When I joined an online dating site, I had hope that I might meet someone great. However, I didn’t have all that much faith that I would. Yet, I met someone fantastic and we’re now married after one and half years of dating. We moved into a nice place with luxury apartments in Atlanta just a couple of months ago, and it has been really interesting to learn how to live life as a married person. I love every bit of it, but having never lived with someone who isn’t a family member has been interesting!

I am someone who has always been overly neat. I used to drive my mom nuts because, not only did I obsessively clean my own room a lot when I lived at home, I often moved around and organized her things often, too. Though, for the most part, mom was pretty happy with it because she worked a lot and me cleaning often was a big help to her. But it took some adjusting to being such a neat person around my husband who is a bit messier than me.

My husband does not like to live in a regimented way. I do live life in a regimented way. I figured out that I needed to decrease that a bit, and he is doing really good about being a bit neater. It’s good that we are meeting in the middle. We have set up zones in our apartment that are hands off to me for certain amounts of time. For example, if he takes his shoes off near the couch when he comes home, I no longer swoop in to remove them and put them up as soon as I see him do it. I leave them alone unless he leaves them out all night. It is then considered safe for me to move them. He, on the hand, is doing a lot better about not leaving them there all night in the first place.