Moving To a Simpler Life in North Carolina
| Ms. Mauro, now 32, still remembers the moment in 2002 when, sitting in her cube at a New York City communications agency, she tapped out an email to me at The Wall Street Journal lamenting the “pre mid-life crisis that afflicts a tremendous number of people in the 28-35 age range.” Working 12-hour days to pay the rent on their Manhattan apartment, she and her husband of two years, Marc Hineman, a trading-desk manager, had “all kinds of questions” about how they would afford to buy a house and raise a family, she wrote. |  |
“It wasn’t until Marc and I took a huge leap of faith that things started to fall into place for us. About 10 of my friends had moved to Charlotte, N.C., after college. They said, ‘We’re getting out of New York.’ On a visit there in 2005, we saw a new house in a new subdivision that was under construction. It was priced attractively, and we took the leap and bought it. We made plans to move there with Ava — before my husband even got a job in Charlotte. Talk about having faith! My grandfather said, ‘You guys are nuts. You bought a house and your husband doesn’t even have a job there? What are you doing?’ But we felt we had to step out of our comfort zone a little and say, ‘What if?’
“We knew we might have to have a commuter marriage temporarily, but that was a risk we were both prepared to take. Luckily, my husband got a job in Charlotte the day after we closed on the house. The power of positive thinking has a lot to do with that. Sometimes you just have a vision — you know, ‘This is right and we’re going to find a way to make it work.’
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