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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Couples who can’t live together

102 replies

Troutbag · 14/04/2026 10:27

It seems a lot of couples are perfectly fine but tensions arise when they start to live together.

Would the solution be to just not live together long-term?

Has anyone done this and it worked? Or if you can’t live together, is that it?

OP posts:
XDownwiththissortofthingX · 17/04/2026 20:23

XenoBitch · 17/04/2026 19:08

My DM delayed retiring to get out the house and away from my DF. He was at home all day (was unable to work for years before he hit pension age) so when she got home from work, she was pretty much expected to entertain him and have no time to herself. She quite often also wanted to stave his head in 😂
He would just watch shit like GBNews when she was out, and want to discuss it all when she got in.

I have lived with partners twice. I will never do it again.

I had something similar in that my long-term partner was constantly stressed and miserable because of their job, but refused to do anything about it. Any time I was home first I used to enjoy the bliss of an empty home, then I'd hear their key in the lock and my heart would sink.

Tried to get through to them that just because the job was having this effect on them they had no right to bring it home and be a constant, irascible misery to be around, and when it got to the point that you couldn't even ask civil questions as simple as "would you like a cup of tea?" without them tutting and rolling their eyes because you had the temerity to interrupt whatever they were doing...

Like I said earlier in the thread, I can be a tyrant around the home as well, but for the most part I'm generally quite affable, laid-back, and I see it as common courtesy to be polite and at least give civil responses when someone attempts to engage me in conversation. By the end I thought "I just don't need this in my life" and realised I'd be much happier without it, so I left. I've always suspected that they were like this because they wanted out of the situation as well, but couldn't bring themselves to be the one that ended it, so they went out of their way to make me miserable so I would act. Pretty pathetic really, because it wasted both of our time for years, and at any point they could have instigated a grown-up conversation because it wasn't me who was totally unapproachable.

This is a big part of why I'll never share my home with anyone again. I just can't be bothered with other people's moods and huffs, and people who are emotionally incontinent, constantly wanting to "talk" about absolutely every trifling aspect of a relationship are equally as tedious.

Needspaceforlego · 17/04/2026 22:14

There is something nice about getting the house to yourself now and then. Nobody to dominate the TV.

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