Why I’m Glad I Lived With My Partner Before Marriage

First, I understand in different cultures this is taboo, I understand that sociological research shows you’re more likely to get divorced and I understand the Church is against it. This is just my life and my blog so I’m going to give my experience of living with my partner before marriage and why I’m glad we went this route. I come from a family with a high divorce rate, and everyone told me the same thing; “you don’t know someone until you’ve lived with them.” Damn, I hate when my mom is right! (Kidding Karen!)

First, you know those minor things they do that really annoy you in the moment? Can you overlook them 90% of the time? Like leaving a dish for you to do later or forgetting to rinse out the sink after brushing their teeth? Imagine dealing with that one thing every day and sometimes multiple times a day! ALL THE TIME! When you comment on it “I’ll do better” but that can only last so long because it’s a habit at this point in life and habits are hard to break.

Now, ask yourself this, have you and your partner ever been in a fight? I hate to break it to you, but the first few months you live together will be the most fights you’ve ever had. You’ll have a whole new honeymoon phase but soon you will have to face your annoyances about each other and try to figure out a way to have a cohesive household. My advice when looking for a place, make sure each of you can separate and have your own place to go for if and when you need alone time. Living with your s/o can be exhausting because you’ll want to be with them 24/7 but also want your own space so find the balance in that.

How does one split the chores? Do you want to alternate who does each chore? What about each person having a set chore that the other can help out with? How would this work out the best for each partner so that chores are split evenly? This is super important because it is so so easy to get burnt out on chores or when only one partner is doing the heavy lifting. This was a huge issue for my husband and I at first and still kind of is now that we’re in a bigger space. Find the balance of chores that work for you both but keep it even.

Get to know your partner on a whole new level! You already know some of their habits but learn about all of them in one go! What do they actually do in their free time? How do they wind down after a long day at work? How do they spend their weekends? Are they the kind of person who runs 5ks on Thanksgiving morning? Do you want to be with someone who does that or are you more of a watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and cook kind of person? Learn their true likes and dislikes. Do they like their toilet paper over or under? How do they get in the shower, near the water or from the back away from the water? (Both are very real things; I still learn new things all the time. Like today I learned my husband and roommate have never heard of a good shower cry?!)

Petty arguments, you would NOT believe the random petty arguments we got into. Like him not putting his boots on the correct boot tray. Or me not unclogging the drain from my hair, or how I don’t really love cooking and I definitely don’t love doing the dishes. Or how he folds the bathroom towels wrong. You remember those things that annoy you big time in the moment, they lead to these petty arguments about really small things. This is where having your own designated space to cool off is really a must-have. Even if one of you goes to the bedroom and the other one sleeps on the couch, sometimes you just need at 5–15-minute coo-down before you can apologize and move on.

All those petty fights, learning to live with annoying quirks, and then some really helped us when it came to buying our first house and our marriage because 1. we knew what set the other person off. 2. We really learned to love and know each other on an intimate level, and I don’t mean sexually intimate. I mean the, how they like to snuggle, how they like their back scratched or foot rubbed after a shift. How they like to have their tears wiped away or their hair played with when they’re sad. We went through a couple of really big losses in our families during that first two years and then a pandemic made it harder. We REALLY got to know each other then, that was the hardest but best year we had was in quarantine. We really were able to sit down and learn how to appropriately communicate how we were feeling. We learned each other’s love languages and how to “fill their bucket” if you will. It doesn’t take much, but in my opinion, it was less pressure to make things work but was more of we wanted it to work. I think living together before marriage really made us stronger as a couple.

It’s so easy to talk about the future when it’s more figurative, but when you can’t “escape” the conversation, it becomes a reality. When do you want to buy a house, how much do you want to have saved up in x many years, do you want to have kids? Should we buy a house before or after we’re married? Are we both going to be on the mortgage or is it going to be under one person’s name? What are the safety nets for either way? Living together can either make or break that image or dream of marriage. Is it realistic? Are we two people who are actually meant to be together or people who are just together? This time living together without the pressure and stress of making a marriage survive really helped us in planning our goals and our futures as individuals and as a couple. I know technically you could do this all married too, but wouldn’t you want to know the most annoying things about your partner before you go into marriage? Don’t you want to know what you’re home life will be like? Don’t you want to know what life at home with them will be like before the stress of keeping a marriage alive? For us we had the benefit of two families who did it two ways, so we were able to decide for ourselves. Another perk aside from the getting to know your partner stuff, it helps you save money on rent and utilities to have a roommate, why not have someone you know you like on a deep and personal level?

Weigh your options but for us it just made sense to move in together once I was out of college. My only regret was that we didn’t try to live with my parents a little bit longer to save more money and go ahead and buy a house instead of renting an apartment.