cohabitation experimentation

28 Jan 2024

at some point last year, me and my partner, david, decided that we wanted to start moving towards living together. but we wanted to do figure it out in a way that felt good to us and our partners. so we decided to do some experimentation! i can’t remember which one of us threw out the idea to do an experiment and it doesn’t really matter because experimentation is my middle name so i was pumped.

for a few months, we threw around a few different ideas:

• 1 month his place, 1 month my place
• 1 week his, 1 week mine
• multiple weeks, spaced apart, somewhere new (like a friend’s house or something)
• 1 month somewhere new

i’m sure there were more ideas. but while he was visiting me on sabbatical, we had a multi-hour hike and landed on our final experiment: a week his place, a week separate/off, a week my place, a week off. and we’d do that 4 times aka for 3 months. then take a break (hopefully during the summer), and, depending on how things were going, there are two path options: 1 is to spend a month together in one same house, hopefully a house that is neither of ours. then take a break before thinking about moving in together more permanently.

we landed where we landed for some pretty good reasons. a few of them include:

• wanting to feel what it’s like to have weekend time and work week time
• wanting to feel what it’s like to be in each other’s homes for longer stretches of time
• the week on, week off part feels nice because we both have other romantic/sexual partners (#polylife) and we want to see how me and him being closer impacts the dynamics between each of us and our other partners.
• taking a break after the experiment feels important so that we can have some real assessment and reflection time before jumping into something that’s much harder to reverse once started. the break will also give us time to be in dialogue with our other partners and see what adjustments could be made to keep all of us in right relationship in the future
• doing the weeks alternating at our places feels important so that we can see what it’s like to be in each our homes in the way that each of us has developed our space. we live in very similar lives overall (in buildings that have very collective vibes) but each of them is different. so it will feel good to explore how each of us has set up our own personal living space as well as how each of the buildings feels.

some possible outcomes we could imagine include (but are not limited to):

• realizing we aren’t good cohabitation partners but we still connect on many other dimensions
• realizing what things we want and need in a shared residence
• seeing how much time feels good to be together and where we each have limits
• seeing how increasing our “down time” impacts other parts of our relationship

as i’ve shared about this development with close friends and people, i hear pretty consistent feedback:

• wow, that’s really smart/wise
• i wish my partner and i had done that
• more people should do that

we start in about 6 weeks. stay tuned!

ps - thus far, i have been calling this our cohabitation experimentation or our cohab experiment. i have wanted to call it our cohab-ex but i haven’t yet. maybe i will start though…

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