Your reluctance to move in with your boyfriend is right on the money! We don’t believe in living together. In fact, one of our biggest rules is “Don’t Live with a Man (or Leave Your Things in his Apartment)!” Or as your mother might say, why would he buy the cow if he can get the milk for free?

If you are dating your boyfriend for almost a year, he should be thinking about proposing with a ring and a wedding date, not emptying out a drawer for you to move in! Contrary to popular belief, your boyfriend does not need a “trial period” to see if he can live with you or you with him, in order to marry you. A year is plenty of time!

If there is anything he doesn’t know about you, just tell him! For example, you eat your Cheerios with the milk on the side, you go to bed at 11 pm and do the treadmill at 7 am, you talk to your mother three times a week, you prefer baths to showers, you like Leno, not Letterman, and anything else he doesn’t already know.

If he really needs to know what it is like to wake up with you in the morning or how long you take in the bathroom, you can do sleepovers on the weekends! And anything you need to know about him (how loud he snores or exactly how much football he watches on TV or if he is a workaholic) you can find out on weekends too.

Now what if you’re equally curious to know what it’s like to live with him? You might be thinking that “playing house” for a few months might be the best way to take this “car for a test drive.” The only problem is that if you decide that yes, you love living with him and want to marry him ASAP, you could be stuck living together longer than you like or forever. While you're ready to go ring shopping, he's in no rush, but "happy with the way things are, what's a piece of paper anyway?"