Moving In With Boyfriend
About Moving in with Your Boyfriend
Not so long ago there were strong negative societal injunctions against moving in with your boyfriend. Young women from respectable families simply did not do such a thing. The practice was called “living in sin,” a phrase that you only hear these days as a sort of joke, as in “When are you two going to get hitched and stop living in sin.”
Although you can still find some traditional sections of the country where moving in with your boyfriend before marriage is still considered as something to be frowned upon (the radio talk show host, Dr. Laura Schlesinger pejoratively terms it, “shacking up”), times have largely changed. The practice of pre-marital cohabitation has become so common as to be considered almost a rite-of-passage for many young women in today’s society. Deciding to move in with your boyfriend however is still a big deal. If you have reached that stage in your relationship, here are some things to consider.
Are you mature enough?
The first consideration has to do with maturity. If you are going to take the step of moving in with your boyfriend, are you ready to handle all that goes along with that? Although you may have seen your boyfriend every day this month and spent countless hours together, do you think you are ready to see him all the time. Moving in together changes the nature of a relationship, much like sex does. It adds completely new levels of complication. If you get into a fight, you no longer have as easy a way of retreating into your own space.
In addition, much of the mystery will now be gone. You may think that you already know your boyfriend really well, but are ready to uncover his pornography collection? Or, hear him while he goes to the bathroom? Or, be okay with compromising on the shows you watch?
The real test of maturity, however, has to do with being truthful. Are you ready to be open about living with your boyfriend to your friends, coworkers, and parents? If you feel like you or your boyfriend would have to keep your living situation a secret, this is a good sign that it may not be the right time to take such a step. Living together has its difficulties under the best of circumstances, but if the arrangements are clandestine, then this will add a series of other problems that may make things very uncomfortable.
Compatibility
Just as important is the question of compatibility. If you are going to be sharing a roof as well as a bed with someone, you should consider if you are actually compatible living partners. Just because you enjoy dating someone, doesn’t mean that you will enjoy living with that person.
Look at your boyfriend’s room. If you think that it is messy or if you notice that your boyfriend’s mother is constantly asking him to clean up after himself, don’t expect things magically to change when he moves in with you. More likely than not, you will be the one who will be nagging him to clean up or, possibly worse, picking up after him. Are you ready for this kind of a change?
Stability
One final consideration should be whether your relationship is stable enough to handle this kind of change. Sometimes we want to move in because we think that it will help to save a relationship or because we think that this will help us to resolve certain issues in the relationship. This is rarely the case, however. More often than not, if a relationship has problems, moving in just multiplies those problems.
If you are just moving in with your boyfriend because you think that if you don’t move with him you will lose him, then you should consider what might happen if things don’t work out anyway. Following a boy to a new city may sound romantic, but as he develops new friends at his new college or job and you struggle to adjust to a new city, this may turn out to be a difficult strain.
All of this is not to say that the experience of moving in with your boyfriend may not turn out to be one of the best experiences of your life. You should only be sure that you are doing it when both of you are ready and when you are doing it for the right reasons, and not just because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.