In my previous blog post, I wrote about meeting the hottest girl in Dickinson.  Normally, I am not seriously interested in hot women, because they are so much trouble.  Other men are after them all the time, and it is stressful and difficult to keep a hot girlfriend.  They are propositioned all the time by men, and they end up getting lured away.  This would be especially true in Dickinson, because there is such a shortage of women, and such a scarcity of attractive women.

But this hot girl that I like, has many more good qualities besides being hot.  She has a great sense of humor, she is very funny, very entertaining, and she says that she does not get upset easily.  She has already been through a lot in life, which has made her more mature, and self-reliant, but not jaded and mean.  She is about 30 years old, and she has lived and worked in several western states.  She was born and grew up in a resort town in one of the western states.  Like me, even though she really liked the town where she came from, she just could not make any money there, and she had to come to Dickinson to make money.  I believe that she has been married once before.

I like her so much, that I had to stop and seriously consider what I wanted to do about it.  I realized right away that I am not in a position to get married in Dickinson, so I had better just leave her alone and not try to pursue her romantically.  That would be the best thing to do, for both me and her.

I came to Dickinson in 2011 to work and make money.  There were more jobs here, and higher paying jobs here, than in Idaho where I own a home on five acres.  The only way that I was able to save money each month while working in Dickinson, was to stay in a camper on the company property where I worked, or live in similar low cost housing.  Right now, I live with an older homeowner in Dickinson, in what is not a very ideal situation.  But I put up with very rough living conditions, in order to make money and save money.

The young women that I meet in Dickinson, housing is very important to them.  Ever since I came to Dickinson, housing has been extremely expensive, and good housing is scarce and highly sought after.  The young women here were completely willing to pay up to 60% of their income on housing, because it was the most important thing to them.  The most I ever paid here in Dickinson for housing, was 25% of my income, because housing here was not the most important thing to me.  The most important thing to me, was to pay all of my bills, especially things like property tax and insurance for my home in Idaho.

One of the biggest things that women here in Dickinson look for in a man, is his ability to pay for housing, and his ability to upgrade their housing situation.  How much money does he make, and how much of this money can he contribute to housing.  Women look at me, I’m not married and I don’t have any children, and they expect that I would be able to contribute 60% of my income to housing, like they have had to do.  They look at me, and think in their mind, that their $1,500 per month that they pay for housing, combined with the $2,000 per month that they can get from me for housing, would pay the rent on a nice house in Dickinson for the two of us.

There is no way that I would get on a joint and severally liable lease in Dickinson, for even $2,000 per month.  Right away, this would cause a huge conflict with a girlfriend.  Good housing is so important to women, that they would be outraged, and start to get very ugly about my unwillingness to spend as much as they wanted to on housing.  They would be thinking, and maybe even yelling, “Do you think that you are going to be with me for free and not have to pay!  I will just get somebody else who is willing to pay for me, you aren’t, you cheap piece of shit!”

I have been in the situation before, where I have had to move in the middle of a lease.  For my own apartment, I have had to give thirty days written notice, pay rent through the thirty days, plus pay one month rent as a penalty.  When I have been on a joint and severally liable lease with someone else, who wanted to remain in the house, I have had to pay my half of the rent for the remainder of the lease, in that instance it was five months.  Can you imagine being in Dickinson, not being able to get a job, and being on a one year lease for $2,000 to $3,000 per month, and your “Hot” girlfriend decides to leave you because you don’t have any money, and she is always getting propositioned every day by guys who do have money.  Leaving you solely responsible for the rent, even though it was her that insisted and required getting a place that cost $2,000 to $3,000 per month.

Right now, there are very few job openings in Dickinson. The jobs in Dickinson are also lower paying than they used to be, with much less overtime.  Working for any business or oil field company in Dickinson now, there is no guarantee that you will have your job next month.  I think that it would be a huge risk for anyone to try to have children in Dickinson now.  I think that it would be very careless and stupid.  I would never want to put my wife and children in a situation where we were unable to pay rent, pay utilities, pay bills, and buy groceries.

No matter who you think you are, and how much money you have been making over the last several years, most of the people in Dickinson can’t be certain that they will keep their job, or be able to find another job if they lose their job.  I have lived and worked in seven different states.  People think and tell themselves that if things get too bad, they will just move to another place to find work.  When you try to move from one place to another, you can be completely mistaken about the number and availability of jobs where you are moving.  Just because you move to some place that you think will be better, doesn’t mean that it will be better, it may in fact be worse, because of things you didn’t know or didn’t account for.

So having children now in Dickinson would be a mistake, because you don’t know if you will be able to keep your job, or find a replacement job.  And, there is no where in the United States that is having a boom right now, where you can go to work and send money back to your family.

Living and working in Dickinson for five years now, there hasn’t been many chances to meet likable women, because of the shortage of women, and scarcity of attractive women.  Now, one of the few times that I meet a woman that I really like, I have to decide to leave her alone, for both her sake and my sake.  Women want nice housing so bad, and I don’t want to pay what it costs here in Dickinson, especially because of uncertain employment.  Nor could I see getting married, settling down, and having children in Dickinson.  Living in Dickinson is just like doing time in prison, most of the normal things in life are absent.