For some reason I’ve never been able to wrap my head around moving in with a boyfriend. To me it seemed kind of iffy just considering the logistics - if you rent a place together and you break up, one or both of you have to move and/or pay double rent.
However, lots and lots of people do it. Right now I’m kind of digging the idea but it’s mostly to get more money (I pay my own mortgage) and there’s the other benefits of not living alone.
This thread isn’t going to convince me to do it or not do it (it’s between me and him) but I am interested in how others have came to the conclusion that it’d be a good idea to live with your SO, how long it lasted, how old were you, did you rent or buy, etc.
I moved in with my SO after I married her. It seemed like the thing to do.
Honestly, I know it’s fairly common these days, but I’d be extremely reluctant to move in with a girlfriend I wasn’t married to. If you do break up, you’ve got to deal with all of the financial entanglements, dealing with joint purchases, moving out again, etc. Depending on your financial situation, you might even find yourself in a position where you want to break up with the person, but can’t, because you wouldn’t have any place to live! It just seems like you’re taking on all the potential risks of marrying someone, without getting any of the benefits.
When you want to spend all your time together, or if you’re spending inordinate amounts of time commuting to see each other, it makes sense. I’m all about the test drive. You want to find out whether or not you’re compatible to live together (it takes a helluva lot more than love) before you get into major legal commitments. Financially, it’s waaaay more better to share the costs.
I was fairly sold on the idea that “there’s no other way to know if it will work”, but my mom made a good argument that moving in together without the commitment just lets you make it not work.
For a lot of people, they view marriage as something where you live happily together, never fight, never hate each other, etc. and if you move in together and you fight, that means it won’t work. But in truth, happily married couples do (purportedly) fight and hate each other on occasion, but they also have to work it through and become a stronger couple for that. So in the end, the relationship will fail by moving in together, because you will leave without trying to get over hating the person.
She also thought that if a guy asks a girl to move in with him, but not to marry him, then that’s pretty much just the guy getting a chance to have a free wife. Which is also probably true in a lot of cases.
Now I’m not sure that these are particularly valid warnings for people who are a bit more realistic about life, but they are still good points.
I moved in with my SO after we’d been together about 18 months. At that point I was confident that it was going to be a long term relationship and living together made sense. Now that we’re going on 6 years together I think it was a smart move.
I’ve never lived with a boyfriend. But then, I’ve only had one very serious boyfriend, and he currently lives 600 miles away. Plenty of friends have taken the plunge, though, and from what I can tell (from my friends) it’s usually done for convenience.
I’m scared to do it, considering I’ve watched my sister and a few of my friends find themselves in a bad situation when a relationship ended. When you’re living in his place and he decides to boot your ass out, well, you’re screwed. Especially if you got rid of all your stuff because you figured you wouldn’t need it. Extra especially if you’ve got no money set aside and you’re living on student loans.
I’m in the (very long) process of moving to the States to be closer to my man, but when I’m there I will not be living with him, due in large part to the lessons I’ve learned vicariously.* In theory*, I won’t ever move in with a SO until there’s a ring on my finger. In reality, I’m weak and I know that the point will come when I can’t say no to the suggestion of cohabitation.
It’s tempting, really - cheaper because you share costs, and convenient because you get to spend more time together. But realistically, it’s not quite as romantic as all that, is it. You have to discuss finances - who pays what? Might not be 50/50, depending on how much each is making. There’s housework to consider - will the man drop it all when a woman’s in the house, and leave it to her? How much “alone time” will you each want, and are you comfortable with providing some for your partner? What happens if your work schedules and sleep schedules vary? Getting a new place together, or moving into someone’s already established place? Each has its own set of questions and negotiations. Living together can be a good thing, but it takes a lot of work, I think, and some people jump into it without doing the thinking.
I’ve never lived with an SO, but I’m curious what benefits of marriage I’d be missing out on if I did so without tying the knot. I’ve always thought that, until you were really sure, there were more benefits to not getting married, given the complexity and expense of divorce if things don’t work out.
I’m a bit different than others in that I view moving in together as an intermediate step between dating and getting married - in other words, I wouldn’t (and didn’t) move in with someone unless we had already decided that we were getting married. Sure, there was a major financial incentive in moving in together, but it happened as a step towards marriage and would not have happened otherwise.
I cannot understand people who move in together without a specific plan to get married, or without knowing if they’ll get married; it just seems crazy and counterintuitive to me. Why merge everything in your lives if you’re not even sure it’s going to be a permanent thing?
What creeps me out even mroe are people who live together but still conduct their lives like they’re casually dating - seperate finances, seperate social groups, seperate activities - they treat each other like “roommates.” It just creeps me out for some reason - it’s too much of a commitment without enough of an actual relationship commitment.
I moved into my wife’s place after we were engaged. Since we were footing the bill for the wedding and we both worked in the same location, it made a lot of sense for us to do so. I guess you can say it worked out OK - we have been married for almost 21 years now.
I agree with the “couples as roommates” syndrome, though I know that separate money is the rule rather than the exception these days, even among married people.
Nothing is permanent (American marriage is proof of that!). There was a long period of our shack up years where marriage was never on the table. That changed for me as I got older, but we lived together for nine years before we tied the knot. You don’t need to be married to be permanent.
I moved in with my SO 14 years ago, and we still aren’t married. It may happen, it may not.
We’d been friends for about 5 years (since college). We were living 400 miles apart. He had a new/good job. I was in a job that I could easily replace. We decided that we were right for each other (hadn’t dated in college) and it made much more sense for me to move then for him to. Since I was moving to a new town, with no job lined up, moving in with him was about the only option. Life has been good since then.
I think the fact that we were friend first made the relationship a much more sure thing.
Well, there’s money that’s “physically seperate” and then there’s money that’s “emotionally seperate,” if that makes sense - my wife and I keep seperate checking accounts and generally have “my money” and “her money” - but of course we don’t think twice about sharing that money and using it together. I know a couple that lives together where the money is so “emotionally seperate” that the man in the relationship came to me once asking to borrow money because he didn’t have “his half” of the rent. Uhhh…aren’t you guys in a relationship? I know another couple where they keep literally everything seperate, including groceries and “their halves” of the bills, even though they cohabitate. Creepy.
We’ve got friends like that, too. THey’ve been together 25 years and married like 18. She buys groceries, and if she doesn’t have the money, they don’t eat. How’s that for creepy? Incidently, she works at Blockbuster and he’s pullin’ down $100K.
I lived with my fiance for about seven months and things worked well. However, things came up and we ended up moving back home (different areas) so we could save up money (this was after college) to be able to better afford living together again. Before we moved in, we were talking about getting married, but he didn’t propose until well after we had moved back into our parents’ homes.
I think that moving in together is an important step to take when one is serious enough to be talking about marriage with their SO (or a commitment ceremony/equivalent commitment) and should be done at least before major wedding planning occurs. Why? There’s always the chance that there’s something that domestic commitment entails that would be a dealbreaker that one would not otherwise know about. A lot of the “before you get married” questions apply to these types of things, and most of them can be covered well before that step as long as the couple has been living together. Do I think less of people who don’t move in together before marriage? No, but at the same time, I realize that they run the risk of running into these problems after they’ve made a major legal commitment and, because of this decision, they’re going to have to be more willing to make compromises now that they are legally bound to each other in order to avoid having to go through a divorce. Not moving in and saving sexual activity for marriage both have these consequences, but they depend on the couple as to how important a dysfunction within these issues is going to affect the relationship.
My husband and I have our own checking accounts, too, for conveniences’s sake, but you are right, that is far different from what some couples do in terms of keeping their money “separate.” When I was engaged, I had to go to the Catholic Church’s mandatory “marriage counseling” (it’s called pre-Cana). We were in a large group, and most of the other couples were living together. Money became a very large topic of conversation, because many of them were living just as you describe here…they had weird IOUs, based on, say, who paid for the groceries this week, vs. who paid the phone bill…everything had to come out even-steven, or they would “owe” each other money. It was the strangest thing. And these couples were engaged, living together, with wedding dates set! They were all very concerned about whether or not they would be able to merge their finances after the weddings. Well, I guess so, if you are practically labeling whose food is whose in the refrigerator! We thought that was really weird.
