Cohabitation

If you haven't read the disclaimer yet, you may want to.

Sweetie and I are now officially living in sin for the next nearly 8 months before the wedding. The dining room is literally buried in boxes, but I'm making slow progress to get that taken care of.

I've never been a believer of living together before you're married (and this is where I don't want people getting all pissy at me). I suppose it may work for some people, but after what I've gone through the last two days I wonder how it can happen without deteriorating the relationship to some point.

I must admit that I come at this with a severe bias. When I was about 14 (?) my half-brother got married to a gal he'd been living with for at least 3 years. They were divorced within the year. My brother got married when I was 18 to a chick he'd been living with for at least a year (she was also evil incarnate, but that's not germane to this discussion) and they were divorced within 6 months if memory serves. The statistics just show it's not a good idea.

It also may come from a number of difficult roommate situations I've had. They eat your Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream you were saving for a rainy day. They let their boyfriends practically move in to a place that's not big enough for three people. The insist on cleaning the top of the door jambs, but leave piles of clutter everywhere. The only way I've found to make roommate situations work is to negotiate a strict set of rules before you begin the adventure. (Really, ask Kaphine and I about the rules we had in place at the original House of Swank, they were insane). Doesn't lend itself well to mutual love and respect.

And it also comes from an upbringing in which I wasn't even supposed to THINK about sex until I was married.

There's an inherent lack of stability in the roommate relationship, where someone can leave at a moments notice and that's the end of it. Turf becomes a big issue. If there's a breakup, who gets the house?

I've not yet really been able to get to the job of unloading boxes, as I've been spending my time up until now preparing the condo for my move in. Assembling IKEA shelves, cleaning the kitchen, reorganizing the laundry room etc. I've always known Sweetie wasn't the most organized of people when it came to home storage, but I had no idea what a pack rat the boy was. Among the things I disposed of/recycled over the weekend were:

• About 15 old phone books, either out of date or duplicates of books on hand.
• 3 large armfuls worth of "rags" (aka old clothes), after holding back a box of rags for if/when we do need them.
• Several sets of sheets which don't fit our queen size bed, some of which may have been twin size (and Sweetie hasn't had a twin bed since I met him in 1997, so who knows how long he's been carting those around).

Because we are setting up OUR home TOGETHER, I felt it appropriate to cull down (after asking Sweetie's permission, of course) so free up a LOT of space for my stuff to go. Perhaps it's some psychological wall that I need to discuss with the marriage counselor, but if we were going to be living together and NOT getting married at some point it would have been a lot harder to do that, and would have been much more 'this is your space and this is my space.' The ring on the finger really does make a difference.

So far I'm really digging the cohabitation thing, and it's totally bringing out the Martha Stewart in me. When I live alone I am likely to eat cheese and crackers for dinner and leave the empty box on the floor until I have to pick it up. Now that my Sweetie is around I'm much more likely to want to cook a nice dinner, then clean up afterwards so we have a pleasant little place to call home.

However, for this week the pleasant little dinner is in front of the TV rather than at the table, as it is literally impossible to make it to the dining room table right now due to the fact that it is surrounded by boxes. And if you could make it to the table, you couldn't do anything there because it's buried in CD's, but give me time.