Dear Complicated Feelings,
A man. That you love. In close proximity. Twenty-four hours a day. Exciting times ahead!
The best thing about living with men is having them around. Coincidentally, the worst thing about living with men is having them around. Learning to live with anyone is, as you rightly said, about making decisions. But it’s also about much more than that.
It sounds like this is your first time living with a man. I’ve lived with men, on and off, for most of the past decade, with varying degrees of success. Not to get too Esther Perel about it, but I’ve found they’ve all had one thing in common: they have been great revealers of truth. Not just truths about the relationship, but truths about myself.
Together, you will have to deal with hangovers, the deaths of friends, the diagnoses of parents and the daily disappointments of being alive, employed and bored together. Every bad-skin day and dark mood is right there in the cold, wide open.
You’ll also experience Sunday sleep-ins, late-summer, sun-drenched dinner parties and just-because-I-thought-of-you flowers. The work wins, the impromptu sex and the first blossom on the trees you planted together in the garden, metaphorically or otherwise.
Shock and sweetness. Anger and ache. Joy and indignity. A sense of uncertainty and absolute knowing within the span of a week, a day, an hour. It’s all there, rising and crashing like waves within the square footage you now share.
I sense the real question you’re asking has nothing to do with how to manage the beginning of this living-together business. It’s about how to manage the ending of something equally precious to you: the difficult yet blissful business of living and being on your own.
My last decade spent navigating this same complicated feeling has imparted some wisdom.
During university, I rented the apartment directly above my high-school boyfriend. I didn’t rent it because he hadn’t asked me to live with him. I rented it because, even at the tender age of eighteen, I craved that chic arrangement in which celebrity couples share a life, and perhaps a hallway, but never an address. I wanted my own space with a side of closeness. This worked for a while, until it didn’t, because eventually all I wanted was space.
The second time I fell in love, it was with a professional skier and passionate drinker. Our relationship ended shortly after my mother, who was visiting for the weekend, awoke to a man trying to break into her bedroom window.
“Call the police!” she shrieked. I shrieked.
I could hear the perpetrator snarling and swearing as he tripped over the concrete planter boxes in a panic. I knew that snarl. It was only my beloved boyfriend, wearing a skate-brand hoodie zipped to the neck, arriving home at three in the morning reeking of Jameson, missing his keys and his mind.
Then there was my husband, of course. A truly superb roommate with whom I happily purchased two homes. There was only one tiny problem: a gnawing sense of dread that I had been plucked like a squishy toy from a machine and dropped into the wrong postcode, the wrong three-storey character home, the wrong wedding band.
I spent the four glorious years following my divorce living alone in London. Four years of doing whatever I wanted. Of preparing those altars you mentioned, making mistakes, crying on the sofa on a Tuesday afternoon and considering misguided futures in the forms of start-up coders, restaurateurs and “social wellness club” founders. While it had its hardships and lonely pangs, mostly it was incredible.
When I left my marriage and moved to London, I took almost nothing with me. A few photographs and one Hermès blanket; a gift which a Hinge date’s miniature dachshund later chewed a hole clean through. I thought this made me strong and brave. That it proved I didn’t need anything material to be someone material.
But over the years, I began to collect things, slowly but surely, at roughly the same speed as it dawned on me that I was building a new life here. That this wasn’t just a dramatic pause. A hand-painted Japanese vase. A delicate set of handmade Swedish espresso mugs. A mostly Americana record collection.
This small collection of objects, housed in my rented flat, became intensely personal to me. They were marks of who I was becoming and who I no longer was. The person I was becoming was never quite as evolved or effervescent as I had hoped, but she was free.
This period ended when I met my current partner two years ago: a handsome Aussie who owned the neighbourhood breakfast spot down the street. Because I am now as “mature” as I have ever been, you might think I would be in my prime cohabitation era.
I am not.
Life has worked its griefs and pressures across our tenancy. It has shone its light, too. There are times when I return to my romanticisation of famous couples who lived in separate but conveniently close apartments.
I’m having one of those moments as I write this. That handsome Aussie is asking me, not gently, where his little sports socks have gone. He is rumbling through various rooms as though each one were an open, disorganised toolbox, only to discover, with complete surprise, that the socks are in his shoes.
It’s easy to live alone because the only mirror you have is the one in the bathroom, and you can dim it. You have a new mirror now. It’s your boyfriend. He’s less easy to dim. And you may find yourself asking all kinds of questions in that mirror.
Am I happy? Am I well? Are we close enough? Are we fucking enough? Are we ordering in too much? Should we give each other more space? More slack? More compliments?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are two versions of you – of us all. There is the person who rages around her living room in a kimono to Lana Del Rey, and there is the person who has to learn how to remain herself once someone else is in the room.
You’re not alone in being unsure how to merge those two selves. In fearing that you will have nowhere to hide, recalibrate or fall apart royally. Because the hardest thing isn’t learning how to live with the man you love. It’s learning how to be your unfiltered self while he is there, hoping that, as Mark Darcy did, he loves you just as you are.
Give it some time. You may find that you can light the candles, dance to Del Rey, build the witchy altars and shake the martinis with him. Or at least while he’s away.
Surely he has private habits he is equally reluctant to bring to the party, many of which neither of us wants to spitball about. You don’t have to lose yourself in this process. You just have to let him find you.
So forgive him when he loses his socks and blames it on you. Happiness, whatever that is, can also be a decision.
I think you two kids are going to be just fine, and maybe when the moon is full, you can howl together.
