After 18 months as a twosome, my dude and I made the decision to try to make it as a foursome with our good friend and his sister. It wasn’t because we were getting lonesome on our own, it more came out of a desire to branch out and experience wild new things with exciting new people.

And so the house hunt for the four of us commenced a few weeks ago (what did you think I was talking about, you pervert you?) and finally ended this past Saturday with an adorable place out on the East end. However signing yet another lease with my boyfriend has caused some fundamental reservations about living together to resurface that, thanks to my Catholic guilt, are pretty much wired into my genetic code.

According to Dr. Joyce Brothers in her 1984 book “What Every Woman Ought to Know About Love and Marriage” (given to me by my mother practically as soon as I started menstruating) couples who live together have much less of a shot of walking down the aisle together one day. I try to tell myself that’s because living together is hard (it is) and it’s much more challenging to stick out sharing a bathroom indefinably than stick out sharing a pizza and a movie every Friday night until one party is finally ready to propose (true without a doubt). I also try to tell myself, who really cares anyway? I love living with him now and I’m not even close to being ready for marriage, so why worry about it?

But the truth is there is a sinking fear inside of me that ol’ Joyce might be right, that by the time I figure out I really do want to marry this man all the romance and passion and wonder will be sucked dry from our relationship. At this point I imagine I’ll wonder why I felt that urgency to live with him in the first place.

The truth is, living together so far has been awesome. Yes, we now have to work harder at certain things (keeping our sexual misadventures alive and healthy definitely one of them), but it has fostered a sense of community and family between us that I relish coming home to over and over again. So put that in your pipe and smoke it Joyce! This cow may be giving the milk away for free, but she loves having her udders worked so much that she just doesn’t give a flying fuck! Hmmmm… Now that’s a nice image.

How about you, fellow She does the City-ers? Who is cohabitating in dirty sin with their dude and whose got an incurable case of Leaseophobia? I’d love to hear your symptoms and your cures.