Moving In Together

Since you've been going-out together for some time and you spend most weekends around each other's houses, surely, isn’t moving in together the next logical step? Marital Therapist and international bestselling author, ANDREW G MARSHALL, opens up his case book that’s full of answers.

- Andrew G Marshall

You have successfully negotiated ‘seeing each other’ into boyfriend and girlfriend, and you can broach the ‘commitment’ word without him disappearing - so moving in together should be relatively straight-forward. You might think so, but over the last twelve months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of couples, at my practice, who’ve found that living together has thrown them into a crisis. These aren’t couples who just met and blindly leaped into a shared mortgage. They have over three or four years, sometimes more, spent most weekends, and weeknights at each other’s flats. After all that time together, you’d think they knew each other well enough to have ironed out any problems.

So, what has turned what should be the consolidation of their relationship into a minefield of squabbles and neuroses? It’s partly because nowadays, we generally wait until we are in our late twenties or early thirties before we start a serious relationship - which means we’re not used to having to consider other people and we, therefore, find it hard to see any view beyond our own. Although it’s useful to know yourself before settling down with someone else (couples who rush into marriage too young are more open to the risk of growing apart as they grow up), being on your own for long makes compromise much harder.

‘I was looking forward to coming home to someone, rather than an empty flat,’ says Sarah - a thirty-two-year-old lawyer who has lived alone for seven years. ‘I can’t believe how annoyed I get when Anthony uses the same chopping board for meat and vegetables.’ Before they moved in together, Sarah and Anthony had seldom cooked in each other’s flats. ‘When I did use her kitchen, I would respect her rules - but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hearing about salmonella,’ he explains.