As if finding someone appropriate to give your last Rolo to wasn’t tricky enough, a combination of the tattered housing economy (cheers, Dave) and your crippling Uber addiction mean you’re not in any danger of getting your own place soon. This means you’re now sharing the budding years of your domestic love life with a whole bunch of other weirdos he met on the internet who it turns out ate all your Rolos when they were drunk.
Here’s how to deal with the worst offenders:
The ladz ladz ladz
This house smells of mildew, Right guard, jizz and sorrow all pathetically masked with a heady fug of Febreeze. They will call their house something ‘towers’ or at least that’s what you hear them shouting in the hallway when they bring home drunk girls in short skirts. The industrial carpet is strewn with kettle bells and broken dreams. If you are going to survive this you’ll have to get used to washing your hair with a bottle of Mint Source (coz it’s tingly on their lad balls) and wiping your arse with the cardboard end of a toilet roll.
In the middle of the night you might creep into the sticky lino kitchen to get a glass of water from a Sports Direct mug, turn on the light and find Jonesy asleep at the kitchen table having been violently sick into a pan of leftover pasta pesto. This is your life now.
Whatever you think of them, they’re not particularly chuffed you’ve turned up on the scene either. Frankly, you’ve been putting a bit of a spanner in the lash, gash and bants timetable. No, sitting on a ripped leather sofa watching three blokes play FIFA and scratch their scrotums might not be your idea of a wikkid nyte, but if you don’t want to earn yourself the ol’ ball and chain nickname you’re going to have to put the hours in. Buy a pack of tea towels, come prepared with ‘chat’ about the relative fitness of the Take Me Out panel and you’ll be alright.
The Brady Bunch
So this gang aren’t technically objective dickheads, but your status as an interloper in this band of merry men may lead you to (unreasonably) to resent them. In fact they are probably the most pernicious type of dickhead because they are way too nice to ever be called dickheads. They met at uni, they have history and a Whatsapp group and some sort of hilarious tally chart you don’t understand pinned on the fridge.
Of course, there’ll probably be one intimidatingly hot girl in this group of bessies has brushed genitals with your new beau at some stage in their cohabitation, but obviously they laugh about it now. LOL! You stay up all night with them playing ring of fire and doing Oscar winning fake chuckles about the time Fran got topless at Worldwide festival and everyone just slept in the same sleeping bag. LOL! You go, LOL, LOL, LOL.
You’ll never know just how relevant to a time and place your own #housebantz is until you’ve witnessed two adult humans roll in the aisles sharing a private joke about a broken clotheshorse. Stick with it, in time you’ll be boring the tits off one of the new girls with similar stories.
Kermit the hermit
This slippery Spare Roomer is a Da Vinci Code bedroom dweller eternally clad in a hooded burgundy (always burgundy) dressing gown like a sort of Matalan monk. You can’t say you’ve ever actually seen his face, just a slick of his greasy hair as he scuttles fearfully from room to room clutching a lap tray.
Before you leave your romantic boudoir alone you find yourself watching the bottom of the door to make sure his shadow has passed. He isn’t too much bother because he spends 97% of his day in a bedroom that smells of warm scalp. He could be doing anything in there and you suspect it might be a combination of fervent masturbation and creating a voodoo doll of you made from hair he’s collected from the plughole. In a horrifying turn of events you might one day find yourself alone together in a shared space like the kitchen. While in this space, keep it light. Mutter something about World of Warcraft in the excruciating moments it takes for him to fill an oven tray with potato smiley faces and scarper.
Ever noticed your dirty knickers weren’t where you left them? nods towards his bedroom door
The ones who really hate him
If your boyfriend has a drum kit, or he’s a racist or he just really likes talking about Reiiki there’s quite a good chance his housemates totally hate him. But as a regular in his bedquarters this sure is going to make life quite tricky for you.
You’ll know because his housemates pause the Skybox when he walks in the room and wait for him to leave it again and they’ll wash every communal mug in the flat but his. I once went out with this guy. A man whose living situation was so lung-crushingly awkward, he would escort me down the corridor and deposit me in on his bed, lest I burst free of his room and do something disgusting and obscene like try and converse one of them. I showered in the middle of the night. I brought my own milk and kept it by the bedroom window. We had silent sex like a pair of rigid Mormons for fear of scaring the horses. And by ‘horses’ I mean his arsehole housemates.
Once, when I thought everyone was out I committed an act of unimaginable rebellion in the form of eating a Babybel, shoving it in my gob and chucking the waxy evidence in the bin. About two hours later by boyfriend sent me a picture message of the very same rind: a rind as red as the blood on my hands. I had no defence. But I mean, if people didn’t want you to steal their cheese they shouldn’t buy such irresistibly cute cheese.
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Follow Lucy on Twitter @lucyannhancock
Picture: Francesca Allen
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.