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My SO wanted to live together before engagement. I'm not against it...but after 5 years I'm against moving 500 miles away without an engagement! So based on my timeline I hope to be engaged at the most a few months after I move in. We've been having to be LD.
Argh! I didn't mean to put this in the "Dress" Category. Is there a way I can change this? Does it matter?
@danafish: I'm in the exact same situation. Fi already has his place but he lives 2 hours away. The thing here is that I'll be burned alive if I move in with him, it's a Taboo thing (lots of religious people).
I'd have love to live with him prior to marriage, but it's ok.
We bought a house about 3 months after we got engaged. We did not live together before we got engaged (we both lived with our parents). I guess I wasn't totally comfortable changing my life that much when we were just dating, although I did hate leaving him every night. Once we got engaged I was ready to go for it full force though. We found what we wanted and didn't want to wait so we just went for it! I'm glad we did, but it pretty much already feels like we are married.
We're not engaged yet, but we have been living together for about a year and a half and I have to say that it was alot of adjustment. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just a reality. I dont think its necessary to live with SO before getting married, I'm just saying that its important to be aware that its not always easy but its definately worth it :)
We didn't live together before getting married and really it just wasn't even a thought or option to have it any other way. We got the keys to our place the week of the wedding, stopped off here to change before getting on the road for our honeymoon, and officially moved in when we got back.
I'm so glad we waited..... Now we had already hashed out & combined finances when we got engaged to start taking care of wedding stuff, but the living together part was what made getting married different.
I lived with my ex-husband before we got married & getting married pretty much felt the exact same as every other day... I liked this way MUCH better.
ETA: I'd like to add that all of the expectations of living together, who does what, how much is spent on what, etc.. was all part of our pre-marital counseling (about 3months prior to the wedding) so that was all taken care of too. We didn't need to actually live together to get all that out & known, so when we did move in together we really didn't have any surprises on what the other expected to be done/not done be the other.
FI and I lived together before getting engaged.
He had bought his own place and was having trouble affording it. I wanted to move out of my moms house and was looking for my own place so it seemed a logical step.
It wasnt too much of a shock for me because even though I lived at home I helped pay all the bills since I felt bad for my mom paying for everything as a single working mother.
What was a shock was having to think about another person, like oh does FI need shampoo too?
Should I buy these towels? Maybe FI won't like them.
I think it was good for us. We dealt with a lot f financial issues and discovered that we could handle problems without fighting. We had some hard issues like us both losing our jobs and then losing the apartment, him having to declare bankrupcy, etc.
FI has even told me that he feels confident in our spending our lives together because we dealt with our problems without breaking up.
We didn't live together before marriage and like amnystik it really wasn't even considered. It's just not what's done in our culture/group/friends/family/what have you.
It has actually been an extremely smooth transition.
I moved into a new place about 2 1/2 months before we got married and he moved in essentially the day we got back from our honeymoon. Though he'd been slowly moving his stuff for almost a month.
We haven't really had any issues with chores/cooking/purchases/etc, except what I already expected because he's a very picky eater.
I'm happy with the way we did it, and anyone who tells you that it's harder to have a good relationship/marriage, a peaceful life, a smooth transition, or anything life that without living together first is fooling themselves. It is possible, and if you approach it in the right way it's even easy.
I lived with my parents until I moved in with my FI (now husband). I didn't pay rent or anything like that either, just my own expenses. To me, I dont think it would have been any different if we wait until we got married. Basically moving in engaged, we started living the "married life" and nothing changed after the wedding. I dont really think there was a huge shock. The only shock for me is trying to keep us as well fed as my mother had me. My husband and I are both savers and manage money pretty much the same so there was nothing to get used to there. The household chores took a little working out, but we fell into our roles pretty easily there too.
@danafish: I'm currently engaged and will be married towards the end of this year. My FI and I live with our parents and we are waiting to move in together once we are married. During our relationship FI has wanted to love out into his own place and have me move in with him but I did not want to. Personally, I am not against couples living together before marriage but I would prefer to experience that chapter once we're married. I really don't know how to explain my stance but I want to experience the "newness" of living together and waking up/falling asleep next to my husband. FI would counter my POV with the "speech" that it's important to live together first before marriage to see if we get along or not. Although I understand FI's stance, I believe that if we both are determined to be together because we love each other than we will give it our all to learn how to live each other, understand each other and make it work the best we can. Besides, FI and I see each other everyday (we work together, lol!) and we know each other's pet peeves, likes, and dislikes when it comes to the duties and organization of a household.
We moved in together the day I turned 18! As much as I love my parents, I needed out! We have been living together ever since and we will be just shy of the 7 year mark when we get married in July. Whilst we moved in together fast, defacto and marriage are so different in my mind. We have been together so long now that a split would still be messy and would still require a divide of assets, but I still feel marriage should never be entered into lightly so I wont enter into it until I know we can work.
I am of course biased towards living together before marriage. I cannot comprehend getting married to a person you have not lived with. Marriage is LIFE LONG how can you possibly know a person well enough to marry them if you have never lived together?.. explains why its taken us 7 years ;P I really need to know if it can work! I refuse to become a statistic.
I need to know how good they are with their money (and how they are when you dont have any!), how they cope with anger/stress (ie fights, work related stress and money stress) and their expectations when sharing a house and their personal space (which IMHO you cannot know if you dont live out of home and experience sharing chores/bills etc). Pre-marital counselling may ask these questions, but how can you answer them if you have never experienced those situations?
But like I said I am biased due to my position. Heaps of people have wonderful marriages without ever living together. As long as you do what you feel in your gut is the right choice (not the choice of those around you!) then you will be fine :)
We lived together for about a year and half before getting engaged. I was living with a group of girls and while I loved it, had I not moved in with FI, I would've moved out on my own.
The girls I lived with are devout Christians and so living together before marriage wasn't an option and all three of them went through various types of adjustment after they moved in together. Nothing bad, but it just takes time to get used to another persons habits.
I never lived with a guy before DH and it was a mild adjustment. The hardest thing for me was sleeping in the same bed as him. I went from a soft soft bed to a pretty hard bed so most of it was the mattress but I had a full on breakdown one night after about 3 weeks on insomnia. DH woke up in the middle of the night to find me in a fetal position crying hysterically about how much I just wanted my old bed back!
Anyway, I would encourage you to live at home just from a financial stand point. Save Save Save! Plus, there is something so amazingly romantic about coming home to YOUR house for the first time after the wedding. I really missed that part of it.
Let me preface this by saying: I don't think it's a big deal either way. Some people do and some people don't. As my Nanny said, "It's something your generation tends to do more. I don't find it necessary, but it's a good thing sometimes. You learn to adjust whether it's before or after the wedding." <-- Right on, Nanny.
Our story is that we DID live together before getting engaged. For a few years pre-engagement, actually. We moved in together for lots of different reasons, but one of the main ones was financial. We both went to the same school 2+ hours away from our families. Why pay rent at two places when we knew we'd be spending most of our time together anyhow? So that's what we did. Our parents approved because of that reason and because my parents felt "safer" that I was living with a guy -- along with many other reasons, like they loved FI. Lol.
We lived together for about 2 years before FI proposed and obviously continued to. We bought a house together while we were engaged (August of last year) and now we live in a real house together...with our 2 puppies. Lol. Sure, we learned to adjust to one another. It came with it's own set of issues. But we did it and we're fine, just like people that didn't live together learn to do it.
We didn't live together before getting married and I have been perfectly happy with that decision from the start. No regrets. (And yes, I was living with my parents before my husband. Interestingly, independence was one of the reasons I didn't move in with him before we got married.)
Kala put it very well:
"I'm happy with the way we did it, and anyone who tells you that it's harder to have a good relationship/marriage, a peaceful life, a smooth transition, or anything life that without living together first is fooling themselves. It is possible, and if you approach it in the right way it's even easy."
That's exactly what we experienced. Moving in with DH was as untroubled and straightforward as the rest of my relationship with him. I can't say that anything surprising or earth shaking showed up. I've lived with other people my whole life, and it wasn't a stretch settling in with DH!
Plus, it's made the first year of our marriage special, informative, and a kind of foundation laying. The experience of living together has become part of our being husband and wife, rather than boyfriend/girlfriend. I think the attitude is different. We're creating a life together, not testing the waters. We make decisions about our life in the mindset of permance and long-term happiness, not like we're trying to set up a current living arrangement that's acceptable. (Though I feel that way about our duplex, lol! Oh, the difference between slapping paint on the walls and saving for our own place...)
You'll be fine either way; but don't worry, you don't need pre-marital cohabitation to ensure your relationship! Just talk with each other, make sure you understand what they say and feel...so that you can say it and truly understand, and feel the same things and empathize. Assume that the weak/strong spots between you aren't going to change when you live together. The relationship will always need work, love, and trust. :)
I never wanted to live with a guy before engagement, but that's just how it worked out. We lived together 2 years, got engaged, and are now on our 3rd year of living together. We will have been living together 3.5 years by the time we are married.
I'm in the process of moving in with BF right now -- before engagement, although if I didn't feel strongly about not getting engaged before a year (or near a year) we'd likely be engaged now...
I've lived with former BFs before but before it was always on a temporary basis -- we were in a different city for the summer or something and lived together with a known, fixed end. This time, this is forever... no end in sight :-). I wouldn't want to marry something I hadn't lived with. It's a much different experience to balance the need for my own time when living with someone. I am a snippy bitch in the morning, for instance, and learning togther to make sure we understand each other's quirks in that sense is important before taking the final plunge. I have no worries, but it is a very exciting step...
That said, I understand why people don't but I could never NOT live with the person I thought I was going to marry before engagement. To each their own....
My fianceé proposed in September and we moved into our house in December. I was staying at his place about 5 days a week anyway, but he wanted to wait until our engagement to buy a house and move in together.
@danafish: Hi weekend twin! (we even got engaged the same month =P )
I lived with my FI for almost 2 years before getting engaged, and we were together 2.5 years when we were engaged... if you can do the math that should tell you how long we were together before moving in!
He had his own place, and I was still living at home and I spent all my time there anyway, so it kinda just... happened. Honestly, it was way easier than we thought it would be. I don't think we had any fights about how to run the household, and he wasn't like a typical bachelor with pizza boxes, socks and bottles everywhere (he got that out of his system in college when he lived with 3 other guys!) So, since he was mature about everything, except the dogs playing poker picture in the office room, it was an easy transition and I'm really glad we've had this time together and to really know what we are both like together for a long period of time.
@danafish: My situation is very similar in that I got engaged in November 2011 and am getting married October 2013 and we don't live together yet. I, however, have lived on my own. Got too expensive so I moved back with my parents. Now I live with my mom, but its more like she lives with me, if that makes any sense. FI has live with his grandparents since 2001 (helping them around the house, taking care of his ill grandfather before he passed, now just keeping grandmom company and helping out) so he has NO IDEA what its like to live outside of a "family" house. We are going to start looking at places in June - neither of us can stand not living together anymore. Especially since FI just started a new job and his hours are super early, whereas I work full time and go to grad school, so I'm up super late - we never get to see each other.
I think it's great to live together before getting engaged--we have learned so much about each other and gotten closer
We didn't live together before marriage, and that was the perfect choice for us. We were together six years before we got married, so we definitely knew each other very well, so it's not like there were all that many surprises once we did move in.
We both lived at home prior to our wedding in order to save some money -- my husband was finishing his education degree and I was working and getting my master's.
We've really enjoyed having "living together" as one of the fun perks and adventures of being newlyweds! :)
We were long distance (5 hours away from each other) for the first 2.5 years of our relationship. While I wish we could have not lived together until marriage, it just didn't really work out that way... it was hard to make the next step in our relationship without being local and it just seemed stupid financially to live separately when we could save so much money living together.
My FI (26) and I (23) bought a house together in August and got engaged in Dec. To be honest... I believe it is the best thing to do. Not only will you save money living together... you go ahead and get the "odds and ins" figured out about living together. I did know that we would eventually get married.. so that helped in the decision of buying a house with him.
My parents were fine with us living together but my mom made the comment that we were taking the fun out of getting married and moving in together. Again, I see what she means but I love it because we have figured out money issues and we have a good system. We actually combined our bank accounts in August when we moved in and that has helped too because now once we get married we will already be set and can start figuring out other parts of our life together such as starting a family.
Paying bills teaches you responsibility... and it teaches you how to have a budget and what you can and cant have...
I am a HUGE supporter of living together before marriage. I personally could never marry someone who I didn’t live with first. Cohabitating before marriage isn’t right for everyone but it was definitely right for us. If this is something that both you and your FI want then I say go for it. You will NOT regret it.
DH and I have lived together for more than 6 years and only about 4 months of that has been married. We moved in together early on in our relationship and I wouldn’t change a thing. The years that we spent living together has done nothing but made our relationship stronger. We were a team long before we were husband and wife. Having lived together for so long has given us the opportunity to really tackle a lot of the issues that couples face after they’re married so we’re ahead of the game in that aspect.
The only “downside” to living together before marriage is that not much changes after you’re married but frankly, that’s a-ok with me. My life with my husband was amazing before we said “I do” so why should it change? For some people this would be disappointing but for us it’s just the same ole’ life we were living before. Now I just get to call him my husband.
FWIW, living together before marriage is the “normal” thing to do in my circle. I’ve only ever known one couple who didn’t and that was for religious reasons. Everyone else has cohabitated for years prior to getting married. It’s just what we do.
My best friend who was 24 at the time lived at home with her parents while engaged (as did her fiance) and waited until after the wedding to move in with him. It ended up being a disaster! They were both only children and had NO concept of sharing personal space. They weren't used to each other's habits, he was messy and she was a neat freak. When they would argue, he would literally leave and go stay with his mother instead of working it out like a man. Like, dude...you're MARRIED! You can't run to your parent's house after an argument with your wife! It was insanity.
Me and SO decided to move in together, and agreed to get engaged within a year of moving in. We've been living together for 9 months and it was the BEST decision for us. It was quite an adjustment on both of our parts. I'm an only child myself and hate sharing. He always had his mother to clean up afer him, do his launcdry, and cook. So I have been learning to share more and he has been learning to do chores. We've both gotten so much better and I love him even more because now I know most (if not all) of his annoying habits and flaws, and I still want to marry him! Haha
We got engaged right before we moved into our first house together. It worked really well for us and I don't think I would have been as comfortable getting the house without the ring (personally).
I went away to college, but it was only 30 minutes away, so I was in a somewhat similar situation. It wasn't incredibly easy to transition once we got married, but it also wasn't that hard! I'd say do what you feel like is best for you guys. It's definitely possible to go from parents to married, though!
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Hello bees! I've been engaged since December and we are planning for a November 2013 wedding. This means a lot of time before the big day. FI and I do not live together and we both live at home with our parents. I'm 22, he's 23. I'm finished with school, he has a semester left. Ideally, we would like to live together before the wedding because we don't get to spend a lot of time together between work and his classes. I would also really like to become more independent before getting married because i've always lived at home with my parents (didn't go away to college). Even though I pay for all of my own expenses, I do not pay rent/utilities or anything like that. I don't want it to be a huge "culture shock" to move in together when we're married, like with managing finances/household chores/living together in general. I would like to have that experience before we exchange vows.
Has anyone been in a similar situation (lived at home with parents before moving in with FI)? Or those who are married and moved in after the wedding, but previously lived at home, was it a huge change that you wish you had lived together before marriage? I'm just looking for other's experiences and to share your stories! Thanks :)