Should You Move in with Your Sweetheart?

shoe_romance_007Spring is often a time of transition. People move in or out of Davis, graduate, start or finish jobs…or relationships. Maybe you’ve been seeing someone for a while and also happen to need a new roommate for your Tandem apartment. Seems like a no-brainer, right? But we strongly encourage you to think long and hard before committing to moving in with a romantic partner. Here are some great questions from MyFirstApartment.com to consider:

1. Have you been dating for over a year? If not, forget about it. All those people telling you not to do it, that it’s too soon, that this is just madness, that things won’t always be like they are right now, that you don’t know the other person well enough, all those people are right. It might seem like your relationship is special, that you and your honey will buck the odds and have it all work out – but, probably not.Everyone who rushes into moving in together thinks they’re special, that their relationship is different … and yet think of how seldom it ends up working. So don’t be a statistic. Just wait a little longer and see….

2. Are you doing it just because your lease is up? This goes hand-in-hand with point number one. Particularly for big-city dwellers without much cash, for whom roommates are necessities, this can be a motivating factor. I was eavesdropping on the El the other day, listening to a woman who’d moved in with her boyfriend after 2 monthsbecause both their leases were up and they were always “at each other’s places all the time anyway.” This is a bad idea. And it can lead to a lot of misery, far more than the inconvenience of finding a new roommate or apartment. Case in point: guess what the woman was talking about when I was eavesdropping? She was complaining about how miserable she was living with her now ex-boyfriend. Hmmm… she and her boyfriend had eight months left on their lease. I don’t envy them.

3. Have you and the Significant Other talked about it before? If neither of you has brought it up yet, it’s probably not quite time – it might be time to bring up the possibility, to talk it through. Heck, after talking about it, and thinking on it, you and your sweetie pie might be ready to move in together in a few months. But if neither of you have even mentioned it, you don’t know what the other’s reaction is going to be – and this can’t be a unilateral decision.

Still can’t decide? Click on the link above for more good questions-that-make-you-go-hmmmm for you and your partner to discuss together.