Should you Live Together before Marriage, Part Two
In my earlier post Should you Live Together before Marriage, Part One, I focused on reasons why you shouldn’t live together. In this post, I’d like to focus on why it can be beneficial to live together before tying the knot.
Reasons to Live Together:
1. You see parts of their personality you can’t know unless you live together. You can’t possibly get to know someone as well by seeing them several nights a week as you can by seeing them in their natural habitat 24 x 7.
It’s a whole heck of a lot harder for someone to be on their best behavior when you see them every day and every night. You get to see them when they’re sick, tired, cranky, sad, happy and angry. You get exposure to a much broader range of their emotional reactions than you normally would.
2. You get better visibility if they’re ready for a real partnership. Let’s face it – few people really want to pick up the living room, do the grocery shopping or empty the dishwasher. It just isn’t fun.
Living together allows you to see how willing your partner is to compromise and be flexible. Having to make decisions together about money, cooking, boring old household responsibilities, etc. definitely lets you see what a team player your potential spouse really is.
3. You can see how they handle Financial Responsibilities - Living with them will let you see a bit more of how they handle taking care of bills, especially bills you’re sharing, and whether your comfortable with their habits.
Do they let them pile up before paying them or do they take care of things right away? Do they neglect things they need to be responsible for and instead spend money on something fun? Is the way they handle money the way in line with how you envision your future?
Between the reasons for and against living together, what it really seems to boil down to is not only is this a personal decision, but also that each couple’s situation is so different it can either work for or against you in the long term. I feel as long as you’re completely honest with yourself and your partner as to what you’re looking for and your expectations, whatever decision you make should be the right one for you.
I agree. Living together can either show you how bad or good things can be before you get married, or it can be the worst thing ever because sometimes people live together because they’re not ready for marriage.
And if they’re not ready for marriage, they’re probably not ready for the real commitment that comes from living together.
I think each situation is incredibly different. It can be hard to judge what to do in a vacuum without considering all options and consequences.
I actually am happy that Tom and I lived together before getting married because we were able to iron out how to do stuff. When we moved up here and our incomes plummeted, we had some serious financial issues to work with, and because we had been doing it for a while and had a “system” already, it was that much easier to figure out how to handle it. I guess you could say we would’ve done that being married, too, but like you said above, I think we both were encouraged by what we saw in the other person’s habits and abilities financially.
Tom and I actually complement each other really well – I’m a “big picture planner and budgeter,” and Tom is conservative with money and very good at handling the daily stuff – making decisions about which bills are going to get stuff turned off and which ones we can juggle if we have to (yes, we’ve had bad sitiuations like that). So, he helps us keep on track, and I help us plan for our future. It works.
Cristy – I think it’s fabulous you and your husband benefited from living together before getting married since it let you work out things which may have been a bump in the road later on!
“sometimes people live together because they’re not ready for marriage. And if they’re not ready for marriage, they’re probably not ready for the real commitment that comes from living together.”
Fabulous point, Susan S! I think that may be an issue for some people when they move in together, and that can be what they’re truly seeing from an issues perspective.
I cannot IMAGINE marrying someone without living with them first! That’s just crazy talk.
My boyfriend and I have been living together for a year and are currently discussing marriage. I was married for 10 years to a man who didn’t believe in living together before marriage and, while I don’t think our living situation had anything to do with why it didn’t work out, I think it might have been more apparent to me if we’d lived together first. I want to be sure before I get married this time. But experts say the reason marriages last longer when people don’t live together first is that the people who don’t live together first more often have a morality that has them not believing in divorce, no matter what.
You definitely should live with them first. DEFINITELY! I think the divorce rate would go down if more people did this.
LiLu – I hear you on that one…you gotta take them for a test drive.
Candice – I’ve vacillated on the living together thing for a while, although I’ve heard so many stories I’m leaning in the ‘Pro Living Together’ direction (the stories were from people who said they wish they’d lived together before getting Married, because they never would have married that person if they’d spent 24×7 beforehand).
As I said before, I’m on the fence about the “living together before marriage” issue, but this makes a really good case for it.