Increasingly, couples are now living together before marriage. For many, it's a great way to work out kinks before tying the knot. But for Helena Andrews, cohabitating with her college boyfriend completely unraveled their relationship. She shared her story on HuffPost Live.
"The very first time I lived with a guy I was a senior in college, which I don't recommend to anyone," she said to host Nancy Redd. "It was very much a slide-in type of situation -- we'd been together for a year, which seemed like an eternity when I was 20, and we just thought, you know, 'why should I live on campus? We spend so much time together. He had graduated a year before.' And it was just an absolute nightmare."
Failing to communicate before moving in together killed Andrews' relationship. "We didn't talk about our expectations. We hadn't really talked about where we saw our relationship going. He was all about the commitment like going forward, wanting to get married, and I was 20 so I didn't feel that way necessarily. And it just ended up being horrific."
After that experience, Andrews did not live with another boyfriend for 10 years before moving in with her current long-term boyfriend.
"It was a decade later, so Helena at 20 was a lot different than Helena at 30, thank God. And it was a totally different situation. I was in a committed relationship with someone. We had spoken very clearly about our expectations, where we saw our relationship going -- really it was about us being on the same page, and not just assuming we were on the same page just because we liked to spend a lot of time together. We had to handle the relationship like adults."