Lately, many couples have been wondering whether or not moving in together before marriage would be a good idea. This is not something people needed to think about generations ago, because it was so unusual. However, today, is becoming an increasingly common habit. But there are many things to consider before you move in together!

First, you two need examine your intentions and be on the same page about this. That is, do you want to live together to see if you are compatible in the same house? Do you want to move in together because one or both of you are avoiding (or putting off) marriage? If yes, why are you doing this?

Ideally, you should have an honest conversation about why one or both of you want to live together without being married.

Having this conversation is crucial because if you are not in sync with your intentions, it will cause problems in the future. However, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you both know that the ultimate goal is marriage – not just any kind of marriage, but luckily one that is full of love, happy, and healthy.

You will see in this article:

Living together before marriage: Good or bad?
Strengths
Negative points
Does living together before marriage help in the marriage in the future?

Living together before marriage: Good or bad?

Let’s jump to the positives and negatives of living together before marriage.

Strengths:

1. Will you share the accounts

This can be one of the most popular reasons to move in together before marriage. Most healthy couples are pretty much living together anyway. They keep clothes and other personal items in each other’s homes and may be there more than their own home. So, in that case, it would make sense to stop paying two different rents, two different electricity and internet bills, and more.

While this is definitely a plus point for moving in together, you need to make sure you are wise with money. It’s very tempting to spend the extra money you’ll save and not even know where you spent it. A better idea would be to save the money and invest it in the future together.

2. You avoid future unwanted surprises

Living with someone can be stressful. It doesn’t matter if it’s your own parents, siblings or children, they all have the ability to piss you off when you live in the same space 24/7. It’s just a fact of life.

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But when you’re dating or in a serious romantic relationship, you have a lot less time to get to know someone’s habits. When you’re dating for the first time, you don’t see – or forget about – some of your partner’s annoying habits. You might even think it’s cute. But as time goes on, what you thought was cute starts to piss you off.

So imagine if you had never lived together before you got married and when you moved in together you had a crisis going on in your head. You might think, “this person drives me crazy because they never do the dishes!”

If you live together before marriage, you will enter it with your eyes wide open and there will be far fewer surprises.

3. You will grow closer and build a strong bond

Intimacy is a very important thing in any relationship, but more especially in marriages. But when I say “intimacy,” I don’t just mean physical/sexual or emotional intimacy. In fact, there are other different types of intimacy that are just as important, such as intellectual, spiritual, experiential and volitional.

Let’s talk about volitional intimacy. This kind of intimacy is about the commitments two people make to each other. For example, if you decide to buy a house, a car, or a dog together, it means that you are making a commitment to each other (regardless of whether you are married or not). And living together represents that kind of intimacy.

When a couple has all these types of intimacy in sync, the relationship becomes stronger. Therefore, living together will test you and see whether or not you can create and maintain these intimacies before getting married. And if so, it will strengthen the bond between you and make you more confident about getting married in the future.

Negative points:

1. Family and/or friends may not approve of the idea

Everyone has an opinion about everything. And most people love for you to know what it is whether you ask for it or not. That said, it can be very difficult to do something without the approval of your family or friends.

If the couple’s family and friends are against the move, well, that’s bad. However, even if one of you has a family that doesn’t approve, but the other does, it can still cause a problem. The partner whose family is okay with this may not understand why the other person’s family is not.

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In extreme circumstances, this can cause one of the two to lose relationships with family and/or friends. So it’s something to seriously consider before you decide to move in together.

2. Lack of support can weaken your relationship

Living together with your partner is a big decision, whether you are going to get married or not. Living with someone other than you is not an easy task. Sure, having a person with you can make you less lonely, but a lot of challenges can come with that too.

So if you don’t have the support of your social system, it will likely have an impact on your relationship – and not for the better. There may be stress and resentment that lurks in the air between the two of you.

Living with anyone can sometimes be a struggle in itself. If you’ve had roommates before, you know what I’m talking about. So without a good support system, you can put your relationship at risk as this can create new difficulties that you and your partner haven’t faced yet.

3. You will save, but it can weaken the relationship

When you are single or live alone, you have complete control over your finances. Nobody can tell you what you can and can’t spend your money on. But when you move in with someone else, that can change.

Of course, you can still have separate bank accounts, but you will share the expenses. Decisions about how the rent/mortgage will be paid or who will pay for the grocery purchase will need to be made, and you may have very different opinions on how this should be done.

And then there is the problem of external and/or individual spending. Perhaps one of you is a “spender” and the other is a “saver”. The saver will be upset when the spender spends his money if he thinks it is irresponsible.

For example, maybe one of you thinks buying $300 jeans is a good idea, and the other thinks it’s a stupid decision. Or maybe one wants to spend R$500 on a gourmet restaurant and the other thinks it’s a waste of money. These kinds of differences in how you spend money can cause a lot of problems between couples.

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Does living together before marriage help in the marriage in the future?

While most people want a definitive answer to this question, believe it or not, there is mixed research on the subject. Older studies from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s found that couples who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce. However, living together was not as socially acceptable as it is today. More recent studies don’t show the exact same statistics, although the differences aren’t too surprising.

Other studies suggest that the divorce rate of people who live together is not necessarily linked to the real part of the “living together” equation. The results show that there are many other factors that contribute to divorce besides cohabitation.

For example, age matters. In general, the older you are, the more likely your marriage is to last. Other factors include personality traits such as the ability to commit. In other words, maybe people who live together before marriage don’t value serious, legal, or religious commitment as much as people who don’t.

With all that said, the conclusion is that there is no one right answer as to whether living together before marriage is good or not. It really depends on people as individuals and on the couple as a whole.

Conclusion

The truth is, the choice to live together or not before marriage has to be decided between the two of you. As you can see, there is no right or wrong answer here.

So whatever you decide, make sure you and your partner have important conversations about it, and that both are very clear about the positives and negatives. So do your best and trust that everything will work out.