.. to want opinions on this?

[TrillianAstra]

I was wondering what you all thought about living together before marriage, or more specifically about not living together before marriage.

I have one friend who is getting married this year, who (for religious reasons) has never spent the night with, or had sex with, her fiance (or anyone else). This is fairly simple. They think it's wrong to do these things before you're married, so they haven't. Not much to discuss there.

I have another friend who has spent the night with and had sex with her boyfriend, but who really doesn't want to live together before they are married. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, thinks that it's silly to get married without having lived toegther first.

Thoughts/stories/chat all welcome.

daisydora - I cannot believe that living together had not any bearing on your relationship. Don't doubt you're happy, if you so.

*say so

Widowwadman, being a bit thick here (I am slow on Sundays) but do you mean i would be happier if we had lived together first in your opinion? Or anyone like me for that matter.

I guess I just don't think it has made any different, as I am happy just the way things are, I can't see what might be different if we had lived together iyswim.

Well, just from personal experience, moving in together changes a relationship and uits dynamics a lot. So making the commitment of marriage, before having gone through this first, is a huge gamble. It worked for you, and that's great, but it was still a risk.

If you move in with someone, and you leartn that it doesn't work, it's painful enough to move out again, and sort life out on your own again without having to think about a divorce on top of it.

But I guess it's just different attitudes. For me marriage was building the legal framework around a properly road-tested committed relationship. The paperwork would never make a relationship work, if it wasn't working in itself, so it was important for me to have that in place first.

I don't doubt that for some people it worked the other way round, but I think a great dose of luck is involved.

Dh & I dated for 9 months, got engaged & got married 9 months after that.

We were very poor in those days (hah...what do I mean in those days!) & we both lived at home with our parents.

We were going through the motions of buying our first home when dh had an accident at work & was off for 4 months... (leading up to the wedding) so it was either a) buy the house & use the wedding money for a deposit seeing as he wasn't being paid for being off work, or b) forget about the house & keep saving for the wedding....

Dh wanted to buy the house & live together, postponing the wedding until we could save up the money again.. I wanted to do the same, ufortunately I come from an Irish Catholic family & my mam was having none of it...

In the end, we bought a mobile home for £1000 & got married.... spent 5 years in that mobile & they were the best days of our lives Even now (13 years later) we still say the mobile was the best home we had!

I have no principles either way on living together or not - no-one in my family did, no-one in dh's family did it (he just has one sister though) so I have nothing to compare to.

The longest time we had ever spent together was a two week holiday in Galway, apart from the weekends I stayed at his house, (his parents were more lenient than mines & it was warmer than shaggin in the car )

I do agree though that sex is probably a good move before marriage, especially if you think you may be disappointed if it's shit!!

WW - luck hasn't anything to do with a happy marriage, it's all to do with hard work & compromise.

""I don't doubt that for some people it worked the other way round, but I think a great dose of luck is involved.""

I do not agree with it being luck, I think it is a lot of hard work, with the actual desire to get to know the other person. I liked Lovecat post. It described very well what my friend who got married 9 years ago to someone she had not met was telling me, " at each othere throat all the time" in the early days but they made the effort of trying anyway and are now probably one of the strongest couple I know.

I think weather the couple will last or not depend on how much effort both parties are willing to put in the relationship, not the amount of time spent together before.

Connie Complaint - of course you need to work on a marriage for it to be successful. But if you lived together beforehand, at least you've got an inkling whether you could live with that person and would be able to make the right compromises with him.

If you haven't tried it out beforehand, of course it's lucky, if the man you married without knowing what he's like to live it, turns out to be someone you indeed can live with.

I do not think 'luck' has made my marriage work at all.

He was my BF when he asked me to marry him(soppy I know), I knew I loved him and that life was not going to be a bed of roses or whatever. But we work hard, repect each other, listen to each other and talk and both have a desire to make our marriage last - luck never really a factor imo.

But, surely if you've agreed to marry a person, you'd need to have a good idea of they're really like as a person anyway?

Surely if you've got as far as wanting to live with someone, you have some kind of inkling what they'd be like to live with?

If you've been in their home, you'd know if they're messy/tidy, you'd know if they wash the dishes right away or let their dinner digest, you'd know if they flush after piddles, or leave it til there's something more there..... surely you'd know these things about someone if you knew them well enough to agree to marry/move in with them anyway??

But surely being in a relationship with someone (whether under the same roof or not) gives you 'an inkling whether you could live with that person and would be able to make the right compromises with him'.

Granted sharing a roof gives you more of an idea of if they snore/wash their undies in the sink or whatever, but it doesn't change the person you have been in a relationship with for however many years. My DH still had the same ideas/opinions/beliefs once we lived together as he did before. Some I sgreed with some I didn't but he was always the same person

I moved in with Dh 6weeks after meeting him. We were living in different parts of the country and i was planning on moving to the area anyway, so it made sense. It has taken a while for the house to feel like mine though.

We never really argue and it has all gone really well. We had our DD 11months before getting married, and although i wouldn't change her for the world, i wish we had got married first.

I don't think it matters about living together or not before getting married, as long as you really know the person you are marrying. I know people who are planning on getting married and yet their fiance has never seen them without make up on, or their hair straightened. What is the point? It seems to be that their fiance is not getting to know and love them 'warts and all'

From reading this thread, it sounds to me as if most of the pro-living-together fraction argue with "getting to know the intended on a different level first".

To me it was the other way round. I wanted HIM to get to know ME. Sometimes having self-confidence issues, I was more worried that he'd make a runner when he discovered the "real" me, than that I wouldn't be able to compromise on his behalf.

For example, I can get depressions. Living with someone depressive is tough for the best of people. If I married someone without having previously lived together, it would feel to me as if I were not being totally honest; sort of tricking him into marrying me... You can talk about it beforehand, but you can't really convey the experience.

Obviously this is a very personal reason for wanting to live together before getting married, and not true for everyone. Still, am wondering if others feel/felt the same or if it's just me?

I object to the idea that it is 'lucky' that our marriage is good. I think it is bloody hard work, a strong commitment to honest and thorough communication and a desire to be kind to eachother and care for eachother, thank you very much!

Loads of people get married and get divorced whether they lived together first or not, so I really don't think it can make that much difference. In fact, having written that, am I dreaming some statistics that says that living together before marriage makes your marriage more likely to fail rather than less likely? Might have to go and look that one up!

Anyway, like I say, I have no issue with people who choose to live with eachother first, but it does piss me off when people think that, because DH and I decided not to live together first, we were 'lucky' to have survived so long in our marriage.

I wouldn't bother looking it up Flamingo - statistics don't say that anything makes anything else happen, they just say that two things are moer or less likely to happen together. There are too many confounding factors in this situation, most obviously the fact that people who do not live together before getting married (especially in more recent times) are more likely to be people who don't believe in divorce.

I know, Trills. The thing is though that it's not just luck that we have a good marriage and it is very irritating to read that people think it is, just because they chose a different route.

I meant that the statistics mean that there is at least a little evidence that I could use to say 'well if you live together first, it's just luck if you have a long happy marriage because most don't' but I don't. I totally respect people making choices that work for them as every other couple is a different couple to us and will need different things.

Blimey I am lucky! Dh is too. It was luck that we met each other and decided to go on a date - and that led to all the rest.

As for OP.
I have no objsction to living with people and when i was younger did live with someone for a few years (I would never have married him though).

When I met DH it progressed quickly, as I was old and wise and it was obvious that we "clicked", got on really well, had shared sense of humour and interests etc etc. After a week he was sleeping at my flat pretty much every night BUT I never put him on the bills or anything like that. So I don't think that really counts as living together, his stuff wasn't at mine expect for a few wash bits.

We were engaged after a couple of months and married after a year and a bit. We moved into our house the week before the wedding.

I do have a theory that people who just jimp in at the deep end are more likely to get married than those who live together? No vaule judgement on that at all. My friends who are cohabiting feel that the "moment" for marriage has passed - the "honeymoon period" is over, they have mortgages and children and things. One of my friends the other day said she'd feel a bit silly getting married now - the moment had passed.

I reckon that as long as you spend a lot of time together, and are open and honest with each other, then either way is probably going to be fine.

I think the key is openness and honesty, as you say, ISNT, and willingness to want to be kind to and please your partner.

If one partner is messier than the other, then all it takes is the tidier one relaxing his/her standards a little, and, at the same time, the messier one trying harder to be tidy. It's not about what people are like, but how much they want to make the person they love happy and, ultimately, how much they want their marriage to work.

Eg. it drives me mad that DH doesn't pick things up off the floor. It would drive me mad whether I'd lived with him or not before we got married. The difference is that I have asked him to please try to pick things up and he does try to; and I try to meet him half-way and accept that his standards just aren't as high as mine but I love him and would rather work out a way to live happily with him than have not got married to him.

Marriage is about working out together how to spend your lives together so you're both happy. If you can't do that, then you shouldn't get married. It's irrelevant whether you live together or not as there are plenty of opportunities for honest, profound conversations before you live together to work out if you are going to be happyt together long term or not.

I don't think living together before marriage makes you more or less likely to split up.

I do think that living together before marriage means that if you do split up you're more likely to do it before you are married than after, which is probably a good thing.

I know very few people who have lived together before they get married, it's just not the 'done thing' where we live.

I am one of a family of eight & none of us have lived together before marriage, and thankfully, we're all happily married, ranging from:

25 years, 22 years, 18 years, 15 years, 13 years (me & dh) 7 years, 7 years and 4 years. The sister who has been married four years had a 3 year relationship & a child with a former boyfriend (they never lived together either).
The sister who is married 15 years previously had an 8 year relationship with a man, finished for 3 weeks, then met and married her now (fantastic!) Dh in a space of a year!!

(it's not all religious reasons, more that we're all very, very afraid of the mammy!)

I think luck does come into it quite a bit tbh.

For example; DH and i get on very well, generally agree on things and when we don't we make a compromise,

but

we have never had the bad luck of several miscarriages, a poorly child or having to care for an elderly/disabled parent. I am not saying we would split up if we did, just that it would test our relationship in a way that it hasn't been iyswim? We are 'lucky' that our relationship has had mainly normal problems to deal with.

I had one relationship which worked very well before we moved in together after a year of dating. After a few weeks in the same flat I realised that it wasn't going to work out. I agonised for almost a year, desperately trying to make it work, before I moved out. I think if I had married to him, it would have been even harder, and as it was it already seriously affected my health. It wasn't for lack of trying that it broke down, we simply weren't made for each other and it only became clear through living together.

I've met my now husband a year or so after that. We dated (long distance) for about a year, tried out living together for a couple of months before committing to the big step of dissolving my flat and leaving my home country for good. We've had our first child 3 years later, and got married 10 months after that. With my experience of relationships going wrong through nobody's fault but incompatibility, getting married first, without , would have been insane in my opinion. And of course, we need to work on our relationship and make compromises like any other couple, too.

It's ok unless one of you sees living together as something you do BEFORE getting married and the other sees it as something you do INSTEAD of getting married.

Not that I'm talking from personal experience of course...