Living with Your Significant Other - Cons

Illustration by Juho Choi

Some are under the impression that living with your significant other would be amazing. You spend even more time with the person you love the most, and you wake up next to them every morning. Amazing, right? Wrong.

When you move in with someone you realize all the little things you don’t like about each other. Furthermore, if the two of you get into a lease together, there’s more pressure to keep the relationship going. If the two of you break up, you still have to see out that lease, however long that may be. Most people never want to see their exes again, but that isn't an option.

Senior Year of High School

During my senior year, I found myself unable to live in my own home anymore. Like angels, my boyfriend’s parents invited me into their home. My boyfriend, let’s call him Sebastian, had just graduated and was headed off to college. The house was nice, and it was incredibly convenient — I could walk to and from school. Sebastian was living at Drexel University, but at the end of his second trimester, he dropped out. This meant he was moving back to his parents’ home where I was.

His parents unfortunately had unreasonably high expectations for me because I was dating their son. Also, Sebastian and I had broken up mutually a few months after he moved back home. There was a lot of things wrong with our relationship. While living together, we just realized we weren’t right for one another.

After Sebastian and I broke up, tensions were high and we fought all the time. He and I hated each other for months, and I hated being at home. We just couldn’t find a common ground or a way to get along. We would mess with each other’s things to get back at one another. Also, we were in each other’s business with new significant others, which was painful emotionally.

In addition, his parents could not accept the fact that it was mutual. They thought for sure I had cheated on their son, which was something I didn’t do. Sebastian and I both explained that their thoughts were unwarranted, and that wasn’t why we broke up at all.

They evidently went behind my back with my therapist, which is completely illegal since I was not a minor and they were not my parents. They had me move out and into my grandpa’s house. I didn’t know about it until it was way too late to do anything about it. Moving into my grandpa’s house was something I was very uncomfortable with. I was unprepared, and very unhappy with it.

Freshman Year of College

Going into my freshman year of college, I was in a brand new relationship. I didn’t want to get into a long distance relationship, but he, let’s call him Flounder, seemed 1000% worth it. We officially began our relationship one week before freshman move in.

Things were going really well until October, which is the deadline to choose where you’re going to live the following academic year. I hadn’t really made any friends by then, and Flounder desperately wanted to move up to Rochester. I should have known that someone wanting to move six hours away from their home, for someone they’ve been dating for a few months, was incredibly stupid.

Flounder and I hated being long distance, and we loved each other. In hindsight, this seems ridiculous considering we had only been dating for about two months when this decision was made.

Flounder put a ring on my finger, visited every month or two and we agreed to move in together. It seemed like a smart financial decision at the time, and I was going to save a ton of money. We bought tons of furniture on Black Friday, and got some great deals. We budgeted intensely together, and really thought everything through. We even had an apartment picked out and we were working on an application.

Tragically, I suppose, we broke up in late March. This screwed me over. I ended up without a housing plan at the end of the spring semester. One of the only options I had was Park Point. As most are well-aware, Park Point is ridiculously expensive. If it wasn’t obvious from me leaving home at 17 years old, I have no financial aid from my family; I am completely on my own.

Here I am this semester with five jobs, six if you include being a full-time student, attempting to cover my rent, tuition and medical bills. If I make one misstep, my grades will drop. If I get sick, I’m devastatingly behind. This is all because I was an idiot and thought living with my significant other would be a good idea. I should have learned from my first horrific experience that moving in with my boyfriend was an awful idea. We weren’t even together that long, and I’ve definitely learned from my mistakes.

It will be a long, long time before I make any moves to live with a significant other again. We would have to be together for years and years, and even then I would want a trial run. Getting into a lease with a significant other is a horrible idea. If you break up, you still have to live together. You have to see out the lease and deal with any new significant others they might bring home. Or, your ex screws you and you’re stuck paying out the rest of the lease yourself. It’s all around just a bad idea and not worth the risk.

That being said, you should definitely live with someone before you get married to them. Living with someone really brings light to the chinks in your relationship. Everything comes out and you know whether or not that person is for you. However, at this stage in life, moving in with your significant other is far from smart. Academics take priority and living with this person could become a larger stressor than you ever were meant to handle.