Is Moving In Together the Death of Your Sex Life?

It’s 6–12 months into the relationship, you’re in love, living in an city where rent is 50% of your take-home pay, and you’re wondering:

Is it time to move in together?

There are several reasons you might be contemplating the big move.

First, convenience. You’re sleeping at each other’s apartments on a nightly basis. You’re living out of your overnight bag and half your wardrobes are at each other’s houses. It would be simpler live together, share a closet, a dresser and have all your stuff together in one place, where you feel balanced and at home again.

Second, finances. It’s no secret that the cost of life in big cities is on the rise. In San Francisco, you can no longer get a studio apartment for less than $1700. So rather than splitting a $2500 2 bedroom with a stranger, you’re leaning towards sharing the rent with someone who doesn’t mind you walking around with your boobs hanging out.

Third, well, you’re in love. You’re so madly in love that you want to spend every second, every minute and every hour of your life together because finally, you’ve found someone that completes you.

If your goal is to move in together because it’s convenient on a life or financial level, you may want to start by evaluating the state of your relationship before making any major life decisions.

If your goal is to move in together because you’re in love, you need to take a long hard look at your relationship without your lust goggles on. Because lust wanes and when you begin to see your partner for who they truly are without the roses, you may find you don’t like the person as much as you previously imagined.

When you initially meet a potential partner and begin a sexual relationship, an exciting cocktail of testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline and dopamine are released, sending the partners into the blissful lust that makes us feel happy, alive and so. fucking. excited. Since the brain cannot sustain this state forever, these hormones eventually subside and make room for a calmer phase of the relationship, where oxytocin and vasopressin cultivate the attachment phase.

This is the reason so many relationships last 6 months to 2 years, ending in the disappointing death of the happy feelings.

Realistically, I’m not one to tell you not to move in together. I’ve moved in with 3 boyfriends within 3 months of our relationship based on the reasons above. If experience has taught me one thing, it’s that while I enjoy domestic bliss — cooking dinner, keeping house, watching Netflix together, there is a price that comes with moving in together too early:

The death of your sex life.

And then, the slow, painful death of your relationship. And the part where one of you has to move out.

When you enter a relationship based on hormones or as a way to mend a part of yourself (often both simultaneously) this relationship has an expiry date. Many people have to go through a series of these 6 month to 2 year relationships before they get a better understanding of who they are, what they want and truly need out of a relationship. Some people have to go through a 10 year marriage with 2 kids to achieve this level of understanding about themselves.

Relationships are breathing organisms — a combination of a million moving hormones, complex feelings based on present and past baggage and the merging of two different world views which can be challenging to mend.

At some point in life, you grow to a level of self-understanding of what you need out of a relationship to not be constantly triggered — a place where you know you can’t be with someone who smokes, leaves the toilet seat up or wears ugly sneakers with jeans that you can’t stand. At times, it’s the little superficial things that can erode a relationship over a period of months or years.

Or maybe it’s the things you can’t agree on in a respectful and peaceful way, the way he or she speaks to you in a condescending way or gets defensive when you try to bring up what’s bothering you. Sometimes the bigger issues can be projected onto smaller issues, and your partner leaving his socks on the floor might make you explode when it’s not about that.

All of this can happen in the context of living together or not.

Moving in together will rapidly expedite, magnify and break open your relationship to see what’s truly there.

In my current relationship, we waited 4 years to live together. It was a combination of living 3.5 hours away from each other, in separate cities where neither of us could realistically make the move. And the idea that I wanted to experience what it was like not to jump into a relationship. I wanted to savor the distance and be excited when I saw my partner. I wanted our relationship to stay alive, not plunge into the domestic bliss that had in the past destroyed my sex life and caused me to stray.

It was a conscious decision and also necessity. But it forced us not to merge into a co-dependency that also easily happens in relationships when you’re not careful. It forced us to appreciate the times when we did see each other and to be okay living apart.

Once we did eventually move in together — it was the domestic bliss I’d dreamed of: shared bottles wine while lounging in the sun outside, bonding over our shared love of television series, gourmet dinner together every night, and the comfort of being there for each other at all times. But we also consciously cultivated our relationship. I knew exactly what I wanted and I knew that our bodies, chemistry, levels of attractions, common interests like working out, eating healthy, design and personal growth were in perfect synch with each other. I knew that there would be times where I didn’t feel like having sex but I would do it anyway, because living together makes it easier to say tomorrow, or the next day and I value my sex life and our connection. I knew I was committed to working through the diminishing hormone release to find ways to expand our intimacy. I was willing to do whatever it takes to keep the relationship kindled, to fight because I value the relationship and know what happens when you start to take your partner for granted.

The death of a sex life happens for several reasons.

When you are not in a relationship that’s meant to last forever, the slow waning of the 3x a day sex turns into days, weeks and then months. This is a sign that something is seriously wrong with your relationship, and that you need to pay close attention to what’s happening. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe it can’t.

Once you merge into a domestic bliss, the dance between closeness and separateness, the thing that helps keep us hormones (and sex lives)alive — begins to decline. The constant exposure to your partner slows down the production of hormones and the initial feelings you once had to have wild, uninhibited sex transforms into calmer, more subdued desires.

If your relationship is in fight or flight mode where both partners are often at war, the erosion of intimacy that happens as a result of constantly hurting each other, compounded with the lack of lust hormones is a sure fire to end your sex life. And over time, your relationship.

So should you move in together?

Ask yourself whether you’re in a place in your relationship where you’re both truly solid, committed and in it for the long game. Know that living together will alter intimacy and find ways to avoid co-dependency. Learn to look at your partner in the eye. Learn the dance of closeness and separateness by reading books like Mating in Captivity. Have your own life. Your own friends. Do things by yourself.

Do you really want to move in, build a life together and have to move out a year later? It’s a lot of work, energy and pain for nothing.

Move in for the right reasons, watch for the pitfalls of too much comfort and enjoy domestic bliss.

When it’s right, there’s nothing in the world like it.