After walking into the fifth house, I looked over at one of my future roommates and my realtor and said, “Gawd, this is JUST LIKE dating. And I really suck at dating.”

My lease is up this Friday on my townhouse and for the first time in my life, I am going to move to a big city by the beach. Except I have to find a place to live and as I type this on TUESDAY (My lease is up FRIDAY), I still don’t have a place 100% locked down.

I.AM.NOT.PANICKING.

House hunting is not only exhausting and stressful but emotionally draining as well. When I met my awesome realtor, Kathy Wood, she handed me a stack of pictures of houses and with each one, it listed its selling features. “Do any of these look interesting to you?” she asks. We pulled a few promising looking ones out, and we began our day. And we fell in love with the first one. It was beautiful. Exactly what we were looking for, new and shiny, awesome amenities and in a great neighborhood. We wanted it. Desperately. We put in our application and crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Then some chick swooped in and stole it from us.

And so, every house we saw after that, paled in comparison to the dream man, err, house.

Looking through the OPTIONS for another house, we SETTLED on a few that had nice pictures and impressive qualifications. And yeah, let’s just say that most of them looked great on paper, but the pictures were from five years and 120lbs ago before the receding hairline.

We saw ones in great locations, but the house was unkempt. We saw beautiful houses in terrible neighborhoods. It seemed that we could not find THE ONE anywhere as we mourned the loss of our TRUE LOVE.

Weekend after weekend, we felt the pressure rising to find the right one. We’d start out hopeful, and then as the day went on, we’d get more and more discouraged. And we’d sigh and say, “If only that first house worked out…” and “I’m so done with house hunting. I’m just going to move back in with my parents.”

Then one day, we found one that we thought we could live with (in) and so we put in our application and a wonderfully written cover letter touting our attributes. We made friends with the neighbors hoping they’d put in a good word for us. And we waited for them to call. We sat by the phone all day and held our breath when it rang. And we waited, and we talked about it, and we kept looking at our other OPTIONS. We met the landlords and made sure we looked cute and acted responsibly. We disclosed our financial information. The landlords told us about their other OPTIONS. We told them why we would be the best choice and found stuff we had in common with them. One of the roommates even baked brownies for them.

We are trying not to act too desperate, trying to win them over with our charm and trying not to become too prematurely attached. We really want to call them and see if they made their decision, but we are waiting anxiously… as our (biological) clocks continue to tick loudly…

(UPDATE: About 4 hours after I wrote this, we got a phone call saying that we got the place! Yay! I won’t be homeless!)