtime sex, because the kids were in school and there was no negotiating, or navigating any of that.

[0:50:50] KN: Yeah, it’s a great point. Yeah, there are ways to get around it without your kid involved. You’re absolutely right.

Thank you so much for sharing today, like I said. Also, I want to encourage you at home, if you have a question that you would like answered on a future episode, feel free to send those over. You can send an email to show@willowintimacy.com. Otherwise, that is our time. Thank you again for listening. Until next week, deepen your roots, branch out with love and keep growing.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:51:18] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to Kissing in a Tree. We hope you learned something new and that you use it to enrich the relationships in your life. Until next time, we hope you feel loved.