Why I’d Always Pick Boys Over Girls As Housemates

It surprises me that I have anything in common with Jess fromNew Girl. I have no control over the behaviour of my fringe, no-one thinks it’s cute when I sing while I stand in the toilet and I’ve never been able to live in a loft because the only ones I have ever known have been full of foam insulation and spiders. However, like Jess, I have, domestically, been the token chick among a bunch of dudes. And as a result I can definitively say that when it comes to living arrangements, I prefer the company of men.

I am as wary as the next person of self describing ‘boys’ girls’. They make me feel as suspicious as Hercule Poirot happening upon an arsenic laced handkerchief. If you can’t adequately bond with your own sex, something is wrong with you. And I’m a girls’ girl by default – being one of six sisters, and subsequently experiencing single sex education meant that everything I knew about men came courtesy of Jane Austen. If I met a boy in my early teens, I probably would have asked him how much of his income came from annuities and how much was tied up in land. My crossing over was accidental. At university, in the first and idiotic flush of love, I put dicks before chicks and agreed to live with my first ever boyfriend and a bunch of his pals, instead of joining the girls from halls. It was an unexpected stroke of genius.

Because I was addicted to eighteenth century novels and, less cerebrally, The Simple Life with Paris Hilton, I had no idea how to behave around men that I wasn’t sleeping with. Or rather, I thought all men were hetero horndogs who would erotically explore you in the back of a carriage as soon as look at you, and women had to busy themselves by being coy behind a fan. Naively, I believed all male/female interactions were based on the fact that sex was on the table. Perhaps not as a plated main course, but a sexy side dish, or a napkin that had been folded up to look like a penis.

The first thing I learned, living in my new quarters, was that most men are not especially interested in having sex with me. To be honest, even my boyfriend wasn’t that bothered. Not when there were new levels to get through on Zelda. I attempted to pigeonhole myself as the hot girl housemate, slinking about in a slippery satin cami set until one of the boys bellowed ‘Holy Mary, we can SEE YOUR TITS. PUT THEM AWAY.’ That established, we could move to the more serious business of becoming proper friends.

And I was embarrassingly late to the party on this one, but boys make brilliant friends. Seeing them every day, eating plain pasta from the pan with a wooden spoon, or sneaking home from lectures at lunch to watch Midsommer Murders, or arguing violently with each other in the supermarket about which washing up liquid smells nicer, I learned what I should have known all along – they’re just people. People with penises. Boys were sexy and mysterious until I lived with them, and discovering the truth has made me much more sane around them.

Much is made of the myth that boys are dirtier than girls. It’s a little bit true. Essentially, everyone is as dirty as the filthiest person in the flatshare. I tried to fight it, but after a while bleach starts to smell like resentment and the bathroom starts to smell no matter what you do. I became dirty myself, and trailed the dirt all over the house and into the next one. I’d rather live among friendly filth than be trapped in a pristine domestic set up where there are rules about tea towels. But I appreciate that we all have different priorities.

But it ws when I broke up with the Zelda-playing boyfriend that I really realised that for me, boys just make better housemates. When my girlfriends came over, they made the visit feel like a wake. ‘Just cry it all out. Allow yourself to feel all the pain,’ they murmured, proffering a bottle of Baileys, or a box of Milk Tray that was roughly the same height and width as an Irish Wolfhound. But my housemates were much better at helping me to move on. ‘Frankly, I’m really pleased that you’ve broken up,’ said Alex. ‘When you two had sex, you sounded like a baby seal being clubbed to death. It would be better for humanity if you didn’t go out with anyone at all.’ It’s hard to keep wallowing when you’re laughing so hard that the Baileys is coming out of your nose.

At one point, I was seriously ill, and it coincided with a massive falling out in the all girl house I had almost lived in. The girls would ring me up and ask me how I was, only to spend a solid hour bitching about everyone we knew, while I was too weak to put the phone down. But the boys filled my days with thousands of tiny kindnesses. They didn’t endlessly ask me how I was because they already knew the answer. Instead, they did my laundry, renewed my library books, ran me baths and fed me. Things might have been different if I’d have lived in the other house. The girls might have put their politics aside and done the same. But every day I was thankful for the choice I had made, and the young men around me, who were gruff, sweet and entirely lacking in agenda.

I’ve lived with groups of boys and groups of girls since, and in my opinion, boys are broadly so much better at keeping everything drama free. Of course, there are no absolutes, and plenty of exceptions. In a girl heavy mixed group, a boy will form more complex strategic alliances than a scion of the Vichy government, possibly to make up for decades of suppressed bitching. When other women have been introduced into the New Girl style set up, it’s been a joy. Everyone keeps calling a spade a spade, and no-one walks around being inappropriate in their knickers.

People have asked me whether I miss the rituals that come with living with girls. I don’t. Although the idea of getting ready for a night out is a great one, the reality involves third degree straightener burns, if I’m able to see well enough to do my hair and I haven’t accidentally glued my eyelids together first. I’d rather just go to the pub. It was my boy housemates who taught me how to stop worrying about what I looked like when I went out and love the pub.

I suspect that living with boys wouldn’t have been such a big deal for me if I hadn’t grown up surrounded by girls. And I know you’d need to live in every single houseshare in the country to work out how many of the clichés surrounding gender and communal living are true. But I’m lazy, dirty and drama shy, and the all the boys I’ve known have tended to be more tolerant of those qualities than some members of my own sex. And if they’re not, they’re quicker to call you out on your own bullshit and then make friends again over a pint.

Follow Daisy on Twitter @NotRollerGirl

Picture: Rory DCS

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.