Weddingbee boards

I lived with an ex before meeting my FH.  I thought he was "the one" and we moved in with another friend so that we could save money.  We figured since we all went to the same school and knew each other really well it was the best plan.  Well somewhere during the summer we grew apart.  I didnt want to kick him out since it was like a week before classes started so we lived together even after the break up nd just avoided each other as much as we could.  I moved out, met my current man and am now living happily ever after.... 

i dont regret living with anyone that i have lived with in the past.  All the experiences have made me who I am today and they were experiences that made me grow up. 

Oh *shiver* I just mentioned this on another post today! I agree with you Chelsea.  Living together can be a tough thing and it doesn't always work out. 

My FI is amazing and we have a great living situation in our little city apartment and our cute cats.  However, I've lived with THREE boyfriends in the past (I'm 31) and they were all awful situations, utterly heinous breakups!  During the first one, I nearly had to file for a restrained order.  During the second one, I had moved across the country with the guy, we had been engaged and our wedding called off and we had accrued a ton of debt and I could go on and on.  The third one (yeah you think I would have learned) he just snapped and left, moving across the country to be with his old high school sweetheart and left a BUNCH of crap behind that I had to go through and either sell or give away while I quickly found a new roommate, since life in Seattle ain't cheap.  Cohabitating made ALL of these situations more difficult, because you don't just have the emotional turmoil of a break-up, but you are also having to deal with money, objects, sometimes even pets! 

So those situations SUCKED.  But I had no idea they would have ended up like that.  I really had to learn the hard way what I was looking for in a partner.  Once I met my now-FI, I could hardly believe it.  He's mature, respectful and kind.  But, I also had to set some limits about cohabitating, such was my fear about sharing a lease after those past situations.  He was understanding and we didn't move in together until we had decided we wanteed to be engaged, although we did move to the same neighborhood so it would be easier to see one another regularly. 

I don't regret the situations because they brought me to where I am now.  I had a lot of learn about what a healthy relationship is.  I was in a pattern of choosing very unstable partners and had to learn to channel the desire to care for others into different areas of my life, rather than into my relationship.  Now I know that it is normal to care for someone and help them through hard times sometimes, but they need to be able to sometimes take the wheel as well when I'm having a hard time!  My FI and I do this and it feels very balanced.  Like I said, it took some big life lessons to get to this point.  All the more reason to enjoy it!     

Ooh, good points, ladies. I just moved in with my fiance (and his parents, who are entirely cool and amazing- lucky me, getting such great in-laws!) and so far, it's been wonderful. We've thoroughly enjoyed the domesticity of living together and not being in a long-distance relationship anymore...hallelujah!

We bought this book called 1000 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married. I highly recommend it. It divides the questions up into 50 or so different categories and is such a great starting point for conversations that need to be had, but are sometimes hard to discuss. We got to the living-together section and it asked questions like, "Who will move out if you break up?" and "How will divide bills such as utilities, rent, etc?" and "Whose stuff will go into storage?" We were going, "Whoa...we never really thought about this stuff before." They were hard questions to answer, because when you're in love and in the honeymoon phase, breaking up is such a foreign, almost taboo subject that I'd be willing to say 90% of couples avoid entirely. But it was refreshing to get all that out in the open, even if it was depressing!

I lived with someone for 4 years and dated for 6 years before I met my fiance. My fiance never lived with another woman, nor did he ever have a girlfriend serious enough to even consider living with.

I had a very bad experience living with my ex. Our relationship was over at least three years before I moved out, but I was trapped. I know it's cliche, but I felt like I had put so much effort in and given so much time that something was bound to work. I refused to quit. And then when we did try to end it I had no where to go, it was miserable. We had moved for his job to a location where I would not choose to live on my own. I looked for a job elsewhere for over a year with no luck and then finally went to law school, which I ended up absolutely loving. Three years of student loans later it was an extraordinarily expensive break-up!

Had I not had such a difficult time getting out I would not have gone to law school, would not have ended up in the city where I did, and would not have met my fiance. So in the end, I'm grateful things worked out as they did. However, I absolutely refused to move anywhere with my fiance until he proposed. We lived 2500 miles apart for two years. We're living together now and have our ups and downs over the past year under the same roof, but it's completely different. The commitment level is 100%. We both put significant time into deciding whether we were right for each other before getting engaged.

Everyone and every situation is different so it's hard to learn from someone else's mistakes. But moving in with someone without a ring or a wedding band is not something to be taken lightly. I hate to be negative so when asked, I try not to advise people against moving in with each other. I just advise that before they do, they take a long hard look at other other person and only move forward if they're 99% sure it's the person they want to be with forever.

Oh and Miss Mary Jane - from time to time I still think "where the heck is my..." and remember that I probably left it behind. And when my old company was sold and my stock options vested the check was sent to my ex's house. When it expired 90 days later I was more than a little pissed that he didn't forward it to me (he said he "thought it was junk mail") and more than a little frustrated with the process of having it reissued.

Food for thought- For those of you who have said you lived with someone and it didn't work out, do you think that if you had NOT lived together and continued dating, would you have married that person? Or was it ultimately better that you lived with them and realized BECAUSE of that experience that that person was not the right one for you?

I ask because I always interpreted the typically negatively perceived statistic of "Only about 1/6 of live-in relationships last 3 years and only 1/10 endure five or more years" (taken from above from FromCtoV) to mean that those relationships would not have lasted regardless, and perhaps living together forced them into a place where one or the other person realized...this isn't working. We're not right for each other.

This is kind of a tangent, but I think it's worth considering.

A better way to put it would be, if you had a cohabitation experience that didn't work out,  did you approach cohabitation differently when the opportunity came around again?

Chelseamorning- I like the way that this is reworded.  Since i had to go through the cohabitation disasters THREE TIMES to get it through my thick skull that it isn't to be taken lightly, I approached living together in a much different way with my FI.  He started talkign about moving in together quite a while ago, to which I said "Nope.  Not until we're either married or set on getting married".  While it felt weird to draw such a fine line, and we talked about it A LOT, I explained to him that we needed to wait until we were really ready enough because it is such a big step.  I didn't want to rush into it too quickly with him, enjoy the dating stage, and then move in when it really felt like time.  As it turned out, by the time I decided I was READY to move in with him, he ended up being READY to propose, it all fell right into place.  Now we're living together and it has been great.  I'm glad we waited a while. 

Yes and MsAnna and doctorgirl, it is right on- sometimes things just DON'T work out with people, living together or not!  I think we can learn a lot about someone by living with them.  BUT sometimes things just don't work out.  I really feel that part of the reason it works well with my relationship now is because I KNOW what I want and feel happy.  While my past relationships failed because the person wasn't a good match for me, I also didn't know what I wanted and was confused about things in general.  I think that is a big part of the reason why many relationships fail- we put so much stock in someone else 'making' us happy that we forget we can find that happiness within ourselves and that just helps us know and recognize what aligns with our visions for life- including the kind of partner we want. 

i lived with my ex boyfriend/ ex fiance.  at the time, we were dating, and among other things, our relationship took off pretty quickly..after a few months of living with him (in his house) , i realized that i really didnt want to be with him anymore, but it was SO hard to move out.  i kept stringing along the relationship, despite my depressed mood toward the whole thing, and he must have sensed it bc out of nowhere, he proposed to me.  before this point, we hadnt talked about marriage.  one day, he took me to look at rings and a few days later, bam! there was a nice Jared princess cut on my finger.  but anyway, he proposed, and i accepted (naively!!!) thinking that maybe getting married to him would make me eventually really truly love him... i know this sounds effed up, but there was ALOT of other stuff going on that id rather not get into.  The net result, I FINALLY got up the courage to move out and end it, 2 months after our engagement. 

My boyfriend (very soon to be fiancee/soon to be husband!!!!) and I fell HARD for each other, but despite that,from jump  we were HELL BENT against living together while dating.  He had a crazy past with his ex, so thankfully we were on the same page with not living together.  He has his own condo, and he does stay over my place like 99% of the time, but there is that "We have our separate addresses" for now thing, which has made both of us very comfortable and let us know that we have our own space when /if needed.  (VERY much needed early on in the relationship with some of our arguments!!!! Now referred to as the REALLY Getting to Know Eachother Arguments...lol)

We have come to agree that I will make "the move" into his place within 6 months of the official wedding date, which we are both happy and comfortable with. 

 But back to the ex, it was the HARDEST thing to muster up the courage to break up and move out!  But i was so unhappy and depressed with the thought of being in a relationship with him, it was seriously the best thing.  We ended up stringing along the relationship for about 4 months before the break was done.  I honestly think that living with him really put a spot light on the fact that our relationship progressed WAY too fast for me, and let me see that i truly didnt want to be with him.