One of the hardest decisions to make as a woman is to help a man when he is down. Women are notorious for moving in men when the men have lost their jobs or just because it may be more convenient to live together with their partners. However, moving in a man is detrimental to one’s mental health because the decision creates an imbalance in the male-female dynamic, man-woman engagement, and adult-adult cooperation.
Women are not supposed to move in men regardless of what they believe and/or what men tell them. Men are supposed to provide financially for themselves. They are adults. It does not matter how independent women have become over the years, and this discussion is not simply about role reversal. It is about forming and maintaining territories.
This article explores what happens when a woman moves a man into her home, i.e., what it means, and it offers tips for how to resolve the problem if this is a current issue. An audio lecture titled “Don’t Let Him Move In” follows the discussion.
Territorial
When a woman moves a man into her home, it appears on the surface as a reasonable, logical ideal, but it is not an appropriate solution because men are gatherers, hunters, predators, and territorial. When a man moves into a woman’s house, it changes his territorial nature, making him subject to the domain of the woman’s house. This means that the woman becomes territorial, doling out dictates, demands, policies, and directions to a man who does not respect such ideals. After all, it is her domain.
The territorial nature of men creates the patriarchy we live in today, and men, at all costs, will maintain their patriarchies! A man would never fully be subject to a matriarchy. Even royal families headed by a queen are still subject to a constitutional monarchy that outlines and cements responsibilities, obligations, laws, and global influence. The queen might wear the crown, but the constitution turns the head. One step out of the political line disrupts the balance of the monarchy and the effect it has on its citizenry.
This, of course, is a very simple explanation, but it is appropriate to this discussion because a woman who moves in a man is acting like a queen, but she is not performing like a queen. However, the man is always performing like he owns the woman as property, and he manages the woman’s house as territory.
Transfer
When the woman moves in a man, she inadvertently assigns rights to the man. The word “assign” is a contract term related to property law, which includes both real estate and intellectual property. When you assign, you transfer ownership and rights afforded a specific property or bundle of properties.
You no longer possess ownership. You may receive a fee, and you may negotiate and write a provision in the contract to receive a percentage of revenues, perpetually, but you have no other rights to the property. You do not have a title interest into the property when you assign rights.
However, when you “license” rights, this means that you still maintain ownership in the property, negotiated rights, a title interest, and you can receive a fee and future revenues connected to the property and that too, perpetually, if you create the provision. This is a very simple summary of the difference between assign and license, so it would be helpful to research the term “property law” or “real estate law” at your convenience. For now, you can follow the links provided.
Just know that when you move in a man, you are giving up rights to the apartment and/or house, and if there should ever come a time when you desire to terminate the relationship, you cannot simply kick the person out of the house or apartment. Whether that person is on the lease or not, there are statutes and provisions in tenant and renting law that govern how to exit a person from the place of dwelling.
Eviction
When a woman moves a man into her house, she co-signs her eventual displacement, and she may be forced to evict her partner with exceptions. For example, if conflict ensues between you and your partner, and you have to call the police, the police would inform you that your man has rights and that the only way to get him out is through the courts using the eviction process. That could take time and money, and the process would require extensive study and preparation so that you are successful.
In addition, there would be a battle for territory in the house. As much as you may have the right to kick him out, depending on the length of time he has lived in your house, he may have the same right! If you placed him on the lease, and the lease runs out, you might also decide not to renew the lease and leave the house. If you choose this decision, then your man has successfully displaced you, symbolically kicked you out of your own house, and taken over the “territory” fully! This is done regardless of whether he stays or does not stay in the house. You are the one who leaves.
Mental Health
When a woman moves a man into her home, it affects her mental health. It is important that you understand that moving a man into your house has devastating consequences because the choice not only affects your finances, but also your mental health, your psychological well-being, your spiritual balance, and your emotional regulation.
You cannot operate fully in chaos. You cannot thrive in toxicity. The person inside you who wants to fight back to regain territory will eventually give up when you realize the other person has gained too much ground that you gave him. Loss of rights to your territory affects your mental health.
Homeless
When a woman moves a man into her home, she immediately makes the man homeless. This is your home, not his. Just because he is living under your roof does not make him any less homeless. He is homeless because as a grown man he does not have his own place. If he is moving directly from his mother’s house to your house, then he just merely moved his homelessness around.
His mother’s house stopped being his house when he became an adult. Thus, if he is living in his mother’s house, he is also homeless. The only exception to the homeless rule in this case is if there is a legally binding lease agreement to which you both sign and notarize. Otherwise, if there is no agreement, and you decided to merely let him come live with you, he is not living with you. He is homeless. Therefore, until he requests to be added to the lease, you can kick him out anytime with exceptions.
Interruption
When a woman moves a man into her house, she interrupts his learning process. This suggests that there was a process that required him to learn about finances, how to manage himself as an adult, how to keep a job, how to keep and maintain his own apartment, and how to pay bills. There is a process that every person who is entering adulthood must embrace, endure, and succeed.
Each time you set, endure, and complete a goal that leads to a record of success. Moving in with a woman interrupts that record of success because now whatever the man does at the woman’s house falls under the domain of that house, which includes the successes. A man’s successes are folded into the woman’s successes, and there is little distinction if the woman is responsible for all the finances and maintenance of the home.
It is like when a child brings something home. Whatever the child brings home goes to the house and not to the individual. If there are siblings, everyone gets a piece. The child rarely gets to keep the whole thing. Likewise, when a man brings home a bonus on his check, he does not get to keep it unless he hides it from the woman.
If there is an agreement to split bills, then that agreement should stand, but there should be some individual prerogative to keep something extra. It is what mothers tell their daughters: keep some things for yourself. This rarely happens within the dynamic of moving in a romantic partner. You hardly ever get to keep something for yourself because there is still the unspoken rule that you must disclose what you have and turn it over to the house.
In truth, there is nothing wrong with this ideology because you are two partners working to build something together. However, if you started an individual process to work on your finances, build an emergency savings fund, and/or invest, you interrupt your process when you move in a man. This will lead to frustration down the road because whatever you start, you must finish. You are inclined to finish, and when this does not happen, this lack of completion develops in you a mood that fuels a depression and that later creates anger. You have no idea how the anger got there, but it is there.
Anger now affects the relationship dynamic the man has with the woman. It affects the environment. Resentment grows, and it permeates the home. It feels like a weight that never lifts. The man and woman do not address issues, pain, hurt, and disagreements. Conflict becomes the norm. Sex is used as a temporary solution, i.e., a Band-Aid. The problems simply rinse and repeat.
Nothing ever gets resolved. Then the man is blind to the need to return to what was interrupted, and the woman struggles to regain some emotional, psychological, spiritual, and financial territory. Both are on the brink of relationship termination, and they do not know why. Until both the man and woman discover what they were supposed to learn, before the woman moved in the man, they will remain in an interrupted state. Interruption without resolution creates a setback, mutual and individual.
Parenting
When you move in a man, you become his parent, or you fill in gaps in parenting style and caregiving. The only way to resolve the parent trap is to place him on the lease and require him to contribute financially and equally. This means that you both would be legally obligated to meet the stipulations in the rental agreement. You would be equal in this context.
If you both could not pay the rent, or you decided to break the lease, both you and him would be affected financially. The default judgment would not only be on your credit report, but also on his credit report as well. You live together, and you bear the responsibilities. Otherwise, if you do not place him on the lease, then he is no different than an adult child moving into your home. If you have a house, and you do not desire to put him on the mortgage or deed so that he equally owns the house, then he is definitely an adult child returning home.
I would never advise adding a man to your mortgage or to the deed. However, I would advise, with caution, to add a man to the lease. This will determine how serious he is about you and the relationship knowing that he would be financially affected if he changed his mind. He knows that you would remain in the apartment if he left or if you kicked him out. Regardless, if there is a default judgment, he would be financially affected by that decision.
The woman who moves a man into her home becomes an authoritarian caregiver in the relationship. This begins immediately with expectations the woman outlines. The authoritarian parenting style reflects strict parenting with high expectations and responsiveness from children. The parent focuses more on the disciplinary aspects of caregiving rather than solely nurturing. Children learn how to obey under this parenting style.
In contrast, with the authoritative parenting style, parents tend to be nurturing, supportive, and responsive to the child’s needs. They set firm limits with children, but they also create “teachable moments” in explaining rules, using both reasoning and discussion tactics. They listen to the child’s point of view, which suggests that the child is important, individual, and worthy of recognition. Parents under this style do not always accept the child’s point of view, but there is the high tendency to consider it.
Therefore, when a woman moves in a man, there is little consideration towards understanding the deeply-rooted needs of the man. In a superficial sense, women will commit to all the wifely-type duties, as in cooking, cleaning, being a listening ear, and having sex. That is surface level. Women who move in men rarely understand the man who is standing before her, i.e., what he wants in life, what he needs, what his desires are, what he fears, his inner conflicts, and his struggles to maintain consistency in his life.
Within this dynamic, the highest concern for the woman is his job consistency and whether he can bring the financial resources necessary to make the rent, pay the electric bill, pay the phone bill, put gas in the car, pay the insurance, and pay for food, equally. A man who cannot contribute is a man who is not useful. The woman in that moment can determine whether to keep him around or kick him out.
Most women rarely kick the man out of the house if he is financially short, opting to keep him around for sexual purposes. Thus, the process of ensuring he can consistently meet financial expectations is substituted for making sure he can consistently meet expectations in other areas of the relationship.
Although the woman might compromise and let substitution become the priority, she will still fuss and argue about the finances. She will poke, prod, and provoke the man to be more financially present in the relationship and even require that he take on a provider role. This means that the live-in situation was appropriate when the expectation was mutual contribution, i.e., 50/50 dynamic. However, the situation has changed when the man can no longer financially provide consistently, which prompts the woman to change the dynamics of the relationship from mutual consensus to hierarchical consideration.
In other words, the man was not required to be a provider at the beginning of the relationship when the woman moved in the man. When it becomes clear that he cannot financially provide consistently, then the provider expectation becomes the priority, which is just another substitution from the initial mutual agreement that he pays half the bills. The new requirement that he pays more than half the bills moves the woman out of her position, making the man now head of house, at least ceremonially. This new position of provider is without evidence, credibility, and/or legal record of marriage.
The irony is that the man still does not have the financial resources to accept the new position of provider even though the woman has now placed this as a title onto his back. He is walking with a title for which he has not earned, nor demonstrated capacity and capability. This is what happens when a woman moves in a man who does not have the capacity to operate fully in whatever title he accepts or he is forced to accept.
It is better for the man to get his own place, pay for that place fully for years, keep a job, and demonstrate an ability to sustain himself as an adult with consistency. Without a record of him maintaining his own place, it would be difficult for the woman to determine what kind of man he truly is given any possible expectation of marriage and/or long-term commitment.
In Sum,
There are many more areas that this topic may fall under. For example, a woman who moves in a man may be settling. She might have wanted one thing from the man but decided to settle for cohabitation. He might be settling as well. Instead of getting himself together financially and enduring that process until it is time to consider a romantic partner, he decides to settle with a woman because he simply needs a place to stay.
He may also need help in other areas. For example, his paycheck is not enough for him to sustain himself in an apartment alone. He is unwilling to get another job or a better job to ensure he can sustain himself financially as an adult. He would rather compromise his own personal peace and move in with a woman when he is not ready.
Another example is doing things out of order. If you are a Christian, you understand the importance of completing the marriage before living together. Christians and secular people alike do not always adhere to or respect that tradition, but it still has merit. The more you do something in order, the less out of order you feel in your relationships. It is when you get out of order that you experience the pain, frustration, anger, and resentment towards the relationship.
You had one thing in mind about the relationship but because you did things out of order, the relationship took on a whole different dynamic that you now believe you did not sign up for. That is the consequence that comes with doing things out of order because your steps, thinking, and belief systems are unpredictable. You do not know the next step, so you are walking blindly. Even when you believe you have this whole thing figured out, you realize that you don’t. It is better to do things in order to maintain order and to sustain predictability.
The last example is when you move in a man you essentially move in a squatter. The person becomes a squatter when he involuntarily loses his job, when he purposely loses his job, when he gets sick and cannot work, and when he decides simply that he is not going to leave your home regardless of whatever you say on the matter. He is a squatter, which is defined in legal terms as a person who unlawfully occupies an abandoned building or unused land.
Technically, the man you move in may not be a squatter under the legal definition because you let the person in. However, if the person is not on the lease, and if you leave the dwelling and he stays, then he would be a squatter for the apartment company. You and/or the landlord would be required to evict him through the courts. Just remember that squatters have rights. If you desire to terminate your relationship with the man you move in, expect a challenge to that decision because every state has provisions regarding tenants whether they are on the lease or not.
Before you move anybody into your home, let alone a man, know the tenant rights in your state. You can find some of the information on the government’s website, and the information is usually housed on that state’s office of the attorney general web page. Just use “renters rights” with your state as a keyword search, and you will be able to locate the information.
Life Recovery Objective
I will leave you with this encouragement. Do not move in a man as a woman. You are under no obligation to house a man. A man is an adult, and a man must create the opportunity for himself to win at his own life. He must be financially stable. He must have lived in a place of his own for more than a short time.
If he is fresh out of his mother’s house, or even out of a roommate’s place where he was even a tenant of record, he is still not ready to take on the responsibility of meeting the financial needs of his own place until he meets the financial needs of his own place and his place alone.
Women do not always have their financial stuff together. They have issues with credit cards and managing their finances. However, what they consistently do is keep a place, keep a job, manage based on their capacity, take care of their kids, and lean on someone when it is necessary to do so.
Women rarely hop from place to place, expecting men or family members to take them in long-term. Women tend to get their own place, keep the job to pay for the place, and sustain their adult living until they transition into the next season, which might include attending college and/or starting a business. Regardless, women get it done!
Therefore, if women know that they have this mentality, then they should not coddle the men in their lives. They should not project onto the men this lack of capacity when they reflect capacity. They should not say to the man, “I got this” when they have demonstrated the ability to take care of themselves.
The man a woman chooses should mirror her belief system, hustle, reasoning, and financial management. It makes no sense for a woman who is able-bodied, works, keeps her own place, and has dreams to entertain and/or move in a man who does not reflect the same core values.
The greatest life recovery objective I can encourage you to adopt is not to move in a man as a woman because you are under no obligation to make your man’s life work for him. He is only under personal obligation to recognize his issue, design ways to resolve that issue, and resolve the issue.
The more you take over for men, the more likely you will continue to operate in this role expecting something different. That is the true definition of insanity because if you do not learn from your current situation as well as your previous narratives, you are doomed to continue repeating the patterns.
You can die trying to make someone’s life easier. You can miss out on fulfilling the dreams in your heart trying to make someone’s life easier. You can weather sicknesses and illnesses trying to make someone’s life easier. Your only obligation is to make your own life easier.
To do that, you must focus on what is required for you to manage yourself as an adult and pursue that course of action. Stay on that path. This will lead to soberness of mind and help you better to determine if a partner is the right fit for you.
At the same time, do not move in a man as a woman because you are not that man’s wife, and you are not personally responsible for his well-being. You are responsible for yourself as a single woman.
Thank you for reading.
Regina Y. Favors, Owner/Operator
The vision of the site is to be the preferred online curriculum you need for life recovery.
Video Lesson
The title of this video is “Don’t Let Him Move In.” In the video, I explore the consequences of moving in a man as a woman. The discussion outlines the theme of irresponsibility.
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