Being in a relationship with someone is one thing.
Moving in together and combining your lives is another thing entirely.
On r/AskReddit, a user asked, “Couples who have moved in together, what surprised you the most? For long-term couples, the responses will be a trip down memory lane . For newer couples, they might be enough to convince you never to share your home with anyone.
That’s definitely just how cats roll.
“Apparently the cat I raised since she was a kitten and loved more than life itself is more than willing to abandon me and love someone else much more in a blink of an eye.”
Who needs drawers, anyway?
“After living with him for 4 years, I opened a drawer of ‘his’ dresser… And it was empty. All of it. Apparently he thought it was my extra dresser.
“He doesn’t use a dresser. Clothes get washed and put into a ‘clean clothes’ hamper. He puts socks and underwear in his bedside table.”
She doesn’t miss you, she misses the keys.
“How often I’d be helping her find her car keys.
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“Eventually, I put up a hook that I was able to get her in the habit of using.
“Made me tear up a little at the time, but a couple weeks after we split I remember getting a text from her that said ‘I miss being able to find my keys.'”
Your time is their time.
“My girlfriend has a hard time being alone. When we’re home, basically every waking minute she wants to be together. I love her with all my heart, but sometimes I just want to be alone doing my own thing for an hour or two. Watching sports, playing guitar, gaming, etc. but when I leave for another room I can hear the disappointment in her voice. I’m working on getting her to understand my need for occasional alone time.”
Hair, hair everywhere.
“My ex wife had really long hair and I was constantly pulling 3 foot long strands out of my mouth. The worst was a maddening itch in my eye that I kept rubbing and rubbing until I realized I was pulling a hair out of my eye socket…inch after inch I pulled out, feeling it tugging from under my eyeball.”
Finally, a real person to talk to.
“I never had any roommates, aside from one for like the first two weeks in college before I got moved to a single room, so I was used to just talking to myself out loud like nothing. After we moved in together and she kept asking ‘Who are you talking to?’ and ‘Did you say something?’ I realized that I actually talk to myself quite a bit.”
The devil is in the details.
“How specific I have to be when giving instructions to do something. Like instead of saying ‘wash the sheets’ I have to say ‘wash and dry the sheets and pillowcases and put new sheets on the bed.'”
Step up that TP game.
“I always knew women went through TP faster than men, but I never knew how much faster they did. It got to the point, I’d just grab a pack of TP whenever I went to the store for any reason. We may not be out at home, but we will be soon I reckoned, and I was never wrong about that.”
Finally, real food.
“Definitely the food, I’d eat ramen and canned foods all the time when I was living alone. Now I get spoiled with home cooked food. The best part though is she’s been teaching me to cook, I love our cooking school sessions after work.”
Don’t just assume they’re tidy.
“I always thought of women as tidy and organized. That was until I moved in with one. I swear I spend 20 minutes a day helping SO tidy up the mess she creates in the first hour every morning. Then another 10 minutes every day searching for brushes, hairbands, make-up, clothes etc.”
Bravo!
“She works from home, but the television never leaves Bravo. I leave for work, Bravo. Come home, Bravo. Go on the elliptical, Bravo. 24 [expletive] hours of these catty women (and sometimes men) yelling at each other. Bravo always being on is like the only thing we fight about, which is probably a good thing, but Jesus Christ, always with the Bravo.”
– u/wiiya
Learn to do nothing.
“His ability to be doing nothing. He can lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling and do nothing and think nothing. And he enjoys it. I would pull a muscle or pop something from the strain if I tried to do that.”
Scrambling the ol’ eggs.
“How often he scratches or readjusts his junk.
“Seriously. It’s CONSTANT, and it’s not even subtle. We could be having a serious conversation about our finances and off he goes, hand down his pants. When I finally called him out for it after months he simply said ‘Hey, I gotta scramble the eggs every now and then.'”
Leave a little breathing room.
“It’s not as hard as everyone told me it would be (that’s what she said).
“But seriously, understand you don’t have to do absolutely everything together since you live together, and respect each others boundaries, wants and needs.”
Madness, but no method.
“I grew up with a brother so I was pretty well prepared for living with a dude but what surprised me the most was that my boyfriend has no issue leaving things lying around where they do not belong. Dirty plate for example is left on the couch. The mail he just opened ended up on top of the microwave. The towel he dried off with could end up on the kitchen table. Literally no rhyme or reason to the madness.”
The worst kind of towel.
“My fiancee doesn’t get upset about folding towels but she did inherit a towel problem from her grandma. Decorative towels. In the kitchen and in the bathroom there are pretty towels with quotes and stuff. I hate it. What a useful item to put on display. It is literally meant to be wiped with and we aren’t supposed to touch them.”
The worst kind of pillows.
“Everything has a decorative pillow on it. They are too small to be used for anything, and I’m not allowed to throw them on the floor or pile them all on one chair. The bed has a bunch, and a long tube thing. I’m not allowed to wack her with the tube thing.”
It’s all about the little things.
“The pet peeves you never knew were there. For example, he doesn’t like when I leave egg shells in the sink without pushing it into the garbage disposable. I don’t like when he keeps getting new glasses of water because he misplaced his glass from an hour ago. They’re little things, but I was so surprised how passionate I was about glassware.”
He’s a bad defender.
“He doesn’t take the initiative to kill the creepy crawlies that waywardly stray into our apartment. If he sees a house centipede he looks at it, then promptly turns tail and walks away. Won’t even tell me the damn thing is there.”
It might just go really well.
“I was told that we would start arguing and being miserable. It ended up feeling like a super awesome constant sleep over. Don’t let people scare you into not moving in with a significant other if that is what you both want.”
They like to be with you… A lot!
“That your partner may follow you around the house, just because.”
This was actually one of the most popular responses on the thread, with the person who started the thread asking, “Is your partner, per chance, a puppy?”
The fact that your boyfriend may be happy doing…well, nothing.
“His ability to be doing nothing. He can lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling and do nothing and think nothing and he enjoys it. I would pull a muscle or pop something from the strain if I tried to do that.”
“She’s good at playing Tetris and very organized…”
“She moved in with me at my parent’s house, we had one room to store stuff; my bedroom. we bought things we’d need when we moved out when we saw a deal too good to pass up and she stored them.
“I realized she was good when we had to make 4 trips to get all our stuff out. 4 trips. this girl had boxes inside boxes inside boxes. She utilized every inch available in our room to stack items.
“We just bought a house and still have some boxes left to unpack. I will call her at work and say something like ‘hey, do you remember that blue paper clip I like to use? I can’t find it.’ She will tell me which room, which box, what container, and what is beside it, just in case I still can’t find it.”
Who is the furnace in your relationship?
“Men are incredibly warm and sweaty while asleep, and will be sticky if they hug you as you sleep together.”
After the swathe of responses to this one comment, this person posted an update writing: “TIL that apparently in every relationship there’s a ‘furnace’ and an ‘ice cube’, no matter the gender.”
This is something more people do than you realise…
“He peed in the sink. That’s all […] My fiancé once told me that peeing off high places is a natural instinct for men. ‘Whoever pees the highest wins, that’s the game.'”
How long someone can spend getting ready…
“What surprises me and what I fail to understand is the vast amount of time she spends getting ready. I try to understand, but I just don’t. She looks beautiful all of the time, but spends an hour and a half to two hours before going out making herself look nice. She looks incredible when she’s done of course! But the whole process stresses her out and she has quoted it as a reason why she doesn’t want to go out sometimes.
“Even during little outings with friends she spends the same amount of time getting ready. I’m a numbers type person. That would be just too many of my seconds spent on this Earth looking nice for other people I’m not trying to physically attract.”
The old switcheroo!
“I thought if I ever moved in with a girl, I’d have to be way less of a slob. Turns out I’m the neat freak in this relationship.”
It seems as though people’s partner’s cleanliness is a pretty hot issue for most people!
