If you have ever wanted a Pinterest-worthy home, let me tell you from experience—it is not as glorious as it seems. 

I have always been an orderly person who loves beauty. It started very young. When I was tasked with painting something in kindergarten, I held in my mind an elegant European painting of a mallard and was dismayed when the best my feeble kindergarten mind, hands, and skill could only produce a painting of three yellow ducklings. It was to be hung in the principal’s office as one of the best paintings of the class, but I didn’t understand why. It was just a kindergartener’s rendition of ducklings. It sucked.

I have had many roommates. Starting in college at UC Berkeley, the people I lived with came from a colorful array of backgrounds meaning different kinds of relationships with home. Some I learned from, some I had to overcompensate for when it came to tidiness and cleanliness. 

Thanks to this innate longing for beauty (I am a Taurus), I always sought to have a home I could beautify and feel beautiful in—to make it beautiful, tidy, and clean in the way I saw fit, and in a way that would make me happy. 

In my late 20s I rented a bedroom in a large Victorian house, which I shared with four other women who were all largely on a budget as well, the struggling millennials like myself all around me. Still, I painted a dresser that was over 100 years old a coral color and put a green vintage armchair in the corner of the room. I put up a gallery wall using vintage posters of Bonnie and Clyde I found in an LA flea market. It was a home-room for a moment in time, and it was adorable. But it was just a room.

I moved to San Francisco at 30 and immediately began living paycheck to paycheck, not because my career hadn’t grown, but because between the rent in San Francisco and the social tax of living in San Francisco (particularly that no one moves to San Francisco to stay at home), there was little left over. Still, I created a home I loved…that I was also sure my roommate would love. The truth was I didn’t want any design input from her, so I designed with what I thought were her tastes. The result was a black, white, beige, and neon room that received acclaim from visiting friends, but not something that I would have selected had I not felt like I had someone to appease.

Home continued to be a moving target, in both definition and location.

In my mid 30s, in the environment Covid created including remote work, I tried my hand at being a digital nomad. I traveled south, to the Americas that “Americans” don’t consider America. I passed evenings in hammocks looking at mountains and woke up to coffee made in the wall-less kitchen. I took my calls with dilapidated walls behind me, unable to hide the Costa Rican humidity on my face. 

I was not a good digital nomad. Digital nomads aren’t supposed to long for home.

I settled on where I wanted that to be eventually—Mexico City. First I looked for short-term furnished leases. When that appeared to be futile, I started to look for long term furnished leases. And when that was too hard, I decided to get an unfurnished place and just buy furniture. I found a two bedroom two bath condo in a middle class neighborhood. I would be the first tenant—the building was brand new. 

I made a Canva as to how I wanted this, the first home I’d ever live in that would be exclusively mine, to look like. Yellow. I wanted the living room to be predominantly a happy, pleasing yellow. Colorful wall art, mostly made by local artists but a few vintage pieces. The office would be white, shades of natural wood and terracotta, and blue. For the master bedroom, I got a double bed, and the colors were largely white, different tones of wood again, cobalt, with two pink concrete table lamps on each side table. 

Home. My home.

Some time later, I would sublet the apartment while traveling abroad with my husband. “Wow,” the house guest said. “It looks a lot better than the photos.”

It was a simple home and intentionally minimalist. Over the years I can see how collecting stuff can disable you from enjoying your life. Where pieces were lacking, the design made up for it in the use of color or layered wood finishes, which were not designed to match. I also used budget furniture since I had no idea I would be there. Either way, you can say what you want about it, how it was technically a good or bad design, but most importantly, it was mine, and I loved it.

I felt a kind of calmness and peace in my new home that I realized I had been looking for my entire life. For one, it was the first time I could call a home mine and only mine. Which meant I could design it down to the ordering of the things on the sink in a way that I found visually pleasing. It was easy to keep clean. It should come as no surprise that I am also incredibly clean and tidy. In the coming months I would look for ways to improve on my already perfect home—the perfect bathroom art. The right little vase to go on the guest bathroom sink. I even started to toy with being the perfect host to my guests, providing them with TikTok-style amenities in the form of toiletries. I put command hooks in places to keep cords orderly and not have to bend down to get them. The TV had almost no visual cords. I wondered why people struggled to attain and keep Pinterest homes.

No visual cords. No clutter. But also no people.

I loved my home as it was then, but the truth was, as much as I felt a sense of calmness, peace, and safety in it, it was also notably empty. My floor-to-ceiling windows looked into apartments across from mine, where inhabitants also had floor-to-ceiling windows. I enjoyed seeing how my neighbors all designed the exact same space in different ways. But also, I noted who was alone, and who wasn’t.

The couple who’s balcony faced my bedroom became the people I thought about the most. Sometimes they had friends over. They had a dog who would make eye contact with me sometimes and despite the fact that I had never pet her, I felt like I knew her. Sometimes their parents would come over. There was magnetic poetry on the refrigerator, jumbled up and played with. Whether or not their apartment was beautiful was not the point—I had an apartment, they had a home. It was different.

It’s funny how a single moment in your life can change everything. 

I can still remember the first time I locked eyes with my now husband. I would come to see him various times before he ultimately asked me out and we had our great romance. Most of our relationship occurred without a great deal of fanfare. We got married quite randomly and very quietly on the Friday after I parted ways with my job. And then, life happened.

But I couldn’t tell life was happening. What I thought was happening was that my beautiful home that I had hand-selected, piece by piece, was falling apart.

People don’t like to talk about the parts of marriage that are hard. When people talk about marriage, their experience is usually polarizing in that unless someone is open about it being awful, most people tell you that their married life is great. It’s very black and white.

But there are a lot of words between great and awful that people don’t share. So I will tell you one thing about marriage that is real: that it is hard. Even when you bring together two well-meaning people who love each other. And the reason for this is because everyone comes from a different walk of life and does things differently, from the big to the small. You realize that when you enter this very close union with someone. Marriage is the only relationship in which we take our lives and completely conjoin it to someone who was at some point a complete stranger. How good of a partner this person will be depends on a lot of factors, but even a marriage to a wonderful partner can and still will be hard due to this fact.

Some people marry people from the same world. Largely, this is by design. It feels safe. But I am not the girl that likes to do the things people “should” do. So I married the love of my life instead. 

I say all of this to say that we come from very different spaces. Our ideas of home were different. Our ideas of a lot of things were different. And for some people they will consciously or unconsciously not choose love, real love, because if you love someone who comes from a different world, it isn’t always going to be easy. It will not yield a beige home or a relationship that will always look great on Instagram. It is worthwhile, though.

My home changed with my husband. The first signs were physical. Long, straight, South American hairs on the ground. Lights left on in rooms not being used. Wrinkled beds where someone had laid down for a moment and then got up without straightening things out.

Then more. And for a moment, I thought I was losing it. It was true, I lost my home. I lost it in that it was no longer mine alone and also that it was no longer my sanctuary in which I had complete dominion over how perfectly the cords were placed in the command hooks or how the guest bed never was touched. And I admit, for a moment, I thought I was losing myself.

But was it a sanctuary or was it a fortress? A sanctuary is a safe place. A fortress—well, no one is supposed to come inside a fortress.

I hadn’t thought of it that way. But loving my husband sprung up on me in a way that I could not measure, control, or stop even if I had wanted to. It was only in retrospect that had our love affair not been so intense, I was never going to let anyone in. I hadn’t designed a home for that. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t designed for that. In seeking out beauty in perfection I had completely missed the point that beauty is not always perfect—beauty is just beautiful. Beauty is often defined by a bit of imperfection. Perhaps that’s what I saw in the lives of my neighbors with their disorderly magnetic poetry. Perhaps that’s what made their apartment feel like a home.

I would be lying if I told you I got this lesson quickly and easily. I resisted my husband’s unintentional attempts to take this space from a Pinterest-home to an actual home, and to take us from a couple doing what we “should” to a family that on occasion stays up until 4am on a Saturday because we’re talking.

It took me this long to realize that life happens in between the lines of our day to day—between the lines of these perfectly manicured homes. It’s not perfectly matching plastic containers but a pickle jar that now houses the sugar, drawn on it by you when you were six years old and still in use, as my mom has. It’s finding a single dog hair on the carpet, three years after your dog passed. It’s deciding to play a card game at 1am.

It took me this long to realize that home is happening all around us, in the seemingly imperfect cracks within our Pinterest-perfect homes. 

I haven’t let go of the desire for a beautiful home completely, but I try to be more reasonable about it. I do wipe counters after my husband has made a sandwich. I do turn off the lights. Too many people who know this battle too well will tell you that everything is best in balance. I still like a clean and tidy apartment. 

But, I also recognize for it to feel like we’re living—actually living—we also have to just let life happen. We are not here just to keep tidy Pinterest homes because we are not tidy Pinterest People. We are people. People with unkempt beds, 1am card games, dishes in the sink, laughter, and keys left in the wrong place because we came home exhausted from a fun day. 

If we want to feel like we are living, we must actually let ourselves live.