You’ll immediately age 20 years
Before, emails from your boyfriend would either be funny animal GIFS or, er, pictures of dogs. Now? Pictures of sofas and slightly aggy questions, like, ‘Are you SURE we need all your DVDs? You can stream films online now and they’re taking up space.’
You’ll also become obsessed with having the neighbours round, mainly so they’ll take your ASOS parcelswhen you aren’t at home and not complain to your landlord when your drunk mates wake them up by screaming. Who are these people? Do they think we’re annoying? At least when you lived in a shared house you KNEW the answer was yes.
And while five white wines in your local was always an acceptable night out before, now you become obsessed with having other couples round for dinner, like a really ’80s dinner party. It feels grown-up for about two hours, then you realise you’ve spent £50 on food and you’re sending your boyfriend out to the off licence for more Blossom Hill ‘and some chocolate’.
It’s not actually that sexy
Without having to keep things quiet in the bedroom to avoid sickening your flatmates, and the fact that you’re not sharing a bathroom with three other people, you think that after moving in with your boyfriend it’ll be 24/7 sex. So much sex you have to take three days off work to recover. So much sex, you can give up your gym membership. Er, no. All you’ll do is watch Gogglebox and read Facebook on your iPad. Because you have to share a bed with a massive annoying lump of human flesh EVERY SINGLE NIGHT (how do people do that?) you’ll be so tired that sex is really not that attractive an option. Before, your texts to your boyfriend would be, ‘I love you/ I miss you/ here’s a picture of my boobs.’ Now? ‘OUT OF COFFEE/did you eat that leftover pasta/what time are you home, my sister wants to come round to borrow the iron.’ Saucy, yes?
READ MORE: Why I'd Always Pick Boys Over Girls As Housemates
Your bed is no longer your office
In a shared house, every thing can be done on your bed: watching TV, sleeping, make-up, working, eating, talking to your friends, sex, everything. Now, you have a whole flat to do those things and you’re going to go a bit mad. You can leave your good fake tan in the bathroom without it being stolen! That bottle of vodka can live in the kitchen without fear your flatmate’s friends will ‘mistake’ it for theirs at 2am! Your laptop can go on the living room table and no-one will trip over the cable and pull it onto the floor! There’s only ONE person who can spoil this, and you don’t know rage until you’ve leant in for a kiss, only to smell your very expensive Philip Kingsley Elasticiser in his beard. He probably didn’t even leave it in for 20 minutes!
Face it: there’s going to be loads of food
People will tell you, ‘Oh, you’re going to be eating man portions of dinner,’ but that’s a lie. When you saw your boyfriend twice a week, you’d have a bottle of wine, maybe pasta, maybe one of those two dine in for £10 deals from M&S. Spoiler alert: you cannot eat like than seven days a week. Also, Sunday roasts are flipping MASSIVE when there are just two of you. Before, every roast would have to cater for at least two other flatmates who unsubtly nosed around the kitchen at 6pm on a Sunday. Now, you have Tupperware (or whatever that cheap IKEA version is that you felt you had to buy) full of chicken for days. Plus side: Monday roast lunch.
READ MORE: In Which One Guy Reveals The Myth V Reality Of Moving In With A Female Housemate
Everyone suddenly gets really sexist (including you)
At least one of your friends will make some kind of sexist joke about you doing all the cleaning and if you’re drunk, you’ll take it WAY too seriously. ‘I’m not doing the cleaning!’ you’ll fume the next morning, probably doing the cleaning. However, if your boyfriend is really clean and you’re really messy, people will still think you’re cleaning, because you’re a girl. Amazing.
You’ll become the absolute expert at cutting people off when they start to say, ‘Ooh, moving in! You know what’s next, don’t you?’ Try not to shout, ‘MURDER!’ or ‘SPLITTING UP!’ because they mean a proposal and they’ll probably get upset. In saying that, though, it’s weirdly scary if your boyfriend goes away. Not in an ‘I’m a pathetic girl’ way, in the way that you probably haven’t spent more than three days alone in a flat in your entire life. Home, uni, shared flats: all full of people. You’ll hear odd new noises that you’re convinced are the weird puppet from Saw, or that man from the news who hid in a public toilet to watch girls wee. In fact, it’s just the heating.
You’ve suddenly got SO much time
All that time spent packing bags, carrying them to work, travelling to his house, repacking, going back to work then lugging the bag full of clothes and make-up home? Now spent in the gym! Not really, you’ll spend it arguing about having his PS4 plugged into the TV. Everyone will ask, in the voice of Monica from Friends, ‘What it’s like living with a boooooeeeyyy?’
And you’ll have to point out that you’ve been sharing a house, bathroom and kitchen with various dirty boys the entire time you’ve lived in shared houses. It’s just as rank as it always was.
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Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.