Married to Your Partners

Make no mistake when you enter into a partnership with the members of your TIC it is in large part a business, but it is also some strange extended family part of your life. What do you do, if after ten or fifteen years, your partner becomes a raging alcoholic?

We have one in our building. We used to be friends with the couple downstairs. We'd go out to dinner in the neighborhood. Get together on Friday night to have a drink and unwind. Bond over all we've been through in the building, and share our dreams for where we might be a little further on in our lives. For ten years we went along in this more or less congenial fashion. Not best friends, but friendly.

Then the midnight rages began. And the desperate knocks on our front door, from the partner who felt threatened by violence. And then we had to suffer through the other partner standing outside, threatening us, because we opened our door to the one who knocked in fear.

I love my old building, and I've had great affection for most of my partners over the years. We've lived together, and spent a fair span of our lives together. But when someone is banging on your door, drunk, at five o'clock in the morning, calling you names from every ring of hell that Dante could dream of, it's amazing how fast whatever love you had disappears.