Truer words were never spoken. I married the guy I wanted and we were happy, but there wasn’t an ever after.
Wow, way to bring a girl down, ya’ll. 
[Moderator Note]Can we just dial it back a notch or three?[/Moderator Note]
You want a guarantee, buy a new car. Until this year, I would have said to buy a Toyota, but maybe not any more.
I think for me it’s a little freeing to recognize that there isn’t a perfect future that I might be screwing up!
What a bizarre statement. May I ask how old you are? Because that doesn’t reflect my reality or that of anyone I know - I’m 26. Perhaps it’s another of the cultural differences between the US and the UK? Everyone I know who has got married - bar one religious couple - has lived with their partners beforehand, for significant amounts of time. I’m getting married in September, having lived with my boyfriend for 7 years - we were 19 when we moved in together, we certainly weren’t thinking about marriage. It’s far from uncommon to go from living with someone to marrying them eventually, in my experience…
Seriously, you buy into the whole “men only get married because they want sex on tap” argument? For real? This is almost as astounding as finding out that there are people who wear their knickers outside their tights.
Sensing a little bitterness here…
I never said living with someone provides a 100% gurantee that the marriage will last for ever and ever, I certainly don’t think that. I do, however, firmly believe that you do tend to know someone better if you live with them than if you don’t. That’s just common sense. So it makes sense then, that if you’re contemplating something as serious as marriage, you want to know the person as much as possible. A good and logical way to do that is to live with them.
No, I’m American and it doesn’t reflect my reality either. I don’t know any couples who’ve gotten engaged without living together for at least a little while, and usually several years. It’s a very bizarre statement.
It doesn’t reflect my reality either. Yes, I know of couples who didn’t live together first, but they are not the majority and their marriages are not more stable.
I lived with my husband before marriage. I’m planning on moving in with my boyfriend and it may or may not lead to marriage. I would never get engaged before living with someone, preferably for a while.
Moderatin’ the wimminfolks…
Advocating against living together sounds strange to me, too. About the only reason a couple doesn’t move in together here is if they are seriously religious. The de facto schedule that couples usually follow here is date for a couple of months to a year, move in together, live together for a year or so, get engaged, get married. This time frame is of course elastic.
I’ll third that reality as well. My mother actually told me that she would have serious problems with me marrying a man I hadn’t lived with. My mother is also on her third husband.
Most of my friends are married and they all lived together first. I don’t think that has much to do with actually getting engaged, although I do think it has a lot to do with the length of time you end up waiting before it actually happens.
If you know you’re not going to live together until you’re engaged or married, I think you may be more likely to get engaged or married faster than you would be if you were going to cohabitate first. That’s because, in my opinion, there’s a bigger difference between living together and not living together than living together as a couple and being married. Again, that’s my opinion.
Think about it. When you’re just dating you both have your own rents to pay, utilities, ect. You’re still cooking for yourself, doing your own laundry and basically, living your own life seperate in many ways from your partner. Once you live together though you’re sharing bills, saving money together (maybe), sharing meals, chores, ect. You’re living a joint life, albeit not “officially.” Not that much different from being married. Clearly I’ve never been married, so I don’t know for a fact, I’m just guessing.
Since there’s a much bigger change from living your own single life to a combined one through cohabitation, you’d probably be more inclined to try and rush the first transition than you would be the second. So if you’re already living together, there’s less incentive for the guy to get his ass to the jewelry store to hurry things along.
So while it’s not a common mindset in this day and age, the whole “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” does have some truth to it.
Like I said before, here:
I’m 23 and most of my friends moving in together are between 24-29. The SO and I are getting engaged after he finishes undergrad (roughly a yearish from now). We live together, but we had a plan before we moved in. That’s what I’m trying to emphasize here; don’t move in with someone unless you have a plan. So many of our friends are floundering awkwardly; one couple moved in right after graduating college (in 06), and lived together for 2.5 years. When he was the only one present he’d joke about how he’s not ready for marriage, didn’t want kids for a long time, etc. When she was present, she’d talk about when she wanted to have babies (very, very soon) and how she wanted four kids, etc. She’d say “when he and I get married”. :eek: She even bought a wedding dress and left it in their closet without saying a word about it for weeks. I can’t even make this shit up, but I wouldn’t be upset if you didn’t believe me, because it’s just so unbelievably preposterous. He finally proposed last Christmas, and she booked the first semi-decent venue she could find - they had their wedding on a legal holiday as a result. The wedding had all sorts of religious readings that in no way symbolized the way they lived their lives. I think having biblical readings about a couple that lived together for 3 1/2 years is also a bit much. I think he married her realizing that they’re a (relatively) good team, but part of me (and others) wonder if it was just because he was so terribly pressured.
I touched on the other situation, but another friend was planning on buying a house. Instead she (we’re closer to the guy) up and buys a house in a crummy suburb (we all live in the city, he was househunting in the city) and begs him to move in with her. He’s paying her mortgage and doing all the housework and yardwork. I mean, this is stuff we see when we visit them (not often, it’s not a great neighborhood), not even stuff we hear tale of. That stuff is ten times worse.
I think the problem stems from the fact that one party has in mind “I hope this leads to marriage” and the other doesn’t. Plus the whole host of issues of property ownership, from everything you acquire while together to actual homes and leases, etc.
Basically, these are good friends that are normal people - they’ve got steady jobs, their bachelor’s at minimum but most are working or have advanced degrees, etc. But their relationships have rendered them temporarily insane. The SO and I are already having brunch with one half of a split-up couple one weekend and brunch with the other half another weekend. It’s honestly enough to make your head spin. He commented how he can’t wait for it to end. I gave him a look and told him how it would only get worse - when some of them divorced and we were forced to take sides. He went completely pale.
On the surface, of course I’m all and more for people moving in together, doing whatever makes them happy. There’s too little happiness and joy in this world. And if you’re both truly on the same page about things, go ahead and rock on with your bad selves and live together before having a plan. But from what I’ve seen, moving in before having a plan ends up with people emotionally screwed up and financially shot to hell as well.
Depends on how concrete of a plan you’re talking about. A lot of men will agree to whatever to get what they want. Example:
Him: let’s move in together
Her: not unless I know we’re going to have a future
Him: sure baby, we’ll have a future
Her: I wanna get married and have kids
Him: you have nothing to worry about (a phrase I’ve personally heard one too many times)
Vague promises about marriage before moving in together really don’t mean much. You can move in together having every intention of getting married, but then one of you becomes ready a whole lot sooner than the other and is stuck waiting for an indeterminate amount of time. Or, one person promises that marriage will be in the future, not truly believing that at the time, but hoping they’ll “come around” at some point in the future. Unless you have a concrete time frame, it’s pretty worthless. And asking for a concrete time frame before even moving in together might be taken as putting “pressure” on your partner prematurely. See the rock and the hard place there?
What you’ve described isn’t a plan, it’s vague promises. I’m talking about an outline - between this and this time we’re getting engaged, between this and this time we’ll get hitched. It helps to have a reason why you’re not engaged now - for me, it’s money and the SO still being in school, and a small part are our parents. If you asked either of us, that’s what we’d answer. I have (an admitted minority of) friends who have done just this and both parties are content and happy precisely because they were on the same page. Transparency is key.
Not on the same page? Not ready to build a life together and move in. Keep spending every or almost every night at each others’ places, keep on cooking with each other and going to the gym and watching TV together, but don’t make it formal till you’re both on the same page. That’s the recipe so you’re not in the rock and a hard place situation that you (and the friend who bought the wedding dress before the proposal) are in.
Missed the edit…
A guy I dated before my current SO/future hubby wanted to marry me; we’d been together several years. I thought “maybe in the future”, like what you’ve described, but I wasn’t 100% on it. He wanted me to move in with him, I refused. Instead I lived a block from him and spent a ton of time with him. Conclusion? I didn’t combine households with him, and we later broke up. I consider it a major “crisis averted” situation. I would have deeply regretted living with him and having to break up and move out. Obviously this doesn’t work for situations like **jsgoddess **and Asimovian, or any long distance situation, but it certainly works for most.
Nope.
I enjoyed dolls & girly stuff but never spent time fantasizing for a Big Day.
My first roommate in college was wedding-obsessed. Until I saw her pile of bridal magazines, the thought that I should worry about a wedding hadn’t even crossed my mind.
You can’t have both? “I love you more than all the stars in the sky” and “let’s see if we can come up with a previously unknown use for flavored lube” are not incompatible notions.
I never fantasized about my wedding, or anybody’s wedding, as such, but I did on occasion have fantasies that included weddings. I had these elaborate storylines where I was the lord commander of the space fleet or the pontifex of wizards, and now and again I would find it politically expedient to join in union with the scion of some likewise puissant house, to be commemorated by a grand court affair with serried ranks of officers and/or flights of dragons (as appropriate). I never, ever imagined myself wearing a wedding dress; the required costume was either full-dress uniform dripping with gold braid or ceremonial robes of strange and cunning design.
I wasn’t girly, but I wasn’t particularly tomboyish either, more geeky/creative/intellectual; I’m not into makeup/clothes/pink or cars/action movies/sports and never was, but as far back as I can remember I’ve liked science, math, and making/building things (on the other hand I did, and still do, like sewing and crochet; I still play with dolls, if making them, dressing them and then giving them away to the nearest small child counts). I loved drawing fancy, frilly clothing, but I never wore it, so the whole “bride in white” thing never really had all that much appeal.
Sounds like me. 
I liked drawing, and this included fancy clothes. I drew all kinds of girly things that I wouldn’t have actually wanted to wear, like ball gowns or fantasy costumes or even a kid’s idea of sexy clubwear, but I don’t remember ever drawing a wedding gown. I may have done so a few times, but definitely not on a regular basis. A white gown isn’t much fun to color.
Well, you know one on the internet. DoctorJ and I had been engaged for a few months when we moved in together and if we hadn’t been relocating to another state we probably wouldn’t have lived together before the wedding at all. And if we hadn’t had concrete plans to get married in the near future, I probably wouldn’t have moved with him. Neither of us is religious at all, open-ended shacking up just wasn’t our thing.
I still have a picture of a woman in a mermaid dress I drew in 8th grade. I definitely never intended to wear anything like that: with hips like mine, whaling ships would have been sailing up the river…