This is a kind of bridge story; so not as much sex and a lot more exposition.
We set up appointments with three Berkeley realtors, even though Ellen's house was across the line in Albany.
Two were sharp, young and excited to list the two homes and help us buy a third one -- if a little uncertain about how our relationship -- which we'd explained except for the fact that Ellen's new baby was mine and that we were all fucking -- would look to a bank.
But I had a ton of equity in the Northside house; I'd spent two years at DFJ as a senior analyst and my bonuses the second year had almost paid for the house. When Ellen and I split up, I took out a small mortgage to refi the smaller one I'd had and pay her $50k for a down payment on her house. Her parents had kicked in a little more and so between our homes, we had equity.
The third broker was different. She was maybe twenty years older than us, hair the even color of a good dye job, and a been-there-done-that-cashed-the-check kind of style. She looked at the three of us as we explained our story and nodded, with her tongue firmly in her cheek.
"Mmmkay. Let's think about how to do this in a way that won't tie all of your hands together quite so much. What if there was a way to keep each of your homes and buy another one? There's a lot of equity here. I might be able to get you a private loan cross-collateralizing all three properties. You could rent the two you have and generate some income, and when you decide to split up...the properties...we could have release provisions that allowed the loan to be paid down and release any one of the homes."
For the last twenty years, we've sent her a box of bakery cookies and a damn good bottle of wine, because hiring her and executing on that decision paid for all the kid's college. She's retired in a home up in the hills above Sacramento, and we're hoping she's got dozens of clients who she guided as well as she guided us.
One of her minions walked our houses and gave us a list of things we needed to do in order to maximize rentability. Ellen's house... a small Craftsman-esque three bedroom in Albany needed the most work, so we decided we'd move her and Ted into our four-bedroom while we did it, then shop.
In parallel, we did a lot of negotiating and wound up with a LLC that was held by the three of us who owned half equally, and half by a trust we set up for Ted and any children born to Ellen or Shelly between now and three years from now.
The new house would be owned by the LLC, and each of us would keep ownership of the house we started with.
Then we needed a formal contract on money, which we treated as an update to the provisions of Ellen's and my divorce. She'd pay rent and we'd pay rent to the LLC as well as a portion of the new three-house mortgage. We decided to pool the risks of renting and simply treat the net rental income as going toward the mortgage, with a shared set-aside for maintenance vacancy at the end of the year (I did mention that I was an analyst and structure guy for a VC, then a bank?).
Finally, we needed a personal contract. We didn't ask the lawyer to help with that. It was a kind of a Constitution for the next three years. We talked about it over the weeks and then took a Friday off to try and agree.
This had three pillars: 1) kids first -- everything we did needed to center on giving the kids a loving, consistent, and united experience of us as parents. Ellen and Shelly had already worked through much of this around Ted when we got together; 2) we're committed to make this work for the three-year window it would take for Shelly's and my child to get to 1 year old; 3) we're going to have a bunch of sex. That was both for gratification and as a way of trying to stay connected through what were 100% going to be challenging times. There are three rules around that: a) we're exclusive to each other; b) we each get to say "no" -- but we have expectations of each other that will evolve over our time together; c) Shelly and I are primary, so we get more time together; d) we'll try and do and keep a rough calendar, with the intent that on bad days it'll force us together or give us pre-set up space. We had done the "what does Ellen want" and so we agreed the three of us would try once a week to do a rotating "what does X want" night. I suggested that Shelly and I get a few nights together a week, and was surprised when Shelly agreed, but said that there ought to be a schedule with Ellen and I and Ellen and her.
I thought about that, and Shelly explained that in bed, sweating and dripping, was the likely place each of us would heal or strengthen our relationship with the others.
Finally, we agreed to look for a counselor who had some grounding in complex relationships.
When it was all written down on yellow pads, we sat back and looked at each other.
"Can we do this for three years?" I asked.
