Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. Flexible and made to last.

Meet the Other Phone.
Flexible and made to last.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

Remembering when living with a partner was frowned on!

152 replies

girlfriend44 · 22/04/2023 13:41

Does anyone remember when it was frowned on to live together with a partner. No marriage.

Words like Living in Sin. Living Over the Brush ? any others?

I remember in the late 80s i lived with partner and the manager where i worked didnt approve, made a comment. How things change? Does anyone know anyone who is still old fashioned about it?

OP posts:
TheObstinateHeadstrongGirl · 22/04/2023 16:51

Merangutan · 22/04/2023 16:24

I knew of few private schools who offer staff accommodation (off site so the pupils wouldn’t even be aware) but not for unmarried couples.

I’m fairness this is because they want committed people, otherwise people could move their BF of 2 weeks in. The same reasoning as to why laws around private are just riddled with red tape if you haven’t been married.

TakeMyStrongHand · 22/04/2023 16:52

I'm in my late thirties. My parents lived together and all I ever heard from my grandparents and my catholic primary was how they were living in sin. It wasn't until high school that I no longer felt chastised. I was told I must get married but here I am, also living in sin. Which my phone keeps correcting to sun so it must not be as well known of a saying anymore...

CurlewKate · 22/04/2023 16:55

I think it depended a lot on the sort of people you mixed with. I moved in with my boyfriend in the late 1970s and nobody batted an eyelid except his father, who batted his a bit, but didn't make a big deal out of it. Most of our friends were also unmarried.

Ponderingwindow · 22/04/2023 17:02

1994 and got plenty of negative feedback.

in retrospect, I do think we were too young and rushed things so I’m not sure all the negative feedback was just about our marital status. Well, the complaints from my grandmother were definitely about not being married, but not my parents.

I now see the wisdom of never being in a cohabitating housing situation you can’t afford to leave, regardless of marital status. My advice to my dd will be to make sure she can always afford to end the cohabitating situation immediately or don’t enter it in the first place.

gabsdot45 · 22/04/2023 17:02

When I was a child in the 70s our neighbours had a cousin and her parents weren't married.
We all found this extremely interesting. They were the only unmarried parents I knew

Her parents also had a sports car with no back seat so she had to sit on her mum's lap in the front. Irrelevant but also interesting.

Also in the 70s a teenage girl we knew got pregnant and my sister and I had a serious conversation about whether or not she would go to prison.

JaninaDuszejko · 22/04/2023 17:07

My cousin and her boyfriend at the time went travelling and my uncle was really angry. They got married abroad because he said they couldn't live together at home. This was in the late 90s.

IJustHadToLookHavingReadTheBook · 22/04/2023 17:13

My parents bought their first house and intended on moving into it unmarried. They said they would get married but later down the line when they'd done the house up. My Grandad was having none of it and wouldn't let my mum Mum move in until they'd had a wedding!! So my Dad ended up moving into the house by himself for six months while they arranged a wedding. It was 1982 and my Mum was 23- seems insane now that a) my Grandad disapproved and b) that my Mum listened to him!!

By the time I was 23 I'd lived away from home for five years and was living with a guy. Didn't end up married to that one, married the next man I shacked up with. My Grandad was still very disapproving about "living in sin" but by then it was 2006 and even he knew he couldn't say anything.

autumnboys · 22/04/2023 17:17

When now-DH and I moved in together after Uni in our early 20s my mum was desperate for us to get married asap. She was very uncomfortable with it. That was 1996. Married in 1999 when we were ready!

Duckingella · 22/04/2023 17:18

MIL was 28.5 when she got married;she wasn't allowed to move in with FIL until their wedding night even though they owned their home together already;This was 1977 and MIL had been raised with a strict Irish catholic mother.

cushioncovers · 22/04/2023 17:18

Yep I moved in With my fiancé in 1992, got married in 1994 and it was frowned up by plenty of older and middle aged people.

BatshitCrazyWoman · 22/04/2023 17:20

I lived with my now-exH from the early 80s until we married. Many of our friends were cohabiting at that time, and I don't remember anyone disapproving. We lived in London, if that makes a difference.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 22/04/2023 17:25

Allthegoodnamesarechosen · 22/04/2023 13:58

I’m 72, and I can’t remember this for the last fifty years. By the mid seventies, people in middle class suburbia thought it was sensible to live together before marriage ( though it was often referred to as a ‘trial marriage!)

Goodness, you must have moved in very advanced circles! In our family, this was not really accepted by the generation above mine until well into the 90s, and even then it wasn't a wholehearted acceptance. I was born in the early 1960s.

ConsuelaHammock · 22/04/2023 17:27

I’m late forties. My parents would have been horrified if any of their children had lived with a boyfriend/ girlfriend or had a child before marriage. Having a child out of wedlock would still be a huge no no in most of my extended family. Not one of my immediate cousins on either side of my family ever had a child before marriage. Only one cousin’s son has two children with his girlfriend. Even his generation have tended to do the ‘education, marriage , kids ‘ order.

thefamous5 · 22/04/2023 17:27

I used to be a teacher in a catholic school. When I got pregnant with my eldest (in 2011!) I was warned that many of the parents (very middle class area) would judge me because I was a 'miss' and not a Mrs. I don't think the school was overjoyed but obviously didn't say it explicitly.

I didn't even move in with my child's father until I was 25 weeks pregnant, and we 'lived in sin' for another ten years and had three more babies before we got married 🤣🤣🤣

pointythings · 22/04/2023 17:31

My in laws struggled with knowing my then partner and I would be living together before getting married - in 1997! But they were traditional old school American and quite religious and they coped with it. My parents were not at all traditional and felt living together was a good idea.

LadyMonicaBaddingham · 22/04/2023 17:31

2catsandhappy · 22/04/2023 15:15

Not the same thing but, I recall my mums magazines in the 70' having pregnancy test adverts. Every model wore a clearly visible wedding ring on her left hand.

I got engaged before I lived with a man. At 21 I got married (different man) as I wanted children. I was terrified of my parents disaproval.

To be honest, when I phoned to tell my mother I was pregnant with DS1, I still felt quite nervous like I was going to be told off and we'd been married for 2 years!!

TheKobayashiMaru · 22/04/2023 17:45

I remember. It was looked down on and just wasn't acceptable when I was growing up.

bibbitybobbityyhat · 22/04/2023 17:58

Not at all. I am 60 and lived with partners in my 20s, as did all of my friends (male and female, same sex couples, heterosexual couples) no one turned a hair.

I think you're talking about the 1960s and before that aren't you OP? Unless you lived in some weird backwater.

KitKatLove · 22/04/2023 18:03

I married in 1996 and we didn’t live together first. Not religious just because we got engaged Jun 95, found our home and bought it Dec 95, we were getting married in Jun 96. I didn’t see the point for the sake of 6 months. It wasn’t considered weird that we didn’t.

hadenoughofhisshit · 22/04/2023 18:12

My mother divorced in 1990 but continued to wear her wedding ring for several years so the other mums at the school gates didn't see her as an unmarried mother (even though I was born before she'd married!)

My exMIL was aghast at us having DC before marriage (in 2017!)

Even more aghast now we're split 😂

Neurodiversitydoctor · 22/04/2023 18:14

Temporaryanonymity · 22/04/2023 13:54

Yes. My mother didn’t tell my grandmother when I moved in with my boyfriend in the late 90s. She was born in 1912, was welsh chapel and definitely wouldn’t have approved.

Same here also Welsh

CurlewKate · 22/04/2023 18:16

I often wonder on threads like this whether I lived in a strange bubble, or if some people have inaccurate memories, because a lot of the attitudes people talk about seem to me to be from a generation earlier than mine, and I am very old to be a Mumsnetter. The same goes for memories of attitudes to childcare, and many other things. It sometimes seems that people are transposing attitudes from the 50s and 60s into the 70s and 80s.

MiniTheMinx · 22/04/2023 18:35

I was aged two when I attended my parents wedding in 1974

I don't think my grandparents had any issue with my parents living in sin. When my mother lived at home my grandmother used to cook breakfast for my father when he stayed over. The first morning she had no idea he was even in the house, and when she went in with tea to my mother she said "oh sorry, I'll go and make another one" My Grandmother was born in 1908.

chocolatehoovering · 22/04/2023 18:36

CurlewKate · 22/04/2023 18:16

I often wonder on threads like this whether I lived in a strange bubble, or if some people have inaccurate memories, because a lot of the attitudes people talk about seem to me to be from a generation earlier than mine, and I am very old to be a Mumsnetter. The same goes for memories of attitudes to childcare, and many other things. It sometimes seems that people are transposing attitudes from the 50s and 60s into the 70s and 80s.

We were a Catholic family so were surrounded by these attitudes well into the 90s. I'm not transposing attitudes from the 50s and 60s into the 70s and 80s, but my parents were born in the 40s and they had those attitudes from their parents and carried this on when bringing me up - and the same applied to my aunties and uncles, so my cousins were brought up in the same way and therefore we encountered these attitudes all the time within the family, but also within the parishes we grew up again.
In the circles I moved in growing up, divorce was talked about in a whispered voice.
I can remember when one aunty was getting ready to marry a divorced man that was a big deal in our Catholic family and my parents even asked the priest if it was ok for me to be a bridesmaid at a registry office wedding and he said it was ok as long as I was able to understand the implications of her doing this - ie. no longer being able to receive communion in the Catholic church.

So no false memories here, that's the way it was in our family.

Bansheed · 22/04/2023 18:37

CurlewKate · 22/04/2023 18:16

I often wonder on threads like this whether I lived in a strange bubble, or if some people have inaccurate memories, because a lot of the attitudes people talk about seem to me to be from a generation earlier than mine, and I am very old to be a Mumsnetter. The same goes for memories of attitudes to childcare, and many other things. It sometimes seems that people are transposing attitudes from the 50s and 60s into the 70s and 80s.

Same here. 1993, I stayed happily in my boyfriend's parents house every holiday from uni. Everyone wanted to get married but we all cohabited until we got married around 30.