I'm shacked up

My college girlfriend and I shared an apartment the last two years of school. We broke up my final semester, which made the final to months under the same room kind of tense. I had to sleep on the couch most of that time, and slept in my car when things got really ugly. Oddly enough, we're still friends 11 years later.

My wife and met and almost immediately moved into together. It was never that big of a deal. Things tend to work themselves out. We don't tell each other what to do, and don't keep score who does what and when and how often. It's worked for 10 years now.

 

MrsExpendable and I "shared" an apartment for eight months after we moved for her job. With my chosen profession, a long-distance relationship just wouldn't work (I'm surprised it works now). We got married and I'm rethinking the long-distance thing have remained that way for eight years, so I guess you could say it was a good experience.

 

I don't look at it as a religious issue, and maybe my age is showing (like my lower-back pain some mornings), but I never lived with any spouse types before marriage and would not advocate doing so. I see it less as a necessary transition but as a mixed-signals stage that minimizes the marital commitment.

 

Of course it's bullshit. It's the commonly made mistake of causation versus correlation. Who knows why more non-religious people get divorced than religious (if that's even true). It's probably a lot of things, both good and bad. Could be that their marriages truly are stronger as a whole because they take it more seriously; could also be that they're afraid of being cast out for getting divorced. Could be both. Probably is, even. But to say that pre-marital cohabitation leads to more divorces just because those who co-habit more frequently get divorced is the sort of logical fallacy that intelligent people stop falling for in about the 10th grade.

 

I like how everyone who is Christian is automatically grouped in with the "Christian Right" and all the other Pat Robertson/Ralph Reed/Jerry Falwell crowd. I also like how every Christian's religious beliefs are tied directly to their political beliefs.

Not all of us Evangelical Protestant Christians are stark-raving mad like the troika I mentioned above. Only the extremists get noticed because they're the loudest and draw the most attention. It's also interesting how "church-engrained dogmas" are widely dismissed as illogical when it comes to someone using evidence to back up a point.

Anyway, Cadet's right about the "keeping up appearances" part.

 

Don't have a lot to say on the shack-up-or-don't-shack-up question. Mrs. Wills and I did and it worked for us. Your mileage may vary.

I do want to say something about this bathroom space. My bride takes up the majority of the space around the sink, in the cabinet, etc. with her stuff. Understandable. She has little individual makeup brushes for God knows what, and I have deodorant, cologne and a brush and some hair jelly, and there's less and less need for that, if you get what I'm saying. She needs the space. I don't.

But here's the thing: Last week, I hung a sweet set of stainless steel shelves in the bathroom for her -- at her behest, and at considerable risk of exposing my utter ineptitude at such minor home improvement. After a week, none of her crap had made the migration. It's still lollygagging around the sink (LOLLYGAGGERS!).

So today I moved my crap up there. The hell with it.

That's all.

 

Best decision I ever made, when moving in together:

Found an apartment with 1.25 baths.

Now we're in a place with 1.5. Regardless, she gets her own sink to spread out her stuff (and, of course, about half of mine, too.)

 

a lot of new homes are being built with dual master bedrooms

great idea

 

Nothing in that article even remotely mentioned cohabitation.

It's simply a Bob Beamon-sized leap on your part to assume that "Massachusetts liberals" cohabitate and "Bible Belt" citizens do not. The article cited many factors to support the statistics --- but cohabitation was nowhere to be found.

 

fuck other people's beliefs, pirate. do what works for you.

i have two years of living together under my belt. i've also been married to that person going on 20 years.

 

being raised the way i was, my grandma/aunt/great aunts would probably kill me if they knew i was shacked up with a girl and we werent married. i dont think it would even matter that we were planning on getting hitched at some point, either.

 

FDP, the part of your original post that encourages me is that you're "surprisingly not apprehensive about it at all." Changing living situation naturally has some stresses, but if the living together part of it isn't a stressor, that's a good sign that it's right.

Personally, I think getting married without living together is not in anyone's best interests, just like getting married without sleeping together. I'm all about making informed decisions -- if you're going to commit to something for the rest of your life, know as much as you can about what you're setting yourself up for.