Holly, the subject was ‘shacking up’ not sex. If it were sex, the subject would be ‘should you have sex before you get married?’
Economics these days can make it more practical to live together.
Sorry for the digression, handy. I was just responding to pldennison’s post.
In response to the OP, I don’t care one way or the other. 
Why buy the cow when the milks for free
A less flippant reply:
My sister in law just goes nuts over the fact that her cousins in Germany all live with their SO’s. Some for as long as 10 years the least amount of years is 5 together. She doesn’t understand why they don’t get married. I’ve tried to explain that
- It’s a different culture over there.Hullo, you know, part of your hertiage and what you would be doing if your parents didn’t move over here?
2)They are not religious at all. - It costs about 35,000DEM to get married over there ( about $25 grand or so.)
- It’s not a social stigma over there like it is here.
My SIL’s point is based purely on the fact that these relatives are all going to hell for living in sin. I don’t even think of it as that, I think of it as, " Living in stupidity."
My point is, you should get married for the legal aspect.You are making a verbal and written commitment together that is legally binding and it is witnessed by your friends and family ( if you are so inclined for a big wedding.)
Just living together is like playing house and the big commitment is to the rent. BFD, anyone can weasel out of a rent/car payment. To me there are fewer things that are more pathetic than hearing the phrase, “common law wife/husband.” Just make the fuckin’ commitment, will ya? Michigan favors women in divorces: What’s mine is mine and what his is mine. To put it bluntly.
I can honestly say that the couples that I have known who lived together and broke up don’t really get as much sympathy out of me as all that runs through my mind is, Well they couldn’t have been too serious about it if they didn’t get married.
No, disagreeing with me does not make you an idiot. Stupid generalizations that have no basis in reality makes you an idiot. And it isn’t childish namecalling, it is a simple and accurate label.
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Hmmm… I agree with much of what Shirley has said, but there is another aspect of the thing. SO and I are shacking up, but by no means are we “playing married.” Neither of us WANT to be married again; neither are ready for the commitment. Both of us have been divorced, and are in no hurry to make hasty commitments and find ourselves divorced again. We’ve been dating seriously for a year and a half. We were semi-seriously dating for a year before that. We’re going the cautious route.
That said, what’s a couple to do when 1) they both agree they are not ready for marriage right now, 2) they both agree that they want to continue the relationship, and hope that they will one day get married and 3) it’s getting pretty damn old carting stuff back and forth from each other’s apartments.
SO lives a half hour away from me. He recently got a job in my town. We plan on moving back to the UP in a couple years. He looked into buying a house close to his job, but it doesn’t make much sense to buy a house with the idea that he’d be selling it in two years or less. Renting isn’t an option - he desperately needs an investement and tax writeoff.
After mulling things over since September, I don’t see any arrangement that makes MORE sense than living together. Granted, living together has its problems, but it also has many benefits for us. What would you all do in this situation? I’m truly interested.
I am currently “shacking” with my fiancee. We were living together about 6 months before we got engaged, which was almost 3 months ago. The original reason we started living together was sort of an emergency: he’d moved to the area from out of town, his roommate bailed, he had nowhere to go.
The reason that I think we’re going to “defy the stats” is that we have always had the same level of commitment to each other. We’d known for quite some time (about a year and a half) that we’d be married, but we needed to save money, etc. But since he moved in (and then, since we got our own place) it’s never been just a “roommate” situation. We share groceries. I buy him deodorant and underwear. He does the dishes. Since we’re equally, strongly committed, I have no doubt that we’re gonna make it.
Plus, like Manda said, it’s SO MUCH FUN living together! He’s my very best friend.
Sucks to your assmar.
In college I moved in with my (ex-)fiance. We both wanted to get the hell out of our parents’ houses; as I said, we were engaged and had been for almost a year, but were both in college and didnt want to commit to both an education and a marriage at the same time. Living together until sheepskin and wedding bells seemed like a good compromise. (Side note: at the time I was ultra-conservative, so we had separate bedrooms and didnt have sex, cause that would be a sin. In retrospect I wonder how he put up with it. Granted, we did almost everything short of, but we didnt Do the Dirty Deed, which was what counted in my hormone-fogged puritanical little mind. So technically Living In Sin doesnt have to be LIVING IN SIN.) All the same, I am so prayerfully thankful that we did move in together. You learn aspects of a person’s personality by being around them at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week, that you simply cant_know beforehand, no matter how much time you spend together. He’d said he wanted to move in with me in order to spend more time with me; reality was that since we lived in the same house, he could “see me anytime he wanted” so he took me for granted and ignored me even more than he had before. Now, because we werent married I was able to say “F*** you, you jerk,” and simply find another apartment, instead of having to go through all those messy and expensive and time-consuming legal details entailed in a divorce. We had been dating for a year and a half before we got engaged; had been engaged for eleven months before we moved in together. So it wasnt like we hadnt had time to get to know each other beforehand, and we fully expected to get married - the time just wasnt right. I say again: When you live with a person, regardless if it’s shacking up, marriage, or just an ordinary roommate, you learn things about them and about how you interact with them that you could NEVER have learned beforehand, even if you see them eight hours of every day.
Lyxdesics of the lowrd untie!
Everything I have to say is just putting flourishes on what Rubes quite cogently stated.
I lived w/ the Ex for 7 years before marrying, and making it official was the single stupidest thing I ever did. But that was us. This whole issue is just too dependent on the people involved to carve generalizations into stone and pronounce them law.
(BTW, thanks also to Holly for an excellent sketch another aspect of this discussion.)
I do strongly resent some of the assumptions inherent in Thufferin’s post. Speaking as a bona fide woman who comes from a long line of proud but poor as dirt people, “working” is not just characteristic of men. Bet your damned ass women worked, and the men of the family utterly relied on their strength and fortitude. (BTW, kids also worked at appropriate chores. They were given status as valued members of the family instead of pampered consumers.And they learned by experience as well as example, from the women as well as the men.)
I could rant on for ages…but won’t. Let me just say that I never contributed less than half monetarily, shacking up or married, and I supported my husband full-shot for over 5 years. And now that I’m “available” again (not) it is both depressing and disgusting the men who are mainly attracted to my earning power.
OK, Thufferin’, fair is fair and I’m both honored and challenged to live long enough to actually experience what some men have lived. But it’s a disgrace to share life with another person for any reason less than affection, love, affinity, loyalty and honest intent.
Anything less, married or living together, is simply whoring: male or female.
uh, not ranting here or anything,
Veb
Definitely not. Just have sex. But don’t wash your laundry together before marriage.
RynKat asked “what changed?” after we got married (lived together 2 yrs, married, split 11 mo. later)…
There were many probs with us individually and in our relationship from the beginning. I guess when we made it “official” we kinda woke up and realized we really weren’t good for each other. Helluva way to decide, huh?
I’ll weigh in here, my case seems a bit different than what’s been described.
I’ve lived with my mate/best friend/SO(a term I used since the age of 15 and it’s worn to me) for 14 years. We split up at year 7, for a bit, but never really separated. So here we are, going strong and committed, with no legal piece of paper. Our property is legally defined to both parties. We don’t consider our relationship any less without proper blessing from state or church. Our families accept us as a couple. It has been interesting to see how some people don’t accept our relationship as “valid” without the by-the-book steps being taken. I’d say that longevity would paint the picture pretty clearly. As to why we haven’t gone by the book- a public committment ceremony is not our style, and we’ve never felt the need to make a legal document enforce the way we deal with each other.
We’ve lived & loved this long, and it’s still working on that alone. Perhaps I’m lucky, but it’s been all the normal hard work too. Our contract is in our hearts.
I don’t know if living together makes much of a difference or not. I’ve lived with more than one man, and married more than one man (not at the same time, of course, but you get my point :))I lived with my first husband for three years before we married, and we divorced inside of a year. I lived with my second husband for ten months before we married, and we just celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. I was engaged for two years to a man I never lived with, and the relationship failed anyway. The first man I lived with (outside of my family) and I were engaged, but we didn’t get married either.
I don’t think living together or not living together had anything to do with whether or not these relationships worked. Honestly, I think it was more of a problem with me than anything else. In the course of living with/being involved with these men, my personality developed, grew, and changed. It finally got to a point where I felt that men were nice, but not necessary to my personal happiness and mental well-being. I had to get happy with my own self first.
If you’re happy with yourself, your relationships with other people will be successful, regardless of whether or not you live with them. That’s my take on it, anyway.
Concerning statistics that supposedly show that people who “shack up” are more likely to divorce, which people the use to argue against “shacking up” (ie don’t live together because then you’ll be more likely to get a divorce) it seems to me that the statistics don’t show the positive impact of living together, namely, the relationships that break up because of living together.
Finding out early that you can’t stand the way your honey picks his teeth, and then terminating the relationship because of that annoyance, would seem to be a good thing that isn’t being measured in the statistics.
People that quote these studies never do so in full. It is true that live-ins tend to divorce in greater numbers than those who never do, but only when they have lived together for 2 or more years. People who live together and marry in two years or less have the same divorce rate as those who have not lived together. It does make sense, after a couple of years one of the party is pushing for marriage and the other is holding out, this causes tension or marriage against the will for one of them. Naturally
this may cause a higher than normal divorce rate, any way the higher rate is not that much higher 10% or so.