Co-Habitating...

The Jig is up!

CityBoy and I live together and have been living together officially for the last 11.25 months.

There are black and white opinions on living together before marriage and on most fronts the opinion is that its HORRIBLE, but I totally disagree.

Our reasons for moving in together in the first place were:

1) I was moving to a new city and CityBoy was moving to be with me.
2) Rent on 2 1-bedroom apartments was WAAAY more than 1 2-bedroom apartment
3) If we didn't live together, we'd NEVER see each other

Now that we're approaching 1 year living together, I've started to reflect on how we work as "roommates" and overall, I think we're pretty awesome roomies.

We each do our share of the "chores" and we've never really fought about the house being messy or stuff being left out, although CityBoy did compare our apartment during busy season to a particular scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

We have a household budget that we've managed to stick to pretty well and we discuss all big purchases before we make them. We've also committed to putting a certain amount into savings each month and it really came in handy last month when my trusty pickup decided to kick the bucket and I had to buy a new car!

We're parents to the cutest 2 1/2 year old, 2 1/2 lb chihuahua and we share the responsibilities of taking her out to potty pretty equally with only a few grumbles. Okay, maybe we grumble everytime, but one look at her cute face and the grumbles stop.

We stay out of each other's way when we need to, like when CityBoy comes home from a client at 7:30 PM, scarfs down whatever meal I managed to throw together despite only getting home 15 minutes before him, and barricades himself in the office to work another hour or two while I set up camp on the couch with my laptop to multitask work & clearing out my DVR!

I think the only real snag we've hit as roommates is our sleep schedules. CityBoy goes to bed between 10 and 11 and as soon as his head hits the pillow, he's out. I, on the other hand, don't even think about sleep until somewhere around midnight and can sometimes lie in bed for over an hour before I finally fall asleep. Usually on the nights when I can tell I won't be able to sleep, I'll just plan on sleeping on the couch so I don't make both of us have a bad night.

Despite ALL the good reasons to live together and how well its going, we still had to face the facts during our first marriage counseling meeting with my pastor back home. It was the first question out of his mouth and even though I'm confident we made the right decision, a part of me still feels really guilty...

Do you feel guilty about co-habitating before marriage?