It's a strange thing to move in with your fiancΓ©e's parents. It's even stranger when you do this having never actually
met
your fiancΓ©e's parents before! But this is the situation I found myself in, not long after my twenty-fourth birthday, and it led to an extremely weird chain of events.
It all started when I met Liz. And when I say 'met' I don't mean in the physical sense, because like an increasing number of couples these days we actually met on the internet. It wasn't an internet dating site, or even a site where people meet for cybersex or 'adult chat', it was just an online community dedicated to mountain biking (a hobby that we both shared). We both posted on the forums, then we started having discussions over the 'private messaging' feature of the website, then eventually we exchanged internet messenger accounts and started to talk to each other about all kinds of things, not just mountain biking. I won't bore you with all the details, because they're not particularly important, but to cut a long story short we eventually realized that we both 'liked' each other and our conversations and relationship suddenly became romantic in nature.
Although we hadn't yet met in real life, Liz seemed like my perfect girl. She was a couple of years younger than me, but attractive, smart, well educated and feisty. The only problem was that she lived two thousand miles away! I had my own apartment in San Francisco, while Liz had been born and raised in a small town in Georgia and was back living with her parents since she finished college. As a result it was several months after we first considered ourselves 'a couple' that we actually met for the first time in the flesh. I offered to make the long trip to Georgia and, although she wasn't ready for me to meet her family and friends yet, she came to stay with me for a weekend in a hotel near where she lived. She turned out to be everything I'd hoped and we spent a lovely weekend together. Six weeks later she came to California for a week and I took her to see everything in my home state. Then the following month we met up for a long weekend in Vegas, which I guess qualified as neutral territory.
By now we were very much in love and we would spend hours talking to each other on the phone and online. Then, one Friday night, I was leaving work and completely unexpectedly Liz was waiting for me outside. She took me on a long drive up to a cabin in the mountains that she had booked for the weekend. It was incredibly romantic and that night, while watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I proposed to her. It wasn't something premeditated, I didn't even have a ring, but it was a perfect setting and it just felt right. She said yes immediately.
However, there were problems that had to be addressed and the biggest one was distance. Liz was extremely close to her family and wasn't willing to just leave them behind and move to the west coast. I wasn't particularly close to
my
family, but I had a job and friends back home and I wasn't sure I was ready for the culture shock of moving from a vibrant city to a small, sleepy town. We discussed several options, but none of them were really right for both of us. We were both quite stubborn and it caused our first real arguments as a couple, which eventually ground into a kind of stalemate.
It was getting to the point where I felt that maybe we couldn't make it work and I was reluctantly considering breaking off the engagement, when fate intervened. I worked as a builder and landscaper for a garden design firm, but the company suddenly went into liquidation. There was no real warning, we just turned up for work one Monday morning and were informed that everybody had been laid off. Liz seized this opportunity and, a few days later, made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Although I had been working in garden design for a couple of years, Liz know that this was just for experience and what I really aspired to do was work in park planning. She called and told me that her dad had contacts on the town council and that they had a vacancy in the town planning department. After the brief formality of a phone interview the job was offered to me there and then. It made everything ridiculously easy. The stress of losing my job had been replaced with the elation of being offered a
much better
job. It also removed the main obstacle in me moving to Georgia, which was Liz's intention all along I guess. I did the obvious thing and accepted the offer.
There were still minor details to sort out. I wanted to rent a place of our own, but apparently Liz's parents had objections to that. They still hadn't met me and knew that Liz had also only spent a small amount of time with me in real life. They had reservations (quite reasonable ones I guess) about their daughter getting engaged and moving in with me so quickly. They offered an alternative though - I could move in with
them
while we saved up to buy our own place. Liz's parents were clever and reading between the lines I knew that this wasn't just about saving money. It would also be a test for our relationship to see if we really did want to live together and ultimately get married. I reluctantly agreed, but I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the arrangement. I was used to having my own space and I wanted to have plenty of time alone with Liz. I figured this would be very difficult in a house that contained not only her mum and dad, but also her two sisters and brother as well. That's a lot of people I would have to get along with! Liz reassured me that everything would be fine and that their house was 'quite large'.
_______
As it turned out, 'quite large' was a massive understatement; the Delaneys' family home was