To Shack Up, or NOT to Shack Up? [in retrospect]

To shack up, or not to shack up – that’s is the question.

In fact, it is the age-old question. A question that [I think] I now have an answer for.

One of my childhood homies hit me up today. We caught [each other] up on five years in like five easy minutes. Excitedly, he told me that he was at the point in his life where he is taking the next step with girlfriend of four years and moving in with her. I couldn’t help but to respond with a long, drawn out hmmmmmmmph after he said it. Then I changed the topic, quick, to dismiss the irony of being in the opposite point of my life after shacking up myself almost two years ago.

Yeah, look at me now… making plans to “unshack” up and shit. Go figure.

I think he got the hint because he never really got back to the topic. I’m glad he didn’t because if he asked me to – I couldn’t give a solid opinion as to whether he was about to do the right thing or not. I thought about it more toward the end of last night, and I will say this. Shacking up… I recommend doing it if you think it’s the right thing you [as a couple] to do. Your justification for doing it should not be financial though. The incentive for doing it should instead be aimed towards growing and strengthening longevity in your relationship; it should be because “this is it” and because “y’all love each other dammit and you’re taking it to the next level”. If you’re a struggling Christian like I am, you already know the church basically forbids such actions. On several occasions, I’ve been in church [sitting low in my seat] as Pastor Creflo Dollar preached sermons about how shacking up conflicts with the sanctity of marriage. Man and wife are only supposed to live together, not boyfriends and girlfriends! Here in the South, you get judged heavily and frowned upon for such a thing… and I’ve been frowned up on plenty of occasions, OUTSIDE THE CHURCH.  

But eh… in retrospect, I’m actually glad to have taken a stab at it. I learned a lot about myself with respect to women and how they live. The only sense of living with a woman beforehand came from living with my mother; [this meant like] dinner on the table around 7PM daily, televisions tuned into the Lifetime Channel, house smelling like either Endust or Windex or collard greens on weekends, vacuum lines in the carpet… etc, etc. As far as I was concerned, such was supposed to be life…

LOL, that’s if I were to be dating someone born before 1980. I swear, from that year on… all that typical, predictable default man/woman role shit goes OUT the window. Shacking up allows to you really test the dynamics of a relationship, especially under the cultural and gender shifts created by the Nineties Girl and [what I call] the Millennium Man. You learn your limits. You learn what ticks you off. You learn what you do that ticks your mate off. You get to see who’s better at what; banging breakfasts may be her thing while down-home dinners are what you do best. (My ex has me on the Spaghetti though, I like hers better than my moms. Shhh…)

Of course, it doesn't stop there. You even learn which one of you is better with money. You learn who will be the tidier of the two. You learn that you can't stand the sight of someone else's hair in the bathroom sink, or that one's wet towel outside the bathroom grosses the other out. You learn that in fact, some people don’t [and may not have to] do laundry as much as you do. The list goes on. I won’t though…

But above all, you really learn just how much of each other you can tolerate. There were times when me and mines would practically overdose on each other. So in my case, me going back home to Jersey for a few days at least once a month was probably the best thing for us. While absence made the heart grow fonder, we both got our “me” time in. Not all couples are the same though. One my boys lived with is girlfriend for a lengthy amount of time, and [from the outside looking in] her spending time away from him eventually became problematic for him. She forgot how to do things without him, and never let him have any fun WITHOUT her.

I definitely don’t regret the decision to have moved in with my girlfriend. Yeah, I am moving out now but we’d probably continue to cohabitate if circumstances were better on my behalf. Her shit is straight, its mine that ain’t. Still, I digress – the point I am trying to make is that my moving out would be much uglier had we put off moving in [with each other] until marriage. It’d be a long drawn out process involving lawyers and papers to be drawn up. This may be pushing it, but, moving out as an ex-boyfriend instead of as an ex-husband may even give us a remote chance to getting back together in the future (speaking in more broader terms if you will). Eff what you heard if you ever think that I’d move out as someone’s husband, only to get back with my wife and have to move back in. Puh-lease, my pride wouldn’t let me. Again, I digress – I just think that if you plan on being with someone for the rest of your life then you should at least be entitled test whether you can live with them or not; to me, that is a very vital step in the decision-making process toward nuptials.

So to shack-up or not to shack-up? My answer… do what you want, but be cautious and open-minded. You’ll either fly or flop. Regardless of how good it may feel, be prepared to flop at all times. The more you soar, nonetheless, the stronger your relationship will be in the long-run.