DH wants to move to London as soon as DC go to uni

[GoutFine]

DH is from London and we moved to the Home Counties when DC were small for schools/ quality of life. I have always loved it and he has loved it but always missed London. We met in London but I was from another area of the UK originally so don't have the same emotional ties.

Now the DC are older and youngest l due to start uni next year DH has said very strongly he is desperate to move back to central London. He wants to sell our lovely family home and buy a "lovely" flat in zone 1, with spare rooms for the children.

We have lived where we are for 18 years and built up a great network of friends and I'm so emotionally attached to this area as this is all our children have ever known. If it were up to me I'd stay here and the DC would still have their family home to return to. In all likelihood they'd be living with us for a while after uni and we are within easy commuting distance to London (25 minutes into Marylebone and we are a short walk from the station).

He says I'm being unfair as he has lived here for so long and he belongs in London and wants to live back there. I feel my life is here end don't see why he must live in London when we are so close anyway. I mainly feel sad for the children I don't want them to lose their family home and the friendships and connections they have here.

WIBU to refuse to move? He is desperate to.

I don’t think he’s being unreasonable, he’s compromised for the kids and you for the best part of 2 decades, time for you to compromise now. How much longer can he be held hostage to you and your dc needs!

This was my father's view 🙄. He's now not happy in Australia.

You need to reach a compromise for both parties. A transactional approach 'But I did that then so now you need to do this now' is, to my mind, not healthy for a marriage.

If he feels like a hostage then he should just b*gger off and leave the poor OP in peace 😁

It sounds so exciting! I'd love to do it- if I could afford it.

@BatteryPoweredMammy that's me - I too find it all so superficial and also very money focussed. It's all about going out to this that and the other which is lovely to me once in a while but not what I want every single day. I crave nature and value our friendships.

I'm not dismissing his feelings but do think this is a huge issue we can't really compromise on. One of us is going to be unhappy. I (probably selfishly) can't see how he hadn't got the best of both worlds where we are, he can easily be in London in no time at all, less than if he lived in zone 3 to theatres etc. I just don't see how it warrants giving up everything we have now for that change but maybe we will have to 😞

@GoutFine
How often does your husband see these London friends? We moved to be closer to family after my father died. It didn’t work. No one came to see us anymore frequently and the imagined nights out didn’t happen. We sold up and moved 18 months ago to rent a friends flat in our tweedy market town whilst we looked around. Good property has been hard to find as we needed a train station, shops and parking. I wouldn’t go back to living rurally but be careful about the imagined full on social life with old friends. They will have their own plans. I bet after the initial pub night , dinner party etc things will quiten down. We were wondering about missing our friends until we found out they were in the main planning a Bath move or overseas!

my mum, in her 90s, still lives in the 'family home', which none of her children see as anything but a major pain in the bum, as it constantly needs work on it.
My children love to visit us in the city.
The responses only show how various we all are, and that you won't get an answer, unless you would like to prefer the cherry pick the ones that fit with your view.
It would be my idea of a nightmare to have stayed in our country house. It needed constant maintenance, including gardening.
You only ever met exactly the same people all the time - we keep in touch with some people, but have made new friends. And you had to get in the car to do anything, apart from walk.
I suppose it depends on how open you are to new experiences. I remember being horrified, when I went to a school reunion, to find that some of them had never moved away and were still in the same friendship group.
And as for nature! In dreary weather you can always find new parks in the city, and new ways to walk to them. In the country, although it looks lovely, you're stuck with the same old muddy footpaths.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

I'm sure when he says 'Central London' he doesn't literally mean Piccadilly Circus, does he OP? What area/s does he have in mind? That would help people comment on whether he is BU or not.

It's a difficult one and hard to know what the right answer is, particularly as there's no obvious compromise.

Could you try renting a small flat in London for a while (or even an Air BnB at weekends) to see if the lifestyle he's remembering is really still available? I miss our old life in London pre-kids sometimes but realistically most of the people we knew then have also moved away, plus we're 20 years older, so it would be very different moving back now.

OP one thing to bear in mind is that even if you stay put, the life you have loved will change irrevocably. Long standing friends will move away. DC ill be home less often. DS in his final year of uni spent summer at home with us when some other plans fell through and was really disappointed that all his old friends were busy working in pubs at night and interning during the day or off travelling - he barely saw them. He realised that staying in his old home village was not going to be the sociable place it had been during his schooldays.

You need to think how you want to live, what you want to do, yourself, not dependent on old friends still being around. How do you want to live now that parenting isn't dominating your days?

In your position I think it would be fair to argue to DH that you should stay in the family home to give your youngest stability until the year after he finishes uni. They need to come back to familiar places and may need to regroup for a month or two after uni.

Nooo! 😱

Wasting money on cafes and restaurants and going out every night just for the sake of it, is my idea of Hell! 😂

Also, the idea that ‘new experiences’ can only be found by living in a city and paying to be entertained is obviously silly. Every day can include a new experience if you’re open to learning, regardless of where you live.

A few weeks ago, myself and my DH were both helping a friend re-build a dry stone wall. During the afternoon, he was explaining about the history of the area (he’s a farmer who’s family have lived there for generations), and pointing out the various trees and shrubs on the farm land. Another day we found a hedgehog 🦔 nest in a corner of our garden but didn’t realise what it was until another neighbour friend confirmed it. One of our friends keeps bees and gave us a mini tutorial all about bee habitats and which plants the bees use to make the best honey.

The idea that houses in the country are dilapidated and need endless work is another daft trope. I’m sure some of them are, just as older houses in towns and cities will need money to be spent on their upkeep. Ours is a modern timber framed building that is well insulated and twice the size of our old city home but cheaper to run and thankfully, we’re not bothered by endless sirens or light pollution at night.

Battery powered, I'm not sure dry stone walls and bees are what the op's dh is after

Also as they wont need a car in centrsl london, he can spend that money on eating out and entertainment, it depends what your priorities are.

Indeed. Although we do actually have beekeeping in London should the DH have a burning desire to become a beekeeper. 😂

Dry stone walling is more of a challenge but you can do it in inner London (Stepney):
www.craftcourses.com/providers/london-school-of-dry-stone-walling/reviews

We also have gardens and hedgehogs.

Right, I'm off to waste some money on cafes and restaurants. According to Deliveroo, 3120 restaurants are willing to deliver lunch to me right now. The struggle is real. 😜

@BatteryPoweredMammy Ha ha! Ok, so London life really isn't for you - but it doesn't mean that others don't love it!

…because you want to wake up somewhere you love, rather than wake up somewhere a commute from where you love?

….because you want to live in a neighbourhood you enjoy, rather than in a neighbourhood a train ride away from the one you enjoy?

…because you want to spend your life in a place that you feel you belong, rather than in a place that’s not where you feel you belong?

I can just imagine the comments then. 'My dh didn't want to live in the suburbs anymore so he buggered off'. Yeah that would go down sooooo well 🙄

You could so easily pop on the train to see your neighbours. Why can't you see that everything you value is not necessarily what he values the same way what he values and craves is not what you do. You keep invalidating his wants as being lesser than yours. In actual fact they are just different. If you approach your whole marriage like this then perhaps it's just run it's course.

Will you really be able to get a flat of reasonable size in central London any way?

@BatteryPoweredMammy

Wasting money on cafes and restaurants and going out every night just for the sake of it, is my idea of Hell!

The very words ‘dry stone wall’ cause me to despair. Wasting time on walks and hedgehogs is my idea of hell.

This, as they say, is what makes a horse race.

Ooh - there’s another one. Horses. Don’t trust them. Don’t want to be around them.

I mean, the countryside is like hospital to me - glad it’s there for people who need it, but hope I never have to go there myself, except to visit the less fortunate.

I mean, the countryside is like hospital to me - glad it’s there for people who need it, but hope I never have to go there myself, except to visit the less fortunate.

Let me know when you’ve figured out how to turn all the intrusive lights out and all the siren noises off. 😂

The only thing that happens in the countryside is that people die.
Every conversation that starts with 'do you remember Joe Bloggs?' Is guaranteed to end with 'well, he's just died'
There is literally no other news

@AdelaideRo give it a try. I have previously lived in the Barbican. It’s FULL of downsizing older couples!

That is interesting to know. Dh and I would love to live in the Barbican when we retire. We will be in a good company.

To other posters, it is not a mid-life crisis. It is a clear headed rational desire throughout our full on life working and raising children.

No she cant
She has phoned around and no slots at all
No walk in option there

I am delighted that you are an expert without knowing where she lives.

I like the light, I like the sounds of the city.

I’ve stayed in remote country cottages. Bible-black nights and silence. I think, “If it weren’t for a glass of wine, this would be indistinguishable from the grave.”

@WalkingOnTheCracks I'm with you 😂😂😂

I grew in a village of the dead and the only thing I ever miss is the clear night sky