Q:  Q: I’m a 52-year-old divorced woman and I’ve been dating a 55-year-old divorced man for six weeks who lives four hours away. 

My youngest is actually getting ready to leave for college in the Spring, and so I’m going to be an empty nester.  Before I even met my boyfriend, I had thought about moving to his area of the state. It’s a bigger city with more opportunity. We were talking about how to manage that when I when I move to the area.

My question is should we live together?

A:  Would you tell your daughter to shack up with some guy she’s known for six weeks?  Hopefully not.

Here’s why.   It’s not ladylike and you are acting like an unpaid whore.  It doesn’t matter that he’s really nice, fun, and cute. You don’t really know who your boyfriend is and your boyfriend doesn’t really know who you are. It takes about a year and a half to start having an inkling of who the other person is.

Also, when you shack up together and share toilet paper and sleep in bed with each other, you’re no longer exploring each other.  You’re no longer determining if you’re a match. You’re living together as though you were a match.  If you find out you are not (which is a majority of the time) it’s embarrassing, so we ignore things we don’t like. For the sake of getting along we continue living together.

Additionally, men don’t respect women they don’t have to fight for. It’s easy for him to have you there and he can have you naked whenever he wants. That’s in his interest.  So let him work and earn you.