I think you should not live together until you are sure she is on the same page regarding your joint striving towards the type of life you both want to lead.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that you should live together until you're either married, or have made a "marriage-like life-long commitment" to each other (if you have a problem with the institution of marriage, or current laws unfortunately don't permit you to marry).
I also don't like the idea of BFAs/pre-nups, not because it's unromantic, but because I think that it encourages people to get into relationships that they're not 100% committed to or sure about. You shouldn't live together to "try it out", IMHO. Make a commitment to be together, or don't.
The relationship should be entered into with such commitment and such a passionate intention to make it life-long, that if you lost everything you own, it would be a trivial loss relative to the emotional pain of the relationship breakdown. Can that happen? Sure, it can. But at nowhere near the rate of relationship breakdown due to entering a relationship with insufficient commitment. (Which I firmly believe is
the major cause of relationship breakdown.)
The main due diligence you have to do on your life partner is not whether you get along with their family, whether you have the same views towards money, etc, but
whether they have the same commitment to making the relationship work. If you share a commitment to making it work, you can resolve almost any issue (addiction and domestic violence being two of the possible rare exceptions). If one or both of you feels that failure is an option, failure becomes likely. And getting a BFA is an overt acknowledgment that failure is an option.
But hey, I'm an admittedly and unashamedly "boots and all", "don't do things by halves", "burn your bridges" kind of gal.
coastymike said:
Given the divorce rate, dont listen to other people who say "oh that is unromantic", "but if you really loved her you wouldnt need a BFA" or the one I love "you are preparing for divorce from the beginning, you just need to trust and grow together".
It doesn't matter what the statistics are; we're not passive victims, subject to the whims of fate. There are things that we can do to make divorce highly unlikely. Because there are two parties in a marriage, and you can't control the other person's actions, you can of course never 100% preclude the possibility of divorce, but neither do you have to think of marriage as a "roll of the dice".