For the purposes of this compendium, entries prior to us living together are "Categorized" as "Courtship," which will make this one of the last in that type! This entry (dated 1/23/21, the weekend we began discussing it) will cover the early talks, the limbo period, and the move-in process, which in truth lasted through winter, until early May of 2021.
TALKING ABOUT MOVING IN TOGETHER
Teresa came back up only a week after our multi-week mega-visit. That visit had made real many thoughts we'd both had about living together, and serendipitously acted as a de facto trial basis. On her return, conversation pretty naturally turned to increasingly-less-hypothetical hypotheticals about "if" we were to live together.
The prospect of combining lives this way was not scary to me, and felt absolutely like a natural next step (a "more permanent visit," essentially). For Teresa, the change would be much larger, obviously including moving out of NY for the first time ever, and making what was already my home feel like her own.
When I purchased this house, it was really almost already a given, in my mind, that certain spaces would "belong" to my "future someone," should that come about, given how much extra space there was. So, those spaces already existed: a room that could be her own (office/hobby room), bedroom and house closets that had nothing in them, many nearly-empty kitchen cabinets, etc. Talks increasingly addressed logistics such as these, and then evolved into purchases (from outfitting her office in late March, to replacing the bedroom set in May)
THE "LIMBO" PERIOD
Personally, my only misgiving, in this very particular era of being "in limbo" - which is to say, TALKING about living together, but not yet DOING IT, was the fear that we would
evaluate more things about each other as 'foreverable,' (like, ask ourselves 'could I deal with this permanently, and from a roomie?') while at the same time NOT having what people who live together have, which is the expanse of unlimited time, to cure any issue. If she she were to go home to NY after a question surfaced, would it only cure into a serious doubt, with that distance?
Thankfully, the reality of the situation was that the forever-ability of each other had already been evaluated by each of us as we had grown. Additionally, our communication had matured to where talking through things was easy. So, my fear would never ultimately become a reality, and the inertia with which we found ourselves at this decision point also carried us cleanly past it into a new life together.
THE MOVE-IN PROCESS
The move happened so slowly as to nearly be imperceptible. Visits to CT from NY slowly became visits to NY from CT, as more of her home comforts were centered in CT. May is when we say the move was complete, officially.
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