I’m sitting in a sea of badly packed moving boxes with a painful bout of shingles and a sprinkling of existential angst. My landlord’s mortgage has been hiked up, so he’s selling up and me and my flatmate are being shoved out once more.
In need of a dose of light relief, I FaceTime my young niece. But she’s distracted, examining my east London rental. Suddenly, I’m incredibly self-conscious about the unjustified amount of faux fruits, framed 90s movie posters and the unwieldy box of skincare products on display.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Thirty-two,” I whisper.
I dive into a box searching for my 32-year-old teddy’s battered paw.
“Thirty-two!” she howls.
I tell her I have to go, my flatmate’s just walked in. A lie. She’s actually in the process of moving in with her Hinge lover. I just didn’t want her to see me cry.
By and large, “adulthood” remains shorthand for stable housing and long-term domestic partnership. The nuclear family home is embedded into our mainstream cultural template of what it means to be a righteous grownup. But the facts are beginning to tell a different story.
In the 2022 census, the fastest-growing household type over the past two decades was the “multi-family” setup, where “families” may be unrelated and, therefore, encompass more than one person living with someone not necessarily related.
This isn’t surprising. According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK increased by 4.4% in the year to January 2023: the largest increase since records began. Add that to the swelling statistic of single adults (aged 30-34) rising from 49.2% in 2011 to 58.9% in 2021. And so, for those of us born without the magical power of affluent parents, what this equates to is: getting a roommate.
What was once seen as a “blip” on the journey towards adult life, a final hurrah, a Friends or The Young Ones experience before you maturely moved on, is increasingly becoming the destination of the adult experience. And, though my tears are falling because I, like my niece, have been indoctrinated to think that the family home is the goal, and I’m not hitting the Farrow & Ball painted mark just yet, I also think I’ve found the beauty in this messed-up fate.
Yes, this housing situation is anxiety inducing and increasingly impossible for many. And, yes, it’s a gloomy product of the extremities of capitalism. But, as I sort through the relics of flatmates I’ve lived with over the past few years –Polaroids, birthday cards, old wine corks, a motivational Post-it – I’m hit with a deep pang of nostalgia. I’ve navigated this 55sqm space with a delectable cast of city dwellers over these past five years. We’ve each partaken in the bizarre dance of sharing a sofa, toilet, food cupboards and that weird drawer filled with curious things (candles, batteries, sparklers, etc). We’ve fielded constant micro-negotiations of managing work calls and night-time partners and personal conversations and cleaning rotas and social plans and individual highs and woes. Essentially, we’ve completed a crash course in navigating interpersonal ethics.
Amy Canevello, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, explains the unique dynamic of non-family cohabitation: “Our expectations are different from living with romantic partners or family… It calls for a clear setting of boundaries. You negotiate, hopefully with a sense of care, how you are going to live in an intimate setting without the presumption of shared values or an intrinsic sense of responsibility for the other person. The space becomes quite democratically shared.” Within this strange and sometimes strained intimacy, I’ve had a taste of communal living.
I’ve binged every 60s horror film, while wolfing down troughs (mixing bowls) of pesto and pea pasta with a flatmate who generously nursed me through a breakup. I arranged an online boxing session for my flatmate (which backfired as I mistakenly kicked her in the face), as she was processing a family illness. Through Covid, after my uncle died, my flatmate instilled a Sunday ritual of a hike (long walk) followed by a roast dinner followed by making our way through the Guardian’s list of the top 100 films of the 21st century. The shared walks, talks and food helped me grieve.
It reminds me of Michael Pollan’s writing in Cooked. He explores the social glue that is borne out of communal meals. “What Winston Churchill once said of architecture – “First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us” – might also be said of shared feasting. First we cooked our food, and then our food cooked us. The rituals, they build a sense of community.
Over the course of my rental life, while sharing rooms with acquaintances who have – on the most part – swiftly become close friends, I’ve experienced heartbreak, lust, love, death, work wins and losses, illness and grief. We’ve navigated the art of communicating (as best as we can), adjusting, considering – and coexisting.
Like any other relationship, this isn’t a utopia. I once had a flatmate who used to trim his pubes, leaving a confetti-like trail around the toilet seat on a biweekly basis. I had another cohabiter who didn’t register the thinness of our walls, so I listened to the uncensored audiobook of her sex life with her new boyfriend. We swiftly instilled a non-negotiable agreement to play music whenever a bed partner was present. Back in the early years of my rental life, I was navigating a disordered relationship with food while living with a personal trainer. This meant I waited for her to get to bed before I binged my way through the kitchen, like some strange orthorexic vampire until she caught me one night rustling in her cupboards. Even these awkward encounters, as hellish as they were to confront, were instructive.
In one of my many moving boxes, I have a book (gifted to me by a previous flatmate) Life, Letters and Journals written by the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell. She writes: “Is not the assent of another a sort of second conscience?” She poses that the people with whom we encircle ourselves become fundamental in the architecture of our own being. “Our character is moulded by them and receives its colouring from them.” She describes what researchers (Aron & Aron) went on to define as “self-expansion”. Most studies are limited to exploring how romantic relationships help broaden our sense of self. Renting over the past decade, I’ve had the chance to experience multiple “others” rather than a single partner. They’ve challenged my biases, my blindspots and ultimately my sense of meaning.
While the single-family home has long been held up as the aspiration – the signifier of stability, commitment, wholeness and a range of other moral attributes – I wonder if there is a correlation between the “chronically lonely” age we are living in and the picket-fence domestic dream. Urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that “The structures that once supported the nuclear family no longer exist,” and this leads to an intense sense of pressure on the relationship. The average divorce rate is currently 42% and that figure is on the rise. Psychotherapist Esther Perel comes to mind: “You’re asking one person to give you what an entire village used to provide.” Perhaps by aspiring to shack up with our romantic partner and build a self-sufficient brood in an urban dwelling or, if financially possible, a house with a manicured lawn as a moat, we are risking seclusion. Bowing to the pressurising institution of individualism.
The nuclear domestic setup was not always the norm. For centuries, kinship was not defined by being genetically related, it was something you could create. An international research team carried out an ancient genome-wide analysis in an early medieval graveyard of individuals who most likely lived together 2,700 years ago in what is now Germany. They found that many of the people who were buried together were not related to one another. They shared the highs and lows of each other’s lives, but were most likely not romantically or genetically linked.
Maybe by softening our commitment to the socially prescribed “family home”, we might give ourselves the chance to rebuild a sense of community. I’ve read that the Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying for when two people survive a dangerous trial at sea – they call their boating partner “my sibling from the same canoe”. I haven’t had to test my survival on the shores of the Thames just yet, but I do believe that through my rental life, I’ve built an eclectic network of kinsmen.
As I tape up my boxes, preparing myself for my next overpriced, under-furnished abode, I think about my niece’s quip. “You’re an adult. Start acting like one.”
We are living in an era of impermanence, of forced adaptation. Maybe, the very act of living in a constantly changing setup is the definition of modern adulthood; learning to live with the precariousness of it all.
I FaceTime my niece again and just as I’m about to share my theory, she tells me she’s been thinking about what she wants for her birthday. “A doll’s house,” she says, “with a mummy and a daddy and a baby and a dog.” Before I have the chance to respond, she’s performing a very good song from Matilda.
I follow her birthday instructions and swiftly fall down an Instagram hole of doll’s houses. Wide oak-plank floorboards, shiplap walls, Shaker-style cabinets, a Victorian fireplace, a study for the parents, a playroom for the kids, a larder. I could scroll for hours… I want all of it. I’m interrupted, damn. The moving van is here.
As I open the door to my new rental, with boxes filling up the hallway, I meet the eyes of my new flatmate. A broken toilet sits outside the bathroom and the smell of a dead rodent is hard to ignore. And she quietly, anxiously, asks me for a hug. Together, we confidently refuse to move in until the flat is made acceptable for two human beings who are paying far more than they can afford. The faceless estate agent grimaces, but we stand strong: “My sibling from the same canoe.” There’s power to be found in this kinsmanship. And as we take the agent round the flat, showing him what needs to be fixed, I wonder, what will be learned here, within these four weathered walls?
Listen to People Who Knew Me, written and directed by Daniella Isaacs, available wherever you find your podcasts (bbc.co.uk)
