Last weekend, while most of New York City was still blanketed by significant snow, I strapped on my snow boots and made the sometimes-precarious journey to Barneys to shop for shoes. I don’t necessarily recommend going shoe shopping when you’re wearing complicated all-weather boots; taking them on and off between shoe departments at different stores gets old really quickly. The trip was mostly for the benefit of my friend, though, who was hunting for several new pairs and had just received a shoe-enabling bonus at work. (Lucky her, right?) In fact, it was at her urging that I tried on the Chloe Susanna Booties.

I’ve loved these shoes for a long time and written about them previously, but until this weekend, I had managed to restrain myself from trying them on. That’s a tactic I often use when I know I’ll love something and don’t want to spend the money; if they never touch my feet, then I’ll never know exactly what size I need, and then I can’t order them online or buy them in-store with any confidence. It’s usually enough to keep my budget in check, but on this particular day, I figured I might as well try them. When in Rome, right? Plus, Barneys had the new version with silver hardware, which is even more perfect for me than the previous gold version.

Of course, it was instantaneous love. It’s like these booties were made with me in mind, and everything from the leather quality to the heel height was exactly as I would have wanted it. I didn’t end up buying them, though, and it was for one reason and one reason only – a little voice in the back of my head told me that $1,345 plus tax was a lot of money to pay for a pair of shoes that’s already lived the glory days of its trend life. Even I’m disappointed with that logic.

I’m always the first person to tell people to buy what they absolutely love and pay little regard to who else has or doesn’t have it. It’s your money, after all, and things you love enough to pay full price to have are always in style. Anyone who says otherwise is a tedious snob. Now I feel like a tedious snob, but shouldn’t something this expensive feel totally special to me? Perhaps the fact that I’m still thinking about these shoes nearly a full week later means they’re more special to me than I want to admit.

Have you ever had this problem? Did you end up buying the object of your affection?

You can pick up these shoes for $1,345 via Net-a-Porter.