Living together does not go without saying

Getting on and cohabiting are two different competences. The first bears on the bond, the second on the management of a shared space, budget and timetable. Nothing guarantees that one accompanies the other.

The confusion is maintained by the fact that moving in together is presented as a stage of the feeling, when it is first of all a logistical decision. The friction that follows is then read as a sign of falling out of love, which it is not necessarily.

Anthropology distinguishes several rules of residence: the couple settles near the husband's family, near the wife's, or elsewhere. This last configuration, called neolocal, is dominant in contemporary Western societies and a minority one across documented societies.

It has a rarely noted consequence: it leaves the couple alone with the whole of the domestic load and its organisation, where other arrangements spread it over a wider group. The isolation of the contemporary household is not a natural given, it is a recent organisational choice.

Three objects concentrate most domestic disagreements, and none has an obvious solution. The acceptable threshold of cleanliness, which varies considerably and feels self-evident on each side. Rhythm: getting up, going to bed, silence, guests. And the division of tasks, whose difficulty is not the execution but the load of knowing what needs doing.

That last distinction deserves stating. Doing a task because you were asked and thinking of the task are two different things, and the second is not visible, which makes it hard to have acknowledged.

A simple mechanism explains a large part of the imbalances observed: the person whose tolerance threshold for disorder is lowest acts first, and that head start becomes a permanent division of labour. No ill will is involved, only a difference of threshold.

Becoming aware of it does not settle the question, but it shifts the conversation. It no longer bears on the character of one or the other, but on a rule to be established, which is a negotiable object.

Cohabiting well says nothing about the solidity of the bond, and cohabiting badly says nothing about its weakness. Very attached couples put up with each other poorly day to day, and exemplary flatmates no longer have much to say to each other.

The point of separating the two questions is to be able to handle the first without putting the second at stake every time. A conversation about the dishes that becomes a conversation about love reaches a conclusion on neither.