Cohabitating With a Lover

A lovely friend, who was disgruntled and lost in her 30 year marriage, warned me of cohabitation. She advised me to set up rules early, “don’t start doing his laundry for him, he’ll never do it himself.” “Decide who does what in the kitchen, and stick to it.” Etc, etc. I listened to her advice, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I heeded it. J

I__ and I began our cohabitating experiment (my term, not his) in August of 2010. I knew (or thought I knew) that we were both messy people. What I quickly learned in the first month was that while I am messy, in the manner of always having clothes on the floor, never putting books away and hating to make the bed; I__ is messy in more of a slob way, leaving dishes for days in the sink, even when the sink is overflowing with dishes, keeping even clean clothes on the floor, and not knowing how to clean.

Example: cleaning the kitchen for him means wiping off the visible counter space, spraying out the sink, giving the stove top a quick wipe. Sweeping or mopping the floor? Not with I__.  Whereas I use comet, scrub the stove and always sweep and usually at least consider mopping or spot checking the floor.

Example: We both love cooking. I__ is an artist and I am a scientist, this distinction isn’t always apparent in our lives, but in the kitchen it really becomes obvious. For I__ cooking is a creative process, he is in the kitchen making a huge mess, happily “creating.” For me it is more of an experiment. I am in the kitchen analyzing and wearing lab goggles to chop onions. The end results with both of us are always delicious; the state of the kitchen is less delicious when I__ has finished creating than when I have finished experimenting.  When I__ does dishes he does them until the drying rack is full. When I do dishes I collect every dish I can find and wash them all, stopping to dry as the rack becomes full.

I’ve heard people hypothesize that women are instinctively more passive aggressive than men, and after 8 months of living together I find myself starting to believe that. I find myself thinking, if I__ hasn’t done x yet, then I’m certainly not going to do it, or pointedly doing y without explaining my attitude about it. This has gotten me nowhere. Men are dense, especially my love, so cohabitation is an exercise in clear, direct communication, something we are slowly developing.

One day, the honeymoon phase definitively ended. For the first time in our year+ relationship I thought about just walking away from the whole thing.

Perhaps it was inevitable to reach the point where I say, in a very angry voice, “I love you but I HATE living with you!” The trouble with loving the one you live with is that you have to sleep next to them at night even when you can’t get them to stop snoring, no matter how many times you kick them. You have to cook dinner together, even when one of you wants salad and the other prefers steak. You have to tolerate and interact with their friends, even when you would likely never become friends with those people on your own.

Perhaps it was just as inevitable that on the day I tried to break up with I__ and run away, he called me on my bullshit. This thing about living with the one you love, you forget that they will always have the ability to surprise you with insights about yourself that you would never achieve without them.

All in all I think the experiment is turning out to be a success. I__ is learning to communicate; I am learning to express myself without the passive aggressive part. We are actually learning to argue. This is huge. We are two very headstrong people, who are often extremely stubbornly convinced that “I’m right.” Learning to argue has meant that both of us at times have to say, “You’re right.” Surprisingly I__ is much better at this statement than I.

There will always be things about the person you live with and love that bug you. The key is to make sure those are things you can live with. It is impossible to change another person to match your fairytale ideal, but it is infinitely more rewarding to learn to live with and love a real human, in all their messy, slobby glory.

Peace Out.

Pinky