Then, like many before me, I turned to the worst possible place for a vulnerable person in search of an ego boost: the internet. My timing was off kilter with my friends’ who were in tenancy contracts they couldn’t get out of, and so after a break up that snapped the muscles from my bones tendon by tendon, I was left flailing, with nowhere to live. I paid £25.25 a week for a 20-square-foot room which housed all my most treasured things. One of these was a storage facility called Big Yellow, branded in sunshine yellow for a distinctly un-sunshiny time of life, a business in part bankrolled by teary couples wandering up and down metal corridors like some kind of mad ministry for broken hearts. The Splitting of Things™ led me to strange, previously concealed corners of the city.
When we broke up, a year after we moved in, the heartache was acute but made worse by the fact that I couldn’t afford to continue paying rent, so I had to find somewhere else to live.
We danced around each other, restricted by meager square footage, and argued quietly before storming off to different corners of the tiny bedroom. If we cooked, one of us would have to sit on the countertop. My boyfriend and I moved to a tiny one-bedroom flat in New Cross Gate, a new-build that cost £700 a month and couldn’t fit both of us in the kitchen. My first real experience of love gave me an insight into what it means to share space as a couple.
A 2016 study by trade site Ziffit found that of over 2,000 people interviewed, almost a third admitted that financial security was a key reason they were with their current partner. The joke isn’t really a joke when you consider just how many people this is a real necessity for. There’s a running joke that relationships are shaped by the housing crisis-that thousands of people in this country have propelled their unions forwards thanks to the promise of cheap shared rent. Welcome to Roommates Week, an exploration of the highs and lows of cohabitation.
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