Stephanie and I sometimes feel like radicals, doing something so rarely done these days: We are waiting until we are married to move in together. Of course, a generation or so ago, our behavior hardly would have raised an eyebrow--precisely the opposite situation would have been noteworthy. The times have certainly changed.
To be honest, it is not a topic we wrangled over or even gave much consideration to. Maintaining separate residences until we are married was not even really a conscious decision for us; it is just the way we are.
That said, though, there are reasons behind our living apart. We were not blindly following some notion of communal standards, nor were we just trying to avoid gossip or scorn from our friends, relatives, and members of our synagogue. There are values and assumptions about the nature and meaning of marriage that underlie the fact that we will wait until we are married to live together.
Some people have suggested, not entirely in jest, that our notion of separate residences is a farce. We spend much of our free time together, try to have dinner together every night, often do grocery shopping together, and host guests together at one or the other of our apartments. She has become close with my roommates, and her building's super knows me enough to ask how the wedding plans are going.
We are indeed one seemingly minor step away from living together. But a step away is not the same as actually being there, nor is that step as minor as it might seem to some people. We see our wedding as neither a sharp break from what came before nor a continuation of the status quo. It will be the natural next phase in a progression, each plateau in our relationship building on what we created before, while at the same time introducing a new element to our lives together.
