When people who don't live together get married...

In My Humble Opinion
1

When do they move in together?

This isn’t really a factual question, I suppose, so I’m sticking it here.

When I got married I had been living with my husband for four years before the fact. And it occured to me the other day that I have no idea how it works when people actually don’t cohabitate. Do they move in together on returning from their honeymoon? Start moving boxes in beforehand?

Color me baffled. I realize this is probably just about the dumbest question there could be were there such a thing as dumb questions but, I honestly have no idea (and I have no friends who didn’t cohabitate first to ask).

2

I had all that crap done WHILE we were on our honeymoon. Cost me about twice what it would have had I been there. But screw it; I hate moving anyway…

3

I’ve never been married but I’ll speculate that many couples both leave their premarital residences and move in to a new joint residence. As for the timing, I guess it’s a matter left up to the convenience of the couple.

4

I moved down here from Canada to marry my wife. We had never lived together until we got married. She set up the apartment and all the utilities before I got here, and the first day we lived with each other was the day after we returned from our honeymoon. Neither of us knows anyone else who did it this way.

5

Deb and I did the long-distance romance schtick, so we rented a place a couple weeks before the wedding. I did some painting and scrubbing after work and I began moving out of my brother’s condo in the week before the wedding (which was back in Michigan). At the end of the honeymoon, we rented a truck and brought Deb’s stuff down to the new residence.

6

We didn’t live closer than 600 miles from each other until we got married. She moved to where I was in grad school, and we spent our honeymoon driving (slowly) from Philadelphia to Louisiana. As soon as we got there, we looked for a new apartment, since I was living in a tiny place above a garage. I had always lived in furnished place, and she had furniture, so she put her stuff in storage and had it shipped as soon as we knew our new address. I guess we slept on the floor until the stuff came.

7

It depends on the logistics of who lives where before the wedding, where they’re living afterward, where the wedding is, and what else is going on. What I’ve mostly seen is doing the bulk of the moving before the wedding, then moving the remaining personal items right after you get back.

8

I’ll speak for the churchified of the world (I’ve never even been to a non-Christian wedding).

If they’re both moving:

Usually something happens like one moves into the apartment / house. This would be the person who has the least money to lose by breaking rent or a lease. The week or two before the wedding the other one moves mostly into the apartment, then right before, moves everything, setting up something livable. The second person would stay with a buddy the final few nights. If the wedding is in a city with family (and it usually is), this isn’t much of a problem.

9

It helps if you don’t have a lot of furniture. :slight_smile:

Let me try to remember…DangerDad’s roommate moved out at the beginning of the month, and we got married about a week later. I was living in a house with 3 other women. I remember spending the night before the wedding in my roommate’s extra bunk, but I think my mom was in my bed, and my best friend was there too. (This was in Berkeley–my folks lived 3 hours north, and my friend was 6 hours south. My dad drove down the day of the wedding.)

We had packed up most of my stuff and moved the boxes into the apartment, but then ‘most of my stuff’ was books. Some kitchen stuff too–but since we had 4 people’s worth of kitchen stuff in the house, that wasn’t really missed. I had no furniture except a dresser (I think), and the apartment was partly furnished, which was good, since DDad owned nothing. Oh no, wait, I had an old couch too. As for personal items, I didn’t have that much in the way of toiletries, since we’d all been sharing a teeny bathroom, so it all went on the honeymoon.

When we got back from the honeymoon, my family had dropped off a whole lot of wedding presents in our newly shared living room, and there were several boxes of my stuff. We didn’t yet have a large bed; it was still on order and arrived a week later. So we shared his old twin bed. Mine probably went back with my folks.

We probably didn’t do it in the most graceful manner, but then, we didn’t care. We were so thrilled to be married that all that didn’t really bug us.

I did get pretty ticked off several days later, though. I was going through the kitchen to make room for–well, decent stuff. The apartment had gone through a succession of 5 or 6 guys, none of whom had really cleaned out their stuff. I threw out a ton of horrible Tupperware, aged protein drink powder, and all kinds of icky things. I was pretty mad about that.

Two weeks later, a guy who was supposed to fix a faucet drip broke the hot water valve, and we came home to a flooded apartment with a bunch of guys taking up the carpet, with our furniture piled up in a corner. Ah, good times…

10

Well, speaking for myself (the person who swore she’d never marry someone with whom she had not first cohabitated), I got married at the end of June . . .

. . . and moved in with him at the end of October.

So my first few months of marriage basically felt no different than being unmarried. :wink:

11

my father was remarried this spring, and they don’t live together yet. i think it’s about 40 miles distance between them.

I believe it has something to do with the houses that they are living in. They are both century old family bases, and neither want to give them up. So they have just been having sleep overs and whatever (feels weird to me)

12

My roommate moved out at the beginning of the month (well, officially – the moving process actually took most of the 3 weeks between then and the wedding). Mr. Gazer moved about half of his stuff to my place in those same 3 weeks. Our queen bed got delivered while we were on our honeymoon, and he moved the rest of his stuff over from “The Guys’ Place” over the next month or so.

It was a very tiny apartment, and it took quite some time to get all his stuff, the new bed (we slept on it in the living room the first couple of weeks – my brother and hubby’s sister had strung twinkle lights up all over the bedroom, spiderweb-style, so we couldn’t actually get to or move the twin bed until we’d untangled that mess), and the wedding presents arranged. At least he didn’t really have any kitchen stuff, so that room remained mostly intact.

See, this thread is funny to me, because I think the other way 'round: marriage was such a change to my life that it seems like it might be anticlimactic to live together before you marry. Y’know, you have this big wedding, and then things pretty much go back to the way they were before the wedding (especially when the bride and groom get ready together on the big day). I’m probably wrong, but that’s how it looks from the outside. Enlighten me? :slight_smile:

13

We completed the purchase of our first house two or three days before our wedding (We planned to complete earlier, but it just didn’t happen) - we moved most of our stuff in, left it in a big heap, got married and went on honeymoon. We were pleasantly surprised to find that, on our return, relatives had unpacked (essentials like kitchenware, towels and bed linen) for us and stocked the fridge.

We wouldn’t have cohabited if the house purchase had gone through quicker though, for reasons best described as religious.

14

The responses here are great; funny how alien the concept is to me (and vice versa, clearly :slight_smile: )

But you’re actually fairly right, the wedding was just a big party and the marriage was business as usual, just went back to the way things were, feeling no different, albeit a gram or two heavier from the wedding ring. Although, now, I’m re-married and have never lived with my husband for any length of time - we’ve got a Transatlantic marriage going, and I have to admit, the idea of moving in together is so monumentally huge, that I suppose I’ll have a better understanding of what it feels like. But we’ve been married for nigh on two years now so that’s definitely a little alien no matter how you look at it.

15

We bought a house together in May of 1999, and I moved in immediately. We got married the following October, and she moved in only after we returned from our honeymoon.

16

Back in the mists of time, I was a college student living in a dorm an hour from the family home and my fiance was in the military, living in a furnished apartment many states away. After graduation I spent the weeks before the wedding packing stuff into boxes, and the day after the wedding we loaded up a U-Haul and left Ohio for Georgia, where I moved into the apartment with him. No honeymoon. Ever. Timing just wasn’t right. Did have that night in the Ramada, though, and driving thru Cap’n Taco in my wedding gown.

17

We moved some of my stuff into Mr. Lissar’s apartment during the week before the wedding, and moved the rest in when we got back from the honeymoon. We did the furniture moving fast, and then gradually trickled the rest in- books and whatnot.

It was a small apartment, and moving things in gradually helped with rearranging everything and finding space for my belongings. It was such fun moving furniture around together, and setting what had been his apartment up as our home.

18

Althea and I got married on Halloween in Maryland. i was sharing a house with a couple of other guys in Columbia, and she had an apartment up in Catonsville (about 25-30 minutes away). She was mostly staying over in my house anyway as her work was much closer to my place than to hers, and after the wedding we pretty much continued like that until we moved to Wisconsin the following March.

Once we moved in together in Wisco it was weird for a bit. Not because she was there, but because we had all of her stuff instead of mine. Semi-transient professional musicians don’t accumulate a lot of nice furniture, so we pretty much gave or threw all my furniture away.

The weird part was not having roommates once we got here. I could no longer blame the dirty dishes on anyone but the dogs… :frowning:

19

My wife and i found an appt together before the wedding. I was in another appt with a roommate.

Due to timing after the honeymoon we lived in the apt with the roommate for 1 week while we packed and them moved into the new apt.