I recently viewed a house in a remote village. What struck me immediately was that the somewhat eccentric design of the building. The real estate agent mentioned the wife of the guy who built the house a few times and apparently he had a lot more to tell. As the viewing went on, I became much more interested in the human tragedy I was piecing together than the house itself.

The aforementioned house was built in the 1980s, but in a style that was much more common in the 19th century. Thus, it was a relatively new house that was supposed to appear much older than it really was. This is probably just a minor eccentricity, but it did not take long to realize that the layout of the house was quite unusual. Among others, there was a separate small TV room, right next to the big living room, which housed a big-screen TV. The small room was apparently designed to be used by one person. When I saw it the first image that came to my mind was of a woman who wanted to punish her husband by demonstratively receding to that private TV room where she could watch her TV dramas undisturbed. I chuckled at this thought. Obviously, this was just an example of absurdist thinking, and there was no way there could have been something to it. Or was there?

Other features of this house struck me as so odd that there was clearly a lot of female influence, making me question who really made the final decisions. The most outstanding example was the attic, which was designed to be a yoga studio. It was very spacious and instead of walls at both ends you had custom-made glass panes all the way up to the ceiling. This looked really impressive, and it was not at all what you would expect. Also, it surely cost a lot of money to build. As we learned from the real estate agent, the guy who built this house in the 1980s had a wife who was really into yoga. Thus, he had the attic designed to be a “yoga space” just for her. Probably everything in this house that was unexpected was due to that woman’s influence.

This was a somewhat unusual house, so the real estate agent also wanted to address the question, without having been asked, why this house was ever on the market. This is where the story got interesting. The original owner, who had apparently been running a somewhat successful business for a while, which allowed him to build a house, made some “unwise business decisions”. Within a few years, he was bankrupt. His wife left him, and he had to sell the house. If I put it like that, the chain of events is quite obvious, but it was not presented to me like that. Instead, I heard that the house ended up “being too big” and the guy needed money.

My interpretation is that this business owner went bankrupt because of the expensive lifestyle of his wife. Worse, he clearly enabled her reckless spending. He did not only let that woman talk him into turning the attic into a “yoga space”. On top, he surely had to spend a lot of money on expensive clothes and luxury travels. In any case, to go from running your own business and doing financially well to getting divorced and bankrupt within a few years is a team effort. You can blame the woman but some of the blame is also on him. Probably he was afraid he would lose her if he did not keep spending money he did not have. This is a trap some $30k millionaires fall into but if you cannot handle money, it does not matter how well-off you are. If you do not watch you money, the women in your life can easily financially ruin you. There are many such stories.