Pros of Living Together Before Marriage

Is living together before marriage a good idea? One could argue both the pros and cons of living together before marriage, but I'm going to focus on the pros in this article. With the divorce rate so high, many couples feel more comfortable living together before they're even engaged.

When you're dating and you're visiting in each other's homes, you tend to spend much more quality time together. When your girlfriend or boyfriend visits, you'll make time to watch a movie or do other things with each other. It's not always that way when you're living together. You may find that, after a while, you don't spend much time doing things together at all. You may be in the same space, but each of you are doing your own things. Although this is common in a marriage, it may be better to work through it as a dating couple rather than a married couple.

Finances tend to be a huge problem in a marriage and one of the top reasons why married couples will divorce. If you're living together, you may not be sharing a bank account, but you'll still get a much closer look at how the other person spends their money. After all, if you do decide to get married, this will have an immense impact on the strength of that marriage.

You'll find out how clean or messy your partner is. Even though their place may always look neat when you're dating, they may just be cleaning before you come over. After you've been living together a while, you'll see exactly how they like to keep a place. You'll also be able to find out their expectations of you when it comes to household chores and cooking dinner. For example, if you're a woman and you feel housework should be split by a man and a woman if you're not working and you move in with your boyfriend who expects you to do all the cooking and cleaning, that would be nice to know. Even if this is talked about before living together or before marriage, things do change drastically once you're actually living together. Rely on a person's actions rather than their words. The two may vary.

Another very important reason a couple should consider living together is to see exactly how they treat you. This is much more likely to come out if you spend that much time together. Take Susie and Tom for example. Susie and Tom were together for a year before they decided to get an apartment together. Things were great for two to three months until Tom started getting irritated that Susie was spending too much time with her friends and not enough at home with him. Each time they argued about it, his voice got higher and he began to get violent. This is something Susie may have never known if she wasn't living with Tom first.

When you live together, you find out more about the person than if you both went to your own homes every night since you're able to spend more time together. You'll find habits in the other person you didn't know they had and maybe they didn't even know they had either. You may think you know a person well, but a person's true colors come out especially when they're at home. They won't be able to hide their shortcomings for long when you live together. You can then decide if all the 'not so fabulous' things about them are something you can live with the rest of your life or not.