We all know the feeling – we get really over excited in our freshers’ year – actually, scrap that. We get really over excited in the first semester of freshers’ year about our brand new shiny friends and the prospect of living in a house with people other than relatives for the first time. Everyone is going to be best friends and you’ll find the perfect million bedroom house because you want to be friends with everyone forever! Well, it doesn’t always go like this, but you get the gist. It’s like anything new, it will always be exciting, but there is inevitably a ‘honeymoon’ period.
Now, I’m all for getting excited over everything. I am like a child who realises it’s their birthday in six months every time I see the Coca Cola advert in November. Life would be rubbish without getting excited! But my point is, don’t get caught up in the excitement and pretend that you’re best friends with someone who, were you to live with them, would actually make you want to tear up all their clothes in anger and weave them into a scarf.
But if it’s too late and you have signed that contract, here is how to make the most of your house/hovel honeymoon period, and some pointers for realising when you know it’s over and you have to start making an effort to like each other and co-exist peacefully.
How to stay in the housemate honeymoon bubble
Tidiness Etiquette
If you are a messy person, that is fine. So am I, but keep it to your own area. One that you pay for exclusively and don’t share with your friends, because believe it or not, not everybody is happy to wade through your mouldy cups of tea and numerous bits of clothing that have been shed on the floors after you collapse from your super hard day of a one hour lecture. On the flip side, if you’re a neat freak, don’t force your compulsive tidiness on your housemates! I don’t think anyone fancies being ‘sternly spoken to’ because you forgot to tidy the bathroom between the hours of 5.30 and 7pm according to the laminated cleaning rota they made. Find a happy medium.
I told you my Cath Kidston bed sheets would look really nice!
Make time for each other
Every once in a while, it’ll be nice to cook tea together and have a pyjama/dinner party in your fairy lit kitchen. Get together in the lounge and watch a movie instead of getting wasted and spilling rosé wine on the Wilko’s magnolia painted walls at pre-drinks. It can be useful to appreciate each other sober, rather than spending drunken nights crying and hugging each other, telling everyone that you love them so much, you are going to put them in your will. This will soon escalade into a full-scale screaming argument outside McDonalds because you took one of their McNuggets without asking.
And when do you know it is over?
1. You get back to your house to find your door scattered with post it notes with polite-yet-serious requests to ‘either wash up my frying pan or buy your own’; ‘ please can you pay me the 55p you borrowed the other day in the Refectory?’ or ‘it’s your turn to clean the hair out of the shower.’ Not only have these trivial problems become issues on a scale comparable to third world debt, but your relationship has deteriorated so much that you cannot discuss these issues in any way other than writing them on brightly coloured sticky pieces of paper.
2. That bag of rubbish that has been sat at the front door for a week and is starting to fester in a puddle of bin juice because the door keeps hitting it every time someone comes in is still there. No-one can be bothered to move it and all the politics of ‘whoever filled up the bin last should take it out’ mean that it will stay there until the landlord threatens to charge you £20 for its removal by professional cleaners.
3. You get out of bed at one o’ clock in the afternoon to find that all your housemates have gone and you don’t know where any of them are. No-one is replying to your texts, but you actually don’t really care. All you want to do is stay in your room and watch about fifteen hours of Prison Break and watch your hair grease itself into dreadlocks as you continue on to your fifth day of not showering. Nice work.