Diamond-Hope Kingston
Everyone romanticizes one of the biggest leaps, second to marriage, in a serious relationship: moving into a space where you and your partner will live together.
You have Instagram pages of couples looking super cute and cozy as they cook together and YouTube is littered with couple channels where couples deliberately do cute activities together in order to get views.
But the actual reality of it is far from what social media displays. For instance, couples don’t tweet or take photos of when their partners have fallen asleep before them and taken up all the space on the bed along with the duvet battle. Or the part where you both get into an argument over whose turn it is to take out the trash or even the part when you’re giving each other the silent treatment because someone forgot to flush the toilet.
Generally speaking, there’s a lot more to cohabiting in a shared space than everyone goes on and on about.
1) You are responsible for both of you now, 24/7
While it seems like a great idea at first, it can be a very mentally and emotionally draining situation. You are responsible for helping them even on their bad days, which believe me occurs a lot more often than we realize, and this is regardless of whatever you feel.
Really, nothing prepares you for being mutually responsible for another person while be simultaneously emotionally invested because really, there are no off days.
2) There is no such thing as ‘alone time’
We all like to hope that being around someone we’re in love with is a dream come true but it can go from being ideal to a nightmare really fast. You’re constantly together at every point in time except when you both head off to your different offices.
It can quite frankly get very stifling to not have the space – physically or mentally – to be alone. The great thing though is that you can communicate this to your partner and you can both find a solution that works.
3) It’s very easy to relax and forgo putting in deliberate effort
It might not seem like a big deal but in the long run it can be one of those things that snowball into a string of arguments. Learning to be deliberate with your actions is pretty much the only solution to this dilemma. Don’t act based on how you believe your partner should be loved or cared for, but how they want to be cared for.
Putting in deliberate effort towards your partner is really important and when we get relaxed, it’s easy to stop trying at a relationship simply because you see them every day.
4) Inviting your boys or girls over becomes a lot more complex
So you want a girls night sat on the living room floor with bottles of cheap wine and gossiping about all the funniest antics your men get up to, well now it just got a little more complex.
Before you can invite your girls over you’ll need to let your partner know and see if it is convenient for them, e.g he may just want a quiet night in with Netflix rather than being on hiss best behavior around your friends. Don’t even get me started on if your partner wants to bring his boys around.
5) Cohabiting means putting up all their annoying habits
Technically, some people really aren’t made for the cute cohabiting together thing and it can be heartbreaking to discover this only when you finally move in with each other. Some people have really annoying habits that may be simply unbearable to their partners, for example, the legendary toothpaste struggle. In case you aren’t aware of the time long struggle, it’s basically one person preferring to press from the middle while the other presses the tube of toothpaste from the bottom.
My point is, you’ll see all their bad habits down to the tiniest detail and whether you’ll be able to put up with it, well that’s another case.
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