The best part about you and your significant other moving in together is that, by default, you now get to share all of life’s fleeting, joyous moments together. A drawback of this arrangement is that, by default, you now get to share all of life’s fleeting, joyous moments together, and on occasion, there are fleeting, joyous moments you’d kind of prefer to share with someone else.

It’s not that you dislike spending time with your partner. You love spending time with your partner! (If either of these things are untrue for you, stop reading right now and go see if you can still break that lease.) But there have always been things that you’ve cherished doing with people who are not your significant other—midnight viewings of every new Avengers movie, or happy hour with the college crew, or postgame beers with the pickup run. Living with a roommate who is more than a business associate in a rent-paying arrangement can make protocol for that stuff feel a little more complicated.

Many cohabitants resolve this tension by morphing into a Package Couple, showing up arm-in-arm to everything, traditions and social cues be damned. Do not fall into this trap. If your fear of offending your partner via withheld invitation makes them a non-negotiable component of your presence, it will chip away at all those other valuable relationships that you’ve worked so hard to develop.

Here is a cool secret: Like you, your partner is a independent person with a rich, fascinating inner life, and their well-being is not contingent on your physical proximity. It is healthy and normal and good to spend time doing separate things, and you should both feel empowered to do so without worrying that every post-work drinks excursion will be interpreted as a passive-aggressive escape attempt.

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Encourage one another in little ways. If your partner heads out for the evening, don’t glumly promise to stay up late, all alone, waiting on their return. Make your own plans! Show that you, too, are committed to being your own free-thinking person. If you’re the one with the busy calendar, go out of your way to suggest something specific that they might enjoy doing during that time—a nice reminder that their happiness, wherever you may be, is still as important to you as your own.

Also: Sharing a mailing address does not mean you never go on a date again. (A great way to actually foster the type of resentment that Package Couples fear is to make solo activities one’s solo source of fun after moving in together.) Be purposeful about your time: Instead of spending every weeknight perusing takeout menus and the Netflix queue, plan and prepare a meal together, or go for a long walk, or find a new dive bar, preferably one with bad cell service.

When it comes to those true could-go-either-way events, being clear about expectations helps. What you think is a polite and helpful “You can come if you want” is, to them, confusing as hell. If your partner trusts you to just come out and say when you do want them to do something, they’ll feel far more comfortable telling you to go on and have a good time when (1) you don’t say that and (2) they aren’t into it. An evening of rehashing uproarious inside jokes with your college buds is great fun, but the appeal may not be as broad as you think.

Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read moreRelated Stories for GQRelationshipsSex and Relationships