‘I’ve let this place to loads of couples your age,’ shrugged the estate agent as he handed over the keys. ‘They all break up within eight months and move out.’ Ever a competitive duo, we saw this as a challenge rather than a warning. He would accept my hair-shedding and I would forgive his lax laundry habits, for the greater good of proving an estate agent wrong. And so time passed… three months… still in love… six months… still in love… eight months… GEDDINTHERE…. and lo, the curse was broken.
But to be fair, Mr Doom of McDismal & Sons had reason to be sceptical – the early days of cohabiting are hard. For every warm, fuzzy feeling you have about waking up to the face of your beloved each morning, there’s also the voice of Monica from Friends in the back of your head quietly crying, ‘I have to live with A BOOOOOOOY.’
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Will your relationship immediately shrivel like an old grape? Will you swap hot sex on the sofa for lukewarm dinners on lap trays? Will you start turning down all social invitations because you have to stay in and bleed the radiators, or something? And, if you have them, will you miss the awesome flatmates you’ve left behind?
As Linda Ronstadt almost sang, ‘I don’t know much, but I know flatmates.’ A swift tot-up reveals I’ve had 18 in the past eight years. That’s 18 different types of pube in the plughole, 18 varying attitudes to food ownership and 18 different responses to the question, ‘Um, did someone use my pants as an oven glove?’ Lots became friends for life, some disappeared without paying the gas bill (one memorably left three weeks’ worth of dirty crockery piled up outside her door and disappeared into the ether), but all were important nubbly bits on the rich tapestry of my life.
The most important nubbly bits of all were the two I left last year to move in with my boyfriend. One was a uni friend who I’d basically seen every day for six years, the other a school pal I’d known since we were 12, both so brilliant that I wept snotty, gulpy tears as they waved me off with the best spatula.
Together we shared clothes, danced like no one was watching and decorated like we owned the place (we didn’t). Our three years of domestic bliss were proof that twenty-something houseshares can actually be more than just cheap, convenient and grubby. If you get lucky, they can be proper families.
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And if not, at least you can leave. That’s another thing about platonic households – give or take manners and legally binding contracts, you can extract yourself at pretty much any point. On the other hand, the big relationship move-in feels so very final.
‘You can never go back, you know. Eventually you’ll have to get married or split up,’ a friend told me solemnly as I packed up my bra drawer (NB: there is rarely room for a entire drawer of bras when you share a tiny one-bed). ‘Or die!’ I replied, hopefully.
Not many of us see living together as a relationship litmus test anymore though, thank God. Earlier this year a survey of 2,000 people by Co-operative Legal Services found that only one in four cohabiting couples plan to get married or have civil partnerships. And casting an eye round my friends, almost everyone who’s moved in with a partner did so partly out of circumstance, and mainly because they fancied it – but not to chivvy along the wedding express.
Some 20% of those surveyed by The Co-op said they’d moved in together to cut their living costs, which I guess only works if you’ve been living alone or in some bizzarro pocket of the country where five-bed houseshares are less economical than a one-bed flat. My move put an extra £160 a month on my rent, plus more for bills, council tax and all the stupid sensible insurance he makes us have (but it’s worth it).
For those less lucky than me, escaping the bristling tension round the post-it notes has strong appeal. ‘I couldn’t bloody wait to leave my houseshare,’ says Violet, 26. ‘It had gone from friendly to a total nightmare in the space of two years. I just reached a point where I couldn’t hack how selfish and inconsiderate they all were.’ Whereas the joy of living with a lover is that when THEY’RE selfish or inconsiderate, you can just tell them straight out – no tiptoeing around the housemate politics in case someone gets upset and does unspeakable things with your yoghurt.
And likewise, those nights where you want to come home and just speak to nobody? YOU CAN! The days where you want to linger in the kitchen, eating slices of butter as though it were cheese? YOU CAN! While even the greatest housemates will probably prefer you to be clothed, clean and pleasant the majority of the time, a live-in relationship means you’re fully able to be your true, lazy, disgusting self. Love means never having to say, ‘Sorry, do you mind if I trim this in here?’
So maybe the harbingers of doom were actually right, and it is hard to go back to houseshares once you’ve drawn the net curtains on that chapter of your life. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the clothes swapping and the kitchen dancing, especially as they both still live together without me – and every so often I’ll imagine I can hear them, two postcodes away, laughing at a joke I’m not in on, and almost do a little cry.
But then my lovely boyfriend will make me cheese on toast, we’ll perform one of our tightly-practiced whistling duets and I’ll cheerfully shout at him for leaving a wet towel on the sofa… and realise the grass is pretty green where I am after all.
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Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.