I’m going out of my mind. I met my boyfriend around seven months ago and very quickly I ditched my flat and moved in with him. His place was smaller than mine, but because the area he lives in is nicer and is closer to his workplace, it was an easy choice for me to get rid of my flat and, despite the shoe-box size of the apartment, move all my belongings into his place. I thought it was just for a week until we moved house but, for various reasons (our first flat falling through, then lack of money, then too much other stuff going on), we have now been living together with all my boxes and boxes of piled up clothes for three months.
Let me tell you, if you ever want to test how strong your relationship is, try living in a studio apartment that’s so overstuffed with your belongings that you have to live out of boxes. If you can manage it without wanting to shove your other half in one of the boxes and brown tape him in for a few hours for a little peace, then congratulations — you have probably passed the toughest pre-baby test of your relationship.
So far, I haven’t trapped my boyfriend in a brown box or locked him in the balcony or thrown stackable plastic tubs at him — despite the fact that I still don’t know when we are moving into a bigger place where I do luxurious things such as hang my clothes in a wardrobe and put my books on a shelf. I have daydreamed about it, though.
It’s not just me who’s losing the plot a little. When the air-conditioning unit started leaking last week, my boyfriend had to don full mountaineering gear to hike his way to the top of my clothes’ mountain in the corner of the room so that he could reach the filter to clean it. I’m expecting him back any day now.
The lack of space means that we have no privacy at all. I won’t go into details, but I assure you there’s no mystique left in this relationship.
It also means our bad habits are magnified. I have a tendency to be, ahem, perhaps a little messy. I’m a little lax about washing up dishes and I’ve already mentioned my monstrous clothes pile. I also have a huge bag of plates and crockery that I brought with me from my old flat but I dread opening it because I know everything in it is covered with gecko poop (I had a gecko living in my cupboards in my old apartment and, as yet, I haven’t cleaned up his parting gift to me). And, last week, my boyfriend found an ancient bag of unopened dried beans which had become home to a large family of unidentified bugs. We threw them away.
But before you go thinking he’s some kind of hero putting up with my filth, let me tell you a bit about his habits. He’s one of those people who, even when he’s not watching TV will have the TV on. He watches the most terrible shows and because the room is so small, I’m forced to watch them too. I always go to sleep with an eyemask on because he’ll still be watching trash when I go to sleep and, no matter how many times I ask him to turn the TV off before he sleeps, I am woken up every single night by the TV’s sound. And he’s a really terrible sleep-talker, snorer and general noisy sleeper. Whatever you are imagining isn’t even the half of it.
I think it’s an excellent test for couples. If you can be in such close quarters with someone and not end up posting them in the garbage shoot (I would not have blamed him if he’d done this to me when he found about the gecko poop plates sitting under the table), then you have probably got an excellent chance to be together for a long time.
We have seen each other at our worst and now I really hope we can move house so we get a chance to see each other at our best as well.
