028: How to Convince Your Partner to Leave the City

You can price out land, map out schools, and build a flawless plan and still watch your partner shut down the second you say, “Let’s move rural.” I’m recording from the cabin after a loud, rainy night, answering the question I get constantly: how do you convince your spouse or partner to embrace a more rural, hands-on, self-reliant life?

I start with the deeper why. For me, the pull toward the woods is about biology and mental health as much as preference: the quiet, the work, the sensory reality of nature, and the relief of stepping out of a hyper-digital world. But then we get practical and honest about why a partner hesitates. Kids, income, health care, aging parents, distance from friends, and the fear of losing identity are not “excuses.” They are legitimate stakes, and treating them like obstacles can damage your relationship fast.

The shift that actually helps is simple but hard: stop selling and start sharing. Lead with what you feel is missing and why it matters to who you are, then listen long enough to find the real fear under the objection. From there, I walk through what changed everything in my own marriage: experiences instead of arguments, small steps instead of a sudden leap, and compromises that turn “my dream” into “our direction.” If you want a rural lifestyle that lasts, it has to be chosen, not won.

If this hits home, subscribe, share it with someone who’s wrestling with the same conversation, and leave a review so more people can find it. What’s the biggest concern you and your partner can’t get past right now?

Transcript

Rainy Cabin Morning And A Question

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi everybody, welcome back to the cabin. This is one of my favorite spots in the cabin now, and my wife's too. This bedroom turned out really nice. It's very, very cozy, and it's actually was relatively cool last night. Got really hot overnight. Got really hot yesterday, really humid and damp, and it poured rain all night. So we had the window open for um just to cool it down a little bit in here, but the frogs were so loud and that rain was so loud, trees were falling over just because I think they were getting so waterlogged from just getting that much water all at once. So I'm a little bit tired this morning.

Why Rural Life Feels More Human

SPEAKER_00 0:40

But I get I wanted to answer a question. I get a lot of questions, obviously, from men especially. Uh, how do you convince your partner to move to a more rural lifestyle? You know, one of the things that I've really come to realize over, say, the last 10 or 12 years is that what I'm I think my message, one of my main messages is that I believe this is a more satisfying life. I think we need to reconnect with our humanity. So getting, well, especially reconnecting with our humanity in a digital age, because things are getting so digitized, so so virtual that uh I think we're losing touch with our analog human humanity, which is our true nature. Like I, a lot of my ideas or the way I view the world is through the lens of biology. So when I look at the way people act and the way society functions, to me it's all organic. And it's rooted in our history, it's rooted in our ancestry and rooted in our biological nature. So I think, and so I explain a lot of things, a lot of people's behaviors, for example, or how the society works. I just relate it to the animals in the forest and how it functions. And I so I believe that's where we are, that's where we belong, that's where we're most at um home, that's where our anxiety is the lowest. So I promote this lifestyle, and I know people, it's not for everybody, first of all, it's not for most people, I would say, because for one thing, I think our nature, again, going back to our animal nature, we are creatures of habit, just like any other animal, and we seek the path of least resistance, which I've been talking about for the last 10 or 12 years. Path of least resistance is a good way of functioning because it um allows you to survive and thrive. Survive. I don't know about thrive, survive for sure. So think about the path of least resistance. You've going to extend calories in order to live a more adventurous life or to be exploring or doing whatever, that's risky. You have to replace those calories. So every calorie you burn is a calorie you have to replace through food. So it's it's a good economy to be lazy and to just spend as much time in bed or as much time being uh sedentary and to take that path of least resistance as much as possible. When I say people are inherently lazy, it's not necessarily a criticism or it's not unnatural to be that way, but I don't think it's leads to the happiest and most fulfilling life. I think uh taking the path of most resistance or harder resistance or at least uh taking risk, I think is more rewarding. So anyway, that's my justification for living this life and encouraging other people to live this life. And the other reason most people are not going to do it or can't do it is because they can't physically or financially afford to do it, which is fine as well. What I try to do on this channel, what I'm trying to do with my self-reliance, is to expose more people to it and give them access through my content to this way of life without them having to actually get out and do it themselves. So basically living vicariously. And if I pull the audience like I have in the past, more people are living, watching to live vicariously through me just to experience this way of life without physically doing it, because like I said, they're not physically or financially capable or geographically capable. So that's what I hope to continue to do forever. I'm feeling more and more giving, more and more philanthropic. I feel like I need to give um more of myself to to um you and to just share more and to inspire you or to at least let you unwind, unplug, and unwind and kind of reconnect with what our humanity is through my content rather than um exposing yourself directly to it.

Why Partners Resist The Big Move

SPEAKER_00 4:48

So anyway, all that being said, how do you get your spouse to follow along? If you're a man like I am or was looking to move to the country and trying to convince your spouse, like my wife and I met, she had no exposure exposure to the outdoors. I think she had gone camping once in her lifetime, had lived in a town her entire life. She's from Europe, so she um didn't have this kind expose this access to this much nature and especially wilderness. So when I took her up to my property, to my cabin, when uh she was 19 and I was 23, took her up there for the first time, it was kind of culture shock. And she was never totally comfortable. Took several years to get comfortable, but when we did get married three years later, we moved to uh a small village of 300 people with half an acre of forested land backing on to a lot of forests and and farmland. So again, it's a little bit of culture shock, but she found that she naturally grew to love it and can't imagine living urban ever again. So I think even somebody who has not had that exposure is um drawn to it naturally. And it's an innate uh drive that we have. So, how do you convince your spouse or partner, whether you're a man or a woman, and your partner is resistant to the idea of becoming more rural or living more rural or more hands-on, more self-reliant? Some of the concerns people have, or obviously most of the concerns spouses have, are valid. Like, how are the kids gonna survive or thrive? What are they gonna do for work? How much income are you gonna have? What are you what comforts are you going to have to give up in order to uh live when things are more expensive and your income's not as high? How do you leave family or the community that you maybe you have where you currently are? Um how remote do you have to move in order to have enough land or access to land to make it worthwhile? So, how far from your family and friends do you have to move in order to find that's that remote spot? And every time I read these messages from people commenting or sending me direct messages is I understand that it's probably the biggest hurdle, even in a lot of cases, before financial hurdle or uh or the lack of skills in order to do it. So figuring out how to live this kind of life is not actually about how to build a cabin or to grow food or generate power off the grid. It's navigating the fact that you share your life with someone who isn't where your head's at yet. Well, before you have that conversation, you gotta really sit down and think how you're gonna frame it and what you actually think about it. It's not a small step and expecting somebody else to live your dream is asking a lot. So you have to make sure that you are passionate enough about it to want to convince them to go down this path with you, but also understand their limitations and and their concerns. You're asking them to leave a place they know, possibly, and a community that they've built. You know, the proximity of their family, their friends, their routines, even the coffee shop they go to to Saturday mornings, which probably isn't going to be available or will be different for sure. School the kids have already settled into, or the careers uh you or they have spent getting uh developing. You're asking your partner to give up the vision of the future that you or they had envisioned, but you hadn't probably probably envisioned together. It's a dramatic change. And it probably didn't involve, especially as you get older, hauling water or splitting firewood or being 45 minutes from the nearest grocery store. And you have to understand the person who maybe doesn't share your vision currently is not just trying to be difficult or actually being reasonable and maybe more practical than even you are. They're responding to the actual size of the ask. And if you go into the conversation, treating their hesitation as an obstacle to overcome rather than a legitimate position to understand, you're going to do damage that to your relationship that may take a long time to repair. So the goal of the conversation, the first conversation and the ones after is not to win, it's to understand each other well enough to find a path you can both actually walk together.

Share The Feeling Before The Plan

SPEAKER_00 9:05

So here's the mistake I see most often, which is understandable. You come to your partner with a case, you've done the research, you have the numbers, you know the land prices in three different regions, you've watched enough homesteading content and that you can make a reasonable argument why this is practical, financially viable, and better for the kids in the long run. And you present all of that, and your partner sits there and listens, and at the end of it, they're not more on board than they were before, maybe even less so. That's a major challenge for sure. Kids are um going to be a major consideration for one thing. And if you're not, if you didn't grow up this way, you might think that it's uh you're gonna hurt your kids by doing that. And I've discovered even with my own, who really weren't in this kind of lifestyle, the the rural living actually was better for them. And now that they're in their mid-20s, they acknowledge that, they admit that. Keep in mind there's a difference between sharing something you love and making a case for why someone else should love it too. One invites the other pressures, and pressure in this kind of conversation almost always produces resistance, even from someone who might genuinely be open to the idea if they came to it differently. That's why I always talk about communication. Communication is the most important skill you have in a marriage or in a partnership, no matter who you're talking to. In life, not just in this situation, emotion carries more weight than practicality or facts or data. So what works, what actually moves people, is sharing the feeling behind the thing, not the logic of the thing. So, not here's why real living is more cost-effective long term, which in a lot of cases not going to be. This spoiler, a spoiler alert. But here's what I feel like when I imagine a different kind of life. Here's what's missing from me right now, here's why this matters, to keep me in a way that I'm not sure I can keep ignoring. So, in other words, this is important for my mental well-being, emotional well-being, and I will be a better person, a better partner, for example, and I'm gonna make you happier. I mean, that's one way to frame it. That's a different conversation than just giving the data why you're gonna save money or why you can uh change your job or whatever. It's a different conversation and opens it up a different kind of door. Because now your partner isn't being asked to evaluate a proposal, they're being led into something real about who you are and what you need. And most people, when they love someone, want to understand that, even if it's complicated, even if it scares them a little. So share the longing first and then share the logistics of it later. My wife, from the day we met, understood that I felt very strongly, I was very emotional about my connection to the land and my connection to doing things with my hands. So we've made made compromises all the way through a marriage. So I I'll talk about, you know, most people's situations, but I'll be more specific about our situation, how we did it over time.

Listening For Fears Under The Objections

SPEAKER_00 11:59

So once you've shared what the vision means to you, the most important thing you can do is stop talking, just start listening to see what their feelings and objections are. Because your partner's hesitation is not one thing, it's usually several things layered on top of each other, and they may not have fully sorted themselves out themselves. Your job in in this part of the conversation is just to help them get to the real concerns, like not to rebut them, don't argue, not to reassure them before you've actually heard them, just to understand what's actually there. So listen, like anything else in life, like also just keep listening and get to be genuinely interested in what their hesitations are. Some of what you'll hear is practical, and that might be where they argue the position they argue from the most. The money, the income, the question of how the bills get paid when you're two hours from any kind of meaningful job market, the schools, the health care, which as you get older, the health care is going to be a bigger component of the question. The distance from aging parents who might need more support in the coming years, or maybe siblings that need support. These are real concerns and they deserve real answers, not dismissals. So often a fear of losing themselves, of giving up the life they built, the identity they've developed, the version of themselves they know how to be, the city, the career, the social world they're embedded in. That's not just logistics. That's who they are, and asking them to leave it can feel underneath the surface like being asked to become a different person. This could take years too to convince them that it's um maybe the person they are is only they're only that way because they didn't know the alternatives, they didn't have alternative ways to looking at the world. So the fear won't respond to a spreadsheet, though, it won't respond to YouTube videos or idyllic homestead life and needs to be named and taken seriously. And the way you take it seriously is by asking, what would you need this life to have for it to still be yours? What do you need not to lose? That question kind of changes the conversation because now you're not just asking your partner to accept your vision, you're asking them to help build one that belongs to the two of

Let Real Experience Replace Abstraction

SPEAKER_00 14:10

you. Now I've heard from a lot of people and I've experienced it myself with my partners that it's not that the thing that finally shifted the conversation wasn't an argument, it was an experience. We took a trip together, my wife and I, I brought her up to my cabin, let her spend some time there with me. And she was uncomfortable for sure, but she felt safe and protected with me around, and how I functioned in that setting put her at ease. So that first experience that spending the first night in the cabin, this little cabin that I built on the floor, because all I had was single bunks, two single bunks that we couldn't fit in together. We slept on the floor, and of course there was mice in that cabin, and we had mouse traps going off in the middle of the night around us. And she that was not at all what she was used to, not something she was comfortable with, but she trusted me. And it was spending a lot of little steps like that. But that was throwing her right in under the bus and see how she uh reacted to it, not intentionally, just the way I was living at the time, and didn't really think it was a stretch for anybody. You know, a lot of people will spend a week somewhere rural, like maybe just in a modern cabin or a modern cottage or house or a rustic cabin if they have access to that and spend a week there and see how they feel. Or they stayed with someone who was already living this kind of life. They uh walked the land at dusk, like a lot of people are afraid of the dark, they're afraid of wildlife, and it's more active morning and evening. They also woke up to the quiet, like the silence that you hear, or the nothing but nature sound you hear when you wake up in the morning. Um, they ate food they helped to grow or to prepare, or that they saw somebody grow or prepare. It's something that had only existed as a concept in their partner's mind, became real enough to actually evaluate. Some ideas on paper are going to be easy to resist, but once you experience those things, then it's not just resistance. It's uh, and if there is resistance, it's at least founded in experience. If your partner has never really spent time in the kind of place you're imagining, they're not evaluating the real thing. So try to experience that place that's most similar to what you have in mind. They're evaluating an abstraction shaped by whatever images and assumptions they are already carrying. And that abstraction is probably less appealing than the actual thing. So get them the act experience with the actual thing. And you're not setting a trap for them. It's not as a strategic move designed to overwhelm the resistance. It has to be genuine, genuine. So invite them into the experience and let it do whatever it does, good or bad. It might move them, it might reveal real deal breakers that they didn't know they had. Either way, you're now working with real information instead of hypotheticals, and that's always better. And you might find that once you're in that situation with your partner, that yeah, this is too much to ask of them. So maybe you need to scale it back. Maybe it's not a little log cabin in the woods. Like the most primitive situation my wife and I spent in was in the old cabin before we built our current homesteads. We lived there for three months and it was, well, 10 by 20 cabin. You see how small the kitchen is. Uh that little bedroom off the back wasn't ready for occupation yet. I think we had some stuff stored in there, so maybe it was weather tight, but we slept in the loft, which up and down the ladder. I had the little chemical toilet, um camping toilet that I had on the other part of the loft up there, so she could go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Um, the shower was outside in the sauna in the bathhouse, which is also where we did our laundry. So that was quite primitive for somebody who didn't didn't grow up in this environment or didn't grow up loving nature and loving rustic and rural lifestyle like I did, but it took a long time to get to that point. But my point being is that that was pretty rustic. I don't think uh um I could put her through this or expect her to live there forever full-time. So scale it back. What we have now is something that's a compromise, it's something that we both um find enough satisfaction and we're both happy with that is um more modern than what I like, but uh comfortable enough for her. I'd put my women, put my girls, daughters, and my wife ahead of my own needs, and that's the compromise I'm willing to make. So don't orchestrate the perfect visit designed to sell the dream. Give them that exposure in long term if you can, like I did. Show them the show them something honest, the mud and the work and the distance, as well as the beauty and the quiet, the stars and the the bugs, and then the beautiful times when there's no bugs and the sunrises and the sunsets, but also the rain and the snow.

Self-Reliance As A Direction

SPEAKER_00 19:05

One of the things I said in an earlier video is that self-reliance isn't a destination, it's a direction. But I want to apply it specifically here because I think a lot of people hold the vision so tightly that they won't accept an incremental version of it. And that rigidity costs everything, and it usually is a conversation ender. And maybe a relationship ender, too, if you will really feel strongly about this. You don't have to do all of this at once. In fact, you probably shouldn't. Not because the dream isn't worth pursuing fully, but because the person you're asking to come with you needs to be able to build trust in the direction before they commit to the destination. Oh, you can hear the rain pouring out there again. I love it. When you have a dry space, uh bugs are bad out there when the weather's like this, but we can stay inside. That's why we have a screening porch. That's what you do for a compromise. This bedroom and that screened and outdoor kitchen was the compromise. That's what I did for my wife to make her more comfortable here.

Small Steps That Build Confidence

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Anyway, what does it look like practically then? Maybe it starts with a bigger garden. Maybe that's what I did. Started off with a bigger garden in the house we were living in. A few weekends to a month living somewhere rural or vacationing somewhere rural instead of your typical vacation you would take. Maybe it's a course and a practical skill you've both been curious about. My wife learned how to milk cows, make cheese, ferment vegetables, all the things that she could do in any, you know, the modern kitchen, and then get become passionate about that, enjoy that, and want to do it somewhere more deeply. Somewhere that lets you both test the experience whether having sold the house yet. That's a great strategy. So, what you're doing with those steps is building evidence and confidence, evidence that the life is livable, that you can both find something meaningful in it, and that the concerns your partner has can be addressed one at a time in real conditions rather than promised away in a conversation or in the abstract in the future, make it real. And here's what I've noticed for a lot of people the resistance doesn't survive contact with the actual life, typically. I think again, because it's so innate, it's so in us that it just is expressed, it's allowed to um to surface. And once they're in it, even partially, even tentatively, something tends to shift. The abstract fear gives way to specific experience, and specific experience is something you can work with, something you can both work on together and and discuss. It allows you to have discussions about the practicality of what you just did together, what you learned, and what you would do differently, perhaps. Maybe you would go further into it, or maybe not quite as deeply. The partner who said no to the big leap might say yes to each of these small steps. And one small step genuinely taken together is worth. More than a hundred conversations about the big leap that never happens.

The Damage Of Pushing Too Hard

SPEAKER_00 22:04

You cannot drag someone into this life. You cannot guilt them into it. You cannot wear them down with enough persistence or enough YouTube videos until they finally capitulate and agree to go defeated to a place they never actually wanted to be. That emotional part of it. So some of the products we sell on the website might be out of stock right now if you're looking right now. But we're just trying to evoke this feeling. It's an emotion. It's not the practical experience of living here or living in a rural area when you've grown up or um were raised in an urban environment. The emotion is evoked by these sense, the sounds, the sounds of the rain, the sounds of the frogs, the sounds of the birds, the uh, I don't know, the textures, the natural materials. All of that is the experience. You can't get that from watching a YouTube video. We try to show you as much as we can, but what you're and you're getting the sounds and you're getting the visuals, but you're not getting the the smells or the touch, the feel, the um, the uh true emotion behind it. And I think that's why you do have to experience it. Um, but like I said, that's why we offer the products, we do that, so that you can try to immerse yourself in more of the sensory experience of cabin life. So the last thing you want to do is to get them just to go along with you because they've seen enough YouTube videos to think, well, okay, I'll just give in and and and go anyway. But and I know that's not what people intend, but it's what can happen when the desire is strong enough and the patient runs thin and the result, a partner who is physically present in the life but emotionally resentful of it, is not the life you were imagining. It's a harder version of the problems you were trying to leave behind, and it's ultimately going to fail. If the person you love cannot get there, if the honest answer after real conversations and real experiences and real time is that this life is genuinely not something they want, that is information you have to take seriously about them, about you, about what the two of you are building together. And I never you make a commitment to somebody, you need to stick with it. That's why I look at relationships and I look at marriage in particular. Uh, but that's not for everyone. Maybe there's um maybe you both need to look at your lives again and see what's more most important to you. The best version of this life, the one that's actually sustainable, that doesn't collapse under the weight of one person's sacrifice, is built by two people who both chose it. That's worth working towards, and it's worth being honest when it's not what you have. Something I've noticed about the people who make this transition successfully, who actually get out here with their families intact and their relationships intact and build something that lasts, and that is that they didn't get here by winning an argument. They got here by having a lot of honest conversations over a long time. And those experiences, maybe several of them over years, by listening as much as talking, by being willing to go slower when they wanted to go, by treating their partner's fears as real, not as a problem to solve, but as things worth understanding. And they got here because somewhere along the way, the vision stopped belonging only to one of them and started belonging

Turning My Dream Into Our Life

SPEAKER_00 25:20

to both. And that vision is probably a little bit different, well, almost certainly going to be a little bit different for each person. For me, it's spending time in the woods cutting trees down, milling lumber, making things. For my wife, it's being in the kitchen making soap and tallow products and cheese, good meals, preserving the food, uh, freeze-drying and dehydrating, making jerkies, smoking. That's her vision of it. And she's finds a lot of satisfaction in doing those things. But you're not going to find her out in the forest with me when the bugs are thick like they are right now, or in the rain, or you know, bear hunting, fighting off um animals and insects and hardships. That's not her. And I don't would never expect her to do that. And that's to me the traditional role of man and woman. And she's and she's obviously also the one providing uh emotional support and and um and uh mental support or practical support for our two adult daughters, and her sisters, and her mother, and my sisters, even. She's more uh helpful to them than I am because she because that's the role she's taken on in our in our relationship and in our family. So that shift from my dream to our direction is the whole thing. That's what makes the difference between a life you built together and a life one person dragged the other into, and you'll feel that difference every single day once you're out here. The land is hard enough, the work is hard enough. You want to be facing it with someone who chose it alongside of you. Someone who, when February is long and cold and something breaks that you don't yet know how to fix, looks at you and means it when they say they're glad they're here. And they're glad to be relying on the me in this case. My wife likes to rely on me. She thinks of me as a very strong and capable person. He's providing her safety and security, and she really respects me for that. And it's made our relationship so much stronger when I'm able to be the man and to provide. That's our story. I'll tell, and I've told more of our story, but I'll tell more of our story how we got here and how we continue to evolve together and how we continue to develop our skills and our life of uh rural living together. And you know, hopefully, like I said, you can convince your partner, but if not, maybe you can find a compromise. There's always you will find a compromise if you know how to communicate with your spouse, and you should. Well, I hope this helps, and we'll continue to have these conversations because I think this is um this is a challenge that most people need more work on, more help with, and they'll continue to provide, you know, backstory of how we got there and how we're continuing to move forward and what we're learning each and every day about compromise and communication. The journey is where the real fun's at. So I'm gonna get to work. Speaking of that, get the rain jacket on and some bug um protection, get out to do some work while she spends some time indoors. I think she's uh working on some food stuff today. I had wrapped that up inside, but I might have to go back inside. The bugs are kind of bad. I got a bit of smoke coming at me, at least. Very specifically about our situation.

Our Slow Path Into Homesteading

SPEAKER_00 28:31

I think a very quick, and I'm adding this in after I finish recording inside. Very quick uh summary of our path, my wife and I. So we meet when she's 19, I'm 23. I have that cabin at my property, five and a half acre property, cabin that I built. She comes up there, spends weekends with me in the uh good season, summer, spring, summer, fall, and goes out actually hunting like down this river, take a boat across the lake, take a canoe down the river and sleep in a tent. Bears actually she's in the tent, and I'm uh you know this little tiny island in a tiny river. And uh I'm I go downstream first thing in the morning before she's up. This is a range, like she knows I'm doing this, but I take the dog, Toby, my golden retriever. We go down river duck hunting. She wakes up to wolves howling on the shoreline. So that was one of her first introductions to this lifestyle. And then uh fast forward, like so she's getting used to the cabin life and all that kind of stuff just on weekends. And then we live in a town that is getting expensive where we met, where our my parents still live, where I grew up. She spent a lot of years there. And her parent, her mother, and her sister still live there. That town got pretty expensive, so we moved two hours north of there. Hour and a half north of there, hour and a half, I guess, north, in a small village, and bought that little um 750 square foot house, which was like a cottage, basically. That's what it was built for. At the base of a ski hill, edge of cottage country where there's lakes and everything. So that was what we could afford, so we bought there and lived there. It was electric heat, really expensive electric heat. So I put in a wood stove immediately into the basement with an open staircase of the and put a vent in the floor so the air could circulate throughout the house. So we started cooking, or not cooking, did some cooking, but um started heating the house entirely with wood just uh for frugality out of frugality. So that was her first introduction to kind of living a more rustic world lifestyle. So that would have been 2020, 2000 or 1996 that we got married. So I was 26, she was 22. Uh lived there for two years and then moved to that bigger house in the bigger village. Uh I think it was 900 people. I think it probably roughly is still the same, hasn't grown much. And again, we had wood, fire, mostly propane, heat though. Uh half an acre where I could grow stuff, but we mostly planted formal gardens. Uh, not like super formal, but perennial gardens for uh for aesthetics rather than for food. Got away from the whole homesteading lifestyle for a while, other than me going hunting and fishing and making some things offline. Like uh still made some creams and things like that, tallow stuff. And uh continued to live as much of a wilderness weekend warrior type stuff, like probably most of you do, and most people do. Not living the life, but um you know, dabbling out like a hobby. And then uh fast forward to losing the business and everything else. That was 2010 when I turned 40. Yeah. Yeah, that's when we lost business when I was 40. So 41, we really got started into homesteading essentially, so started growing our own food again, started sourcing food more importantly from local farmers. So building up a community, learning those skills like the cheese making and the fermenting and the soap making and all the things that are uh a good way to start dabbling into homesteading. So that again, years, decades at this point now, where we've been practicing these homestead skills before we decided we could move and do it full time. So we move into that cabin, put our house up for sale that the kids were raised in, we lived in for 20 years, put that up for sale, moved into the small cabin, lived there for three months while we were building the other house. That rural house again, we bought raw land and cleared it all ourselves and started building. COVID hit, kids had to come home or move back in with us somewhere, so we moved into that unfinished home for a while while I was building the other homesteads. The old cabin, which we ended up selling, and then this one. So it was a real process of slowly getting into it and her getting more and more exposure, my wife getting more and more exposure to this lifestyle to the point where she couldn't have it any other way, wouldn't have it any other way. The silence, the solitude, the privacy, the sound of nature rather than the sound of you know, traffic and sirens and people. So that uh, and that's where she's happiest, and that's where I'm happiest. So that's our compromise. That's our story. That's how we got to this point. Not overnight, took years, but you're gonna get older anyway, so may as well be working towards something instead of trying to push it all to happen in that first year that you have this idea. Anyway, back to the story. Anyway,

Final Thanks And Next Time

SPEAKER_00 33:46

that is it. Thanks for watching, appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.