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Babies: 9 - 12 Months
NBR: What are your thoughts on living together before marriage
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Re: NBR: What are your thoughts on living together before marriage
to each their own, i guess.
we lived together from uh, the beginning almost! lol
we moved in this house together after dating a month. lived together 8 months before the wedding. been married almost 2 years.
I'm probably going to be the only one on the board in this situation... but we lived together for a year before getting married and didn't have sex, lol. I'm glad we did. We got to know each other much better and honestly the first year of living together was harder than the first year of marriage, by far. We had to work through all the roommate stuff and figure out how being together full-time was going to work. I think the transition to marriage was much smoother.
DH, however, says he doesn't necessarily regret living together, but he also doesn't think it was "right" and will encourage our children not to do the same. I think that it's a great way to really get to know your partner before marriage. I'd rather my daughter live with a guy for a year and dump him than marry him and figure out it really is not how she thought it would be.
I think people should live with their SO before getting married. That is not to say that you should shack up with every person you date, but if it is a serious relationship and marriage is likely, I think it is the only way to really know what you are getting into.
DH and I did NOT live together before getting married, come to think of it, we didn't even live together AFTER we got married!! ?Not because I'm uber religious or anything, but he was stationed in California, and I was still living in NYC going to school for almost 2 years before we moved in together when we came here to Hawaii. ?Yup, we did long distance for 2.5 years and were married for about a year before we ever lived together!
If he wasn't in the military obvs we would have done things differently, but I like how it worked out - when we moved here, I really felt like husband and wife and we were able to start our first home together! ?Other than that, I had stayed with him in hotels for a week here and there when I would go visit him in Cali but that's about it. ? For us, I think it only solidified our relationship, I pretty much know that now since we went through that together, we can handle pretty much anything....
We didn't live together until after we were engaged. I don't know about moral reasons, but I am assuming that if you live together before married, you are still thinking you might break up, right? I thought 1) that is a lot of baggage to bring into your next relationship. 2) I wouldn't be comfortable doing married things (not sex) with someone who could just walk out one day. Things like getting a joint bank account, sharing household chores, having our families over for holidays, etc. I mean, who buys the groceries? Do you split them? Do you figure out what you ate and what he ate? Is it like roomates where you each buy your own and label your milk? And I definitely wouldn't fold another person's underwear or clean another person's pee off the toilet unless we were family.