Are You Part of a Blended Family?
Are you a single parent who has met the One? If you’re in a committed relationship, do you live together?…. Are you married?
You can read my latest Literary Mama column here — “Cheerleader for Love –” about moving in with The Boyfriend last summer.
It was perfect timing: the morning that my moving-in-with-the-boyfriend column was posted, this engaging discussion among the single moms of Single2Mother ensued about whether it’s a smart decision for you you, as a single mom, to move in with your boyfriend before you’re married.
This topic can be quite touchy. I consider myself to be VERY non-traditional, and yet, yet, yet…. Should we have gotten married first? Or, as another mom put it: “Maybe I’d wait until I was ‘engaged’?”
“Living with someone before marriage when you are single is up to the individual adults, but with a child that is just not something I think is a good stable decision,” writes another Seattle single mom. “In fact I see it as a bit selfish. I think kids need the most stability they can possibly get and that would be through a marriage… No relationship is a guarantee, but marriage at least is the closest thing we have to that.”
Well said.
Tell me single parents: how are YOU doing it?
As for me, the Boyfriend and I had talked about marriage and more kids BEFORE moving in together. He said that because he’d never lived with a woman before, he wanted to “try it” with me. That made sense to me at the time. Now, of course, there’s hindsight…. Try it? What am I, your experiment?
The Boyfriend, the Big Girl and Me….
blended family, single parent, single mom, single dad, divorce, boyfriend, girlfriend, relationship
May 7th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Personally, I have decided not to live with anyone until we get married..that’s what I’m saying now anyway. Moving in wi/out marriage is how I got pregnant and ended up a single mom in the first place. I can see though how for some people it is a different situation and would work out well, and maybe I’ll end up in a situation like that, we’ll see.
May 7th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I recently got married, but we were living together for months before. We were only engaged for a week, so we weren’t engaged when he moved in, either.
At the time the decision for him to move in with me and my children was made, it was because I was pregnant. I ended up miscarrying or with a still born (I was 20 weeks, but baby hadn’t developed much more than 15 or 16 weeks, so the classification is iffy), but he still moved in with us.
Obviously, it worked out alright for us, but just going through the pregnancy together solidified our feelings for each other and the commitment we were willing to make…we hadn’t a strong reason to make it legally binding until a few weeks ago.
From my personal view, marriage is anything but a guarantee for lifetime commitment. You have to find someone that believes that it is for it to be anything close to that. When you’re dealing with a couple who both come from divorced/single-parent homes, the intended “marriage is for life” notion is not really there. They may intend for it to be when they take the vows, but they won’t necessarily pause too long before walking out.
So, I think moving in together is a perfectly fine step to take when you’re committed to the other person already and want to be together all the time.
May 8th, 2007 at 12:35 am
When I was 23 years old my boyfriend moved in with me after we had discussed marriage. I have always been a little leary anyway on taking the big steps. I am always thinking of plan B if it doesn’t work out. When I was younger and childless I would have moved in with a guy no problem. However, now that I am a single mother I would definetly wait until we were engaged before moving in together.
There are 3 lives that would be affected by this not just mine. The good part is he would be able to see how our life is and can see if he would be able to be apart of this crazy life of soccer, baseball, cubscouts, park, homework, tantrums.. as well as the good times. My son threw a fit one time at the beach with a potential boyfriend that had liked me for years.. up until then we had spent a lot of time with him and everything was great. I laughed and said its not all fun and games this is my life. Most of the time everything is great, but there are a few bumps.
Another good thing is I would find out if my son is willing to have another man in our lives and see how it would be as a family. The bad side I look at is what if something happend and we broke up.. would we have to move? Where would we go? So I decided I would either have the boyfriend move into my place if I was ever ready or have my name on the lease of the new place, just in case
So there is good things and bad things, but if you don’t try then you never know what could have been. We just have to try and be smart about every decision we make that affects our lives and childrens lives. Make sure we notice the red flags and not ignore them.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Thank you, you three super-women, for being so open. I greatly appreciate your soul-searching and honesty here. You go mamas!