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Your Opinion
I posted this last week on P/E and I got a mix of different responses. Just wondering what your take is on the issue:
For those of you who waited to move in with your significant other until marriage, what was your reason?
If you were already having sex together before marriage, why wait to move in together?
The reason I ask, I have this friend...we'll call her Kate. Kate is getting married in a few months. She's been having sex with her FI since they first started going out. Kate's FI recently got a job in another state and she is going to move down there with him, but not until they are married. I asked her why she was waiting to move in and she said she didn't want to live with him before marriage, and she wanted to be traditional.
I honestly think this is the biggest pile of crap in the world. I think it is incredibly contradictory to have sex with your FI, and then not move in with eachother before marriage because you want to be 'traditional." I think the whole having sex before marriage pretty much trumps the whole traditional aspect of waiting to move in together.
Additional details to probably help you with your answer: Kate isn't being influenced by family. This is her own choice. The thing that gets to me, is the traditional aspect of it. I understand if it was money, job, but the reason she says is because it's not traditional.
Re: Your Opinion
I'm going to blunt and say that I think that is stupid. If she was waiting to buy a house together, move because she would lose her job and have to rely completely on him, etc. I could understand it. But just because they dont want to live together - stupid.
I can even understand waiting to respect your parents (one of my friends is in this situation and actually paying a mortgage on a house she doesnt live in with her FI while he lives there and she has to move back in with her parents because she can't afford to live in her apartment and pay mortgage - luckily this was a 5 month temp situation - I understand it but still think its stupid). I can understand waiting for all of it - though I dont get why anyone would want to.
But in her situation, it just seems pointless. And for the record, DH moved in with me after we had been dating for about 9 months and we lived together for 2.5 years before the wedding and had joint back accounts for about the last year of that time. Neither of our parents cared at all. I had already bought the house before I met DH so the mortgage was only in my name. After we were engaged, I would have had no problem putting both our names on a mortgage though.
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I think she's being a total hypocrite given everything you've written.
What if she got pregnant? Would she move then?
Is she on the pill? Because that's not technically "traditional" either.
Hypocrite. (not you - Kate) The reason most "traditional" girls don't move in with their BF/FI is because of waiting for sex until marriage. If she wants to be traditional she should get off her back.
We unofficially moved in together after 2 months, officially after 6, and slept together on the 2nd date so there was no mistake about what was going on here.
More than kisses you shared, right lucky?
Lucy Elizabeth 10.27.12
ZING!
Kisses and hand holding - that's it. I'm a good girl.
This receives a big
from me. I don't understand enforcing a rule upon yourself solely for the opinions of others, even to some extent your parents. If you're grown up enough to decide to have sex and get married, you're grown up enough to move in with someone w/o fear of others' opinions. It gives me the impression that you're ashamed of your choices to have sex because you want to keep up "traditional" appearances by not co-habitating. I've never felt like I needed to hide anything. Not that I discussed my sex life with dear mom and dad, but again, I'm not ashamed of my choices in the least.
That said, it's her choice and regardless what my opinions are, it remains her choice.
Yeah, that makes absolutely zero sense in my book...
On a similar, but not so similar note, I used to have a roommate whose family was VERY traditional. We lived in CA and they lived in TX and she was engaged, but her family didn't approve of her living with him before they were married. When they came to visit, she hid all of his clothes and other belongings in my closet so that her mom wouldn't know he lived there. He had to find alternate lodging for those nights. It was weird.
Another point to note: She bittcchess to no end about how much it blows to have a LDR.
Cruella: Everything else aside though, do you think it's a load of crap to say she wants to be traditional but sleeps with him anyway?
I definitely don't judge her bc of it. I mean, her choice is her choice, and my opinion on the matter is only MY opinion but don't complain to me about how terrible it is to be in an LRD when the reasonw why you are is contradictory in the first place.
I feel like when it comes to a relationship traditional is all or nothing. I can see if you said, we don't have a traditional relationship, but we're having a traditional wedding. That makes sense to me.
But saying we have a very traditional relationship is a lot more encompassing. If you're going to claim your relationship is very traditional (which she does), you shouldn't be having sex before marriage and you shouldn't be living together.
We didn't live together before we were married and waited until we were to have sex. We did this because of our strong Christian beliefs. PS (We're doing fine). I don't see the difference between living together and just spending lots of nights at each others' homes. It's a type of living together. I do think some people have sex and wait to live together because of parent disaproval.
To answer your question, we waited to move in together until after the wedding and we also waited until after the wedding to have sex.
There were a lot of reasons for each decision, and I suppose "being traditional" affected both, but was not the main driving force. I would say the main reasons we did not live together before we were married were to save something special for after the wedding and to honor the commitment we had made to wait to have sex (obviously living together would be a huge temptation to have sex). We were also both in enjoyable roommate situations with no reason to leave. We were also working on our own financial situations, moving towards completely merging finances.
I do think its odd to claim an overarching answer of "being traditional" when that is not played out in other areas, but like Cruella said I know plenty of people who are more traditional in some ways and more liberal in others. I can certainly pick out aspects of my own life that are more and less "traditional." I think in this case "kate" just wants to keep up appearances for some reason.