The First Key To Living together (a.k.a. sharing a house without killing each other).
By
Xena

Living together can be a wonderful experience. You get to wake up next to the woman you love every single morning. You get to fall asleep listening to her breathing every night. You get to fight over where your autographed poster of Melissa Etheridge goes. You get the joy of paying bills together. You learn all the little "special" things about her that she never shared with you when you were dating. And the best part is, she gets to do the same things with you.

Okay, maybe it isn't all warm and fuzzy every minute. Nothing is. But let's be honest, we are meant to live with other people. There just isn't enough room in this world for us to all live alone. We grow up, meet our soulmate and spend the rest of our lives picking out matching towels and trying to decide who's turn it is to do the dishes. That is life. That's how it's supposed to be. For lesbian's, that how it has to be. We do move in together during our second date after all (though I find it more common to move in on the third or fourth, but that might just be the dykes I know).

Living together is not an easy thing. It takes work. It can bring a relationship closer or tare it down beyond repair. Living together is not just choosing to be with each other during most of your free time. It is a choice we make to co-mingle our lives. We want to share everything with this other person. We want to wake up with them. We want to be there when good news and bad arrives. We want to plan a life together.

With all of that said, I have learned the one secret word that we all must have if we are willing to live together.

COMPROMISE

Say it with me now, compromise. That is the key. If you can compromise, you are half way to a successful living together situation. Notice I said "half way". The woman you are going to live with also must be able to compromise. If only one of you can do this, it won't work. One of you will always be compromising and the other will always be getting her way. The one who compromises will end up resenting the other and this just won't work. It will end, probably pretty messy with a lot of things getting thrown around, etc.

Now, we all don't learn this word when we are young. If you lived in my house, you never learned the word and thought "compromise" was "Promise" with a "Com" at the beginning. It wasn't until you went to college or lived with a roommate, or worse, your first girlfriend (and whoever you first live with ALWAYS knows what this word means) that you find out just where compromise fits in your life.

Compromise means that you do not always have to have things your way. You are willing to meet halfway on a subject and try to find a solution that works for both of you. Here is an example. I smoke. My partner does not. She doesn't want me to smoke in the house. I understand that. I smoke on the balcony of our apartment. I still get to smoke, but it is outside with easy access for me. She doesn't always like that the blinds to the balcony are open. It is easy for me to get outside if they are. The compromise is that I get to keep the blinds open and smoke outside while she gets to breath in nice clean air inside. It works for both of us.

Took us a little while to come up with that one though. Took us a while to come up with a lot of things. When we first moved in together, we both brought close to 30 years of stuff with us (60 if you add her 30 and my 30). I liked my stuff, she liked her stuff. Problem one, where do we put all the stuff. Problem two, she didn't like my stuff. My stuff was just that, stuff. Her stuff was important to her. It was nice and pretty, blah, blah, blah. So, my stuff all went into boxes and her stuff got hung up and placed around the house. This didn't work for long. I didn't feel like it was "our place". I felt like I was living in her place. After a while, resentment built up. I hadn't even realized it. I just stopped trying to pick out new stuff for "our place". She noticed. We fought. Then we compromised. She has some of her things around the house, and I have some of mine. Some of the things that we both liked went in our living room. Other things went into the bedroom or office.

Compromise works in everything. I hate to fold laundry. Don't ask me why, I just do. I don't mind doing laundry though. That I'm happy to do. She doesn't like to do laundry. Great! We are perfect for each other. I do the laundry and she folds. Didn't quite work out that way after we moved in together though. I found myself doing and folding the laundry. After a while, that old resentment built and we fought. Now, I do the laundry, she folds and we are happy. Same with other things. I load the dishwasher, she unloads. I cook, she cleans up. Compromise. We both do work, but we talked about which job works best for us.

Now, it would be great if compromising was the only key to living together. It's not, but it's a biggie! A real biggie. If you can compromise, you really are off to a great start. Again, you both have to compromise for it to work. One person alone can't do it all. It will not work this way. If the person you are trying to build a life and home with isn't willing to compromise, talk about it. See if you can. If she still isn't, or if you aren't willing to, it might still work, but there will probably be a lot more resentment and fighting then there needs to be.

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