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" I&amp;#039;ve been accidentally living with my girlfriend for six months. Before then, her little one-bedroom apartment played the same role for me as a mom&amp;#039;s attic while I bounced around the lesser-known music venues west of the Mississippi with my band. It wasn&amp;#039;t until last month that we decided we were going to do this for real \u2014 not only get a new apartment, but create our own home. And so, a collection of the things that completely freaked me out about officially moving in together: 1. Breaking up requires a Navy SEAL-level exit strategy. Some of my friends don&amp;#039;t understand the gravity of this situation. Breaking up is no longer purely emotional. It means finding a new apartment and finding a place to stay until then, which blows in a major metro area. You still have to do the whole move out of the things, most of which would half belong to her, which sounds like a calm, amicable scenario days after splitting up. 2. Video game marathons are basically a fond memory from bachelorhood. What if I want to play Skyrimor browse Reddit for four hours? And what if I&amp;#039;d rather do that than have game night with Russ and Chloe from hot yoga class? Clearly I have no &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; plans, and killing dragons stopped being a legitimate plan once I graduated college. 3. What if we fight all the time? This could really go both ways. Pro: we won&amp;#039;t have time to let things marinate and can just get it out on the table and not spend what should be sex hours building cases against one another. Con: if it&amp;#039;s a really big problem, we probably won&amp;#039;t get to go to sleep until, like 6 a.m. 4. What if sex gets boring? It&amp;#039;s on you to keep things awesome. Personal favorite: sexy messages while at work. I&amp;#039;m officially not worried about this one. 5. I won&amp;#039;t be able to keep my routines. Up until a year ago, this was my sleep routine: go for a swim, take a hot shower, watch Doctor Who until I don&amp;#039;t know the difference between a dream and the show. Now I just have to read. But the ritual never included a second person, and almost every time she slept over prior to this it was because she was too drunk to drive, and I was too drunk to do the ritual. So I&amp;#039;ll need to adapt my routine. Or get drunk more often. One of those sounds hard and one sounds unhealthy. 6. We&amp;#039;ll have to buy furniture together. We bought a juicer together, which may as well be a fucking puppy. We have to take care of it. It&amp;#039;s OUR juicer. When you move into a place larger and nicer than your old spot (which, in our case, could be a weekly motel in rural Pakistan) you have to doll it up some. That&amp;#039;s probably going to mean going in on a couch, unless your parents are trying to get rid of a badass sectional. It leads back to the #1 freak out, which leads to deciding the couch&amp;#039;s new home if you, heaven forbid, call it quits. 7. What if she decorates while I&amp;#039;m at work? Most girlfriends won&amp;#039;t insist on pastel everything. But there are less crazy versions of that idea, and they usually present themselves as missing concert posters and a bathroom counter full of makeup that, at night, looks like the Manhattan skyline. This is my bathroom, Betsey Johnson, not yours. 8. What if she takes over the closet and there&amp;#039;s no room for my stuff? You know what? I don&amp;#039;t give a shit. I wear, like, four things. I&amp;#039;m wearing three of them right now. Go nuts. 9. What if she goes all Mary Poppins on me? I&amp;#039;m not neat. At the end of the day, it&amp;#039;s not uncommon for my clothes to be piled on the floor in head to toe order, like the rapture took me somewhere between the kitchen and the bathroom. Let&amp;#039;s just call it installation art until laundry day next month. 10. Great, I can&amp;#039;t jerk off anymore. Some dudes love masturbating. Some love it more than sex (I&amp;#039;m looking at you, John Mayer). It&amp;#039;s great; you can control what&amp;#039;s happening, your partner (your laptop) knows exactly what you like, and you can even knock out some work while doing it. A lot of dudes worry that goes away. But we&amp;#039;ll continue to do it. The good news is, now half the time we call it sex, and you&amp;#039;re invited. 11. Ugh, &amp;quot;making sacrifices.&amp;quot; My girlfriend and I don&amp;#039;t have many sitcom-y, &amp;quot;WILMA!&amp;quot; moments. She doesn&amp;#039;t hold my interests hostage, i.e. I didn&amp;#039;t have to trade seeing a Twilight movie to see Star Trek Into Darkness. I still get to see boobs even if there are dishes in the sink. I can decide against cleaning the bedroom to drink a bottle of wine and watch Charlie Wilson&amp;#039;s War. I can even fart when and where I want, and I encourage her to do the same. We can all be this lucky. Just don&amp;#039;t date an idiot or an ass, and none of these freak outs will even matter. Photo Credit: HBO "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a5668/moving-in-freakouts/>