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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Geez people on this board suck.  I mean, who doesn't live with their boyfriend before marriage these days? Must be old and prudish people on this board. OP, just hang in there and try to focus on your relationship. You might take this time to consider whether you really want to marry this guy yourself. Best of luck![/quote]

People that are religious don't live together pre-marriage. [/quote]

And people with common fucking sense.  My argument for not living together would have nothing to do with morals, religion, or living in sin. [/quote]

Yeah, I'm not that religious but I wouldn't ever want to set up a life with someone I'm not connected to, unless I never wanted to get married. I'd rather just spend some nights visiting and then go home.
[b]It's a big honking [b]DEAL [/b]to break up when living together. Kind of pushes you into a marriage that maybe isn't right either but it's too hard to untangle yourself when you're living together?[/b][/quote]

Ha - autocorrect [/quote]

This is exactly why I'd never do it.

The psychologist Meg Jay writes about cohabitation being one of the worst decisions a 20 something (male or female) can make.  I agree with her.  She says cohabitation is often a terrible decision for a young person because it makes the relationships too hard to break up.  She writes that cohabitation is often most tempting in ones 20s, when incomes are low and expenses are high.  What happens when a young couple moves in together is that they, without realizing it, end up entering into something that feels too similar to marriage.  They split the rent on a lease together, they buy furniture together, they might get a dog together, their social lives become further integrated with one another...  This is all well and good, until it comes time to break up...and then the breakup ends up looking way more like a divorce than it should.  The prospect of a divorce-like breaking up with someone who is "good enough" is often enough to deter people from doing so, even when they they are far from optimally matched.  So they end up doing what she calls "sliding instead of deciding".  The couple slides into marriage after dating for several years because the alternative is too much of a headache.  This, very often, leads to unions that are not optimal.  Sort of similar to couples that get married simply because the woman gets pregnant.

She says that a couple should limit any outside factors that might push them towards a marriage, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to avoid over-integrating your lives before both members of the couple have the chance to make a clearheaded and uninfluenced commitment.  It's worth noting that women are only fertile for so many years, and therefore they have the most to lose in a feet-dragging/cohabitation set up.

If the OP's guy already has the ring, he's probably thinking marriage too. But I sure as hell wouldn't move in with him before having a good, unromantic chat about where his head is.

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