Hi everyone, I'm Robert Foster, and thanks to an unfortunate combination of innate laziness, the ready availability of soft drugs, a shoddy job market and art school not preparing me for real life, I spent my 20s being your housemate's deadbeat boyfriend. Nice to see you again.
Of course, I wasn't actually all of your housemate's deadbeat boyfriends, because that would have taken some stamina on my part, and as you can imagine that's not my forte by any means. What I mean is that I could have been any one of your deadbeat boyfriends.
If you've ever lived with someone who has had a thing for loveable slackers, creatives, 'dreamers' (puke) or musicians, then you'll have dealt with someone like me: nice enough, but terrible with money, can't fill out forms, late to everything, shirks responsibility, doesn't separate his whites from his darks and can't fucking cook. These traits are for some reason excusable to girls in their early 20s (you people are crazy). And they also result in your girlfriend's house being a more preferable place to stay than your own, one which very much looks like an anglicised version of Seth Rogan's friends in *Knocked Up. *(Think farting on pillows and watching porn as a group, etc).
And so there it is. She's only known the guy three months andhe's already at your house four to six nights a week, and that's fine by her, because she likes him/thinks she can fix him (she can't, btw)/isn't psyched about listening to his flatmate produce terrible techno at 4am in the next room when she's staying at his. But the course of true love ne'er ran smooth, and before long you - as the agrieved housemate in this situtation - will be tempted to start on a moderate but sustained campaign of pass-agg comments and eye rolls that you hope will make her question what she's doing with this unshaven manchild whose band/painting career/pilot script is definitely not going to take off soon.
It might appear that said unshaven manchild is oblivious to such asides, but let me tell you as a former (yes, former – I'd like to stress that my life is no longer a cavalcade of lost phones, poorly rolled joints and bank cards being declined in restaurants – I got my shit together eventually) unshaven manchild, the unshaven manchild sees all. And the asides aren't going to help at all.
Let me give you a glimpse inside the minds of these hapless, feckless young men eating your private yoghurt stash before you do a terrible murder.
For a start, he's hiding in his girlfriend's room because you're not very friendly, in his head. You see, the 24 year old marijuana enthusiast you're dealing with who's squirrelled himself away in your housemate's room is essentially a giant, stoned toddler, who will sulk as soon as someone doesn't show enough interest in his stories/band/nonsense. So if you're not driving the conversation with questions about him, he's going to think you actively dislike him off the bat, which of course will lead to behaviour that will make you actively dislike him. If you'd like him to not turn into even more of an annoyance than he already is therefore your answer is to baby him both in conversation and generally, just like how his mummy did. Because how do you think he ended up being unable to change his own sheets at 24?
Also, I get that it looks like all he's doing is playing Xbox on your TV, not washing up, being workshy and having loud sex with your flatmate at 3am, because that's exactly what he's fucking doing. However, thanks to a lazy sense of entitlement and a childish belief that everything will work out in the end, he thinks he's just accruing the necessary life experience and 'thinking time' he needs for his novel/album/hilarious single-serving Tumblr to really strike a chord with the masses and make him a very rich man indeed.
Of course, if your housemate is as in love with him as she appears to be, she believes this to be the case too, so don't expect her to call him out on his delusions (give it time, though). If you're keen to instil a little urgency into this hairy layabout, simply enquire as to how people in his circle who are doing substantially better than him (via actually working at stuff) are doing. If he's even a little ambitious, his face will drain of blood at the mention of their names and he'll spend at least a few hours actually getting on with stuff.
And all this stage-whispering isn’t helping matters eithers. For a whisper to be effective, it needs to be completely unnoticeable. If there's some little complaint you'd like to make to his girlfriend or maybe another one of his housemates - maybe about the amount of piss around the toilet, the way he drapes himself across the sofa forcing someone else to sit on the rickety chair or the ongoing case of the disappearing houmous – the best way to deal with it is to make sure he doesn't get wind of him being in the doghouse at all. Because even a waft of terse whispering can create the kind of kind of semi-unspoken but weirdly present house tension that'll force you all to spend weekends at your parents' houses for a few weeks. You've got to accept that he's probably not going anywhere anytime soon because he's an un-self aware, inconsiderate dick, and it's not worth the bother to kick up a fuss until absolutely necessary.
Don't worry, she's going to get tired of him eventually. Of that you can be sure. No one wants to be the mother of a 24 year old when they're 22. Playing house is fun for a bit, but as soon as she realises the role he's playing isn't that of dutiful husband and team player, but of housebound, impoverished, untidy shut-in, the cracks will start to appear. The key here is to let her work it out on her own, any nudges from you will only put the wedge between you and her, not her and him. And that’s exactly what you didn’t want, wasn’t it?
To read the original post that inspired this, here's one writer on how irrirating it is when your housemate's boyfriend basically moves in - and isn't paying rent.
Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.