the great moving in question |
23 April 2002 - 1:12 pm |
the great moving in question
karl and i are tossing around the idea of moving in together. tossing in such a way that the idea does not stay in anyone's hands for long at all. think hot potato, you know, the children's game.
the reasons we are tossing this hot potato around are not (a) because we spend every night with each other anyway and why don't we just live together or (b) we could save so much money on rent/utilities if we moved in.
rather, it would be a bacd-ass-wards way of giving ourselves more freedom. check it out: now, we spend roughly every other night at my place, ditto for his. so every day, we have to decide where to spend that night, and the next several (so we've got plans), then pack clothes etc as appropriate. the upshot is that i feel like i'm always traveling. seems like every night, i'm either packing or unpacking (not that it's packing *much* you understand, just clean underwear and my contacts usually, but still). and on the odd night when i'm not doing one of those things, i feel like i haven't been properly in my apartment for weeks, and need to run around doing the dishes and laundry and swiffering the floor. [on a side note, god DAMN that swifferthing for showing me how hideously dirty my floor always is. doesn't matter how recently i swiffered, even if it was just 2 minutes before, a new swifferpass will always pick up more dust and dirt. i love the ease with which me and the swifferthing breeze across the floors, letting no speck of dirt or dust escape our static-charged power, but the level of cleanliness that i thus achieve leaves me incapable of putting up with the pre-swifferness state of my floors. woe is me.]
point is, if we lived together we wouldn't have to be always with the planning and the packing and the swiffering (well, i would probably still be all up with the swifferthing, but that's another story).
even more than that, though, there's the feeling of being in one's own house, and the freedom that provides. now, as welcome as i am at his house and vice versa, there is still the feeling that when we're over at the other's house, we need to *be together* at all times. entertain and be entertained. because his house is not *my* space, when i'm there there's not much for me to do (if i've finished my current book). there's the tv, and there's the computer, but ... those don't satisfy. if we lived together, the space would be *our* space, and we could occupy ourselves separately while still being in close proximity.
third thing: spontaneity+maintaining platonic friendships. because we want to see each other most days, we end up planning to spend the evening together. but once i've planned to spend it with karl, i don't feel like i can spontaneously do stuff with other people (not that i had such opportunities *that* often, but still). if we lived together, we could feel free to come home from work, see each other or not, do our own thing (leaving a note or some such), and still be guaranteed of crawling into bed with each other at the end of the day. so nice.
however. i know that living together requires all sorts of *other* adjustments (i do know. i've done it, remember?). replacing some problems with others. fine. the other, much bigger thing is, of course, that i'm not ready for that step yet. moving in is almost always permanent (i.e. ends in marriage), right? and i'm not sure i'm ready to make that step. actually, pretty sure i'm not, no matter how much i think about the possibility when i'm alone.
just letting you know what's in my head.
p.s. happy birthday to the bard, who would be 438 years old today!