Sometime back in 2012, when the eyes of London were still bloodshot from the aftermath of its Olympic hangover, I was sat in my room with my ex boyfriend, discussing who we might date next over two greasy bacon sandwiches. We’d been apart for nearly three months, but thanks to an enigmatic lease agreement and an ill-conceived rent split with our flatmates, there was no choice but to live under the same roof for the immediate aftermath of our break up. This is London after all; the closest thing we had to a spare room was the landing.
We accepted a ghostly existence sleeping in the same bed facing different directions; speaking to each other through a veil of phoney-politeness. The elephant in the room could’ve stomped one of us into a bloody pulp, and we wouldn’t have shrugged. Though the second he left the house, I’d jump for the laptop, and quietly scrutinise his new Guardian Soulmates’ profile. That’s the trouble with living with your ex – it’s hard to have the defiant, post-relationship revival when they are there watching you sing out of tune with Bill Withers and burn your ears with hair straighteners.
The odd pseudo-reality of the ‘cohabiting exes’ is becoming all-too common in the London housing climate, a city where, the average rent sits at around £1160. The average national wage last year was £27, 271 and for a lot of Londoners under (and over) 30, there’s still a couple of rungs on the oiled-up ladder to climb before we see that dough. Once you get the abacus out, you quickly realise that the only option is house sharing. Suddenly a less-than-perfect relationship can be moulded into a case for cohabitation, slicing the room rate in half. Denise Knowles, Relationship Counsellor at Relate believes this can create a whole new set of problems, ‘It’s one thing if you’ve bought your property, because there might be some equity involved, or you might have some deposit to make use of going forward, but when people are renting, that’s much less likely to be the case,’ she explains. Cohabiting and long-term commitment might not always be bedfellows, but after the break up – you two will be.
On top of the potential legal bind, there’s the emotional Merry-Go-Round of living within the confines of your break-up each day. For starters, what the hell do you do when one of you meets someone else? Consideration isn’t always at the forefront of your mind when your heart has had a compound fracture. When Shaun, 26, who works in digital marketing, split up with his university girlfriend while they were living together in halls, they couldn’t afford to move out for four months, and things turned pretty ugly. ‘She turned into a party animal and regularly went out on the pull. This meant her coming in very late and slamming doors drunk with me asleep upstairs...once, she'd been out and the next morning I went downstairs and realised I had something I needed in her room. I knocked but there was no reply so I assumed she was out. Huge mistake. There was a guy in bed with her. My old bed. I just immediately shut the door.’
The stark reality of seeing your ex move on can feel like you’re being jabbed in the thigh with a rusty compass, but the most painful realisations are often a little more nuanced. Journalist Katherine, 33, lived with her partner for five years, with a break in between. After things failed to work out for the second and final time, they were stuck renting for eight weeks before it was financially possible to move on. ‘We used to shower together, it was weird, like a comfort thing because we couldn’t sleep in the same bed, and because that was always a time when we used to share stuff. I missed that physical closeness,’ she says.
So if it happens to you, how do you survive this surreal co-existence? My advice: make a plan get out of the situation as quickly and cleanly as possible, set a realistic timeline and draw your escape hatch. Be as honest and empathetic with your ex as you can without compromising yourself. Stay out of the house by doing the things you enjoy – but don’t do a disappearing act. Combat your need for their affection by calling on friends for some over-zealous snuggling. Accept that no matter how strong you are, you are not living in a Dandy Warhols song. It’s not bohemian, it’s painful, and you’ll need to talk about it – so find a friend, co-worker or bored TfL worker who’s willing to listen.
Thankfully, I managed to escape the break-up trappings through daily pleadings with the letting agents to let us fill our room. This led to plenty of over-sharing with some terrified Gumtree strangers as I showed them about the flat, by then a sort of sad, relationship mausoleum. We paid more than £300 for the agent’s laborious task of putting the new names on a piece of paper – and in a piss-soaked Irish bar in North London, my ex and I signed an END OF TENANCY agreement in silence while The Lumineers sang ‘I belong with you, you belong with me,’ in the background. At that point, he’d started a new relationship; and we’d settled into a pacified state with two separate lives operating under one roof. It was an absurd way to live – but it forced us to get along, and in the long run, probably saved us from a messy, hate-filled ending. It’s too exhausting to be bitter on a daily basis, so instead, you just get on with it, and occasionally make each other tea.
Two years later, I ate big meal of my own ‘never again’ words by moving in with my new boyfriend after just six months of dating – but this time for the right reasons. There was no sense of necessity – and definitely no savings. We don’t share with anyone else, and so our only obligation is to each other. Now, I wake up beside him every morning with a stupid Cheshire cat grin. I have discovered the glory of successfully building SOLSTA sofa bed, and I love it. Looking back, I was nowhere near ready for the adult world; I was just playing house with M&S Dine for Two meals served on Tesco Value dinner plates.
As a wise man named Chandler once said ‘remember when you were going out with that girl Donna and you guys broke up? Remember how horrible it was when you bumped into each other at the supermarket? Now imagine you LIVED at the supermarket.’
So shop with caution, and don’t move into the supermarket until you’re good and ready.
**Liked this? You might also be interested in: **
An Open Letter To The Housemate I Accidentally Fell In Love With
A Plea From Your Housemate's Deadbeat Boyfriend For Some Understanding
Picture: Eugenia Loli
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.