Treating your flat like a marriage will keep everyone wanting to renew their vows–and leases.
An agreement to share the costs and comforts of a home, to cohabitate through the ups and downs of deadlines and deathbed hangovers, to have and to hold ‘til the end of term do you part: logistically, signing a lease with flatmates is a lot like signing a marriage document.
The Honeymoon Phase–and it’s Eclipse
Hopefully, like most newlyweds, the start of life in your shared flat is full of excitement and possibility–what throw pillows will you choose for the sofas? How will you organize the kitchen cupboards? When will the flat-warming party be held, and who’s in attendance? In the flurry of settling in and making the house a home, heating bills and quotidian chores are stuffed unceremoniously to the back of your mind like empty wine bottles behind the kitchen door.
Amid bonding with your flatmate and their friends and establishing your connection to the space in which you’re living, who cares about sticky floors and dirty dishes?
Well, unfortunately, you will. Sooner than you’d like to.
And while, at first, your flatmates and you might be overly enthusiastic about taking those wine bottles to the recycling bins or mopping down the floors as a sign of your exceptional character, a few parties later things might start to slip.
Maybe you feel like your flatmate should be the one to do the mopping this time since you did it last time, or they should do the recycling trip since it was their friends who drank most of the wine anyway. Maybe you’re just tired, and you feel like you deserve a day off, and they should be okay with that since they already know you’re a good person overall.
But maybe your flatmate feels the same way.
Now everyone is tired and resentful and someone just stepped in a puddle of unknown liquid and thank goodness winter break is only a few weeks away or else there would be serious considerations of finding somewhere else to live to escape this mess.
How to Avoid a Flatmate Divorce
Okay, that was a dramatic example, but the general points still stand. Living with other people will present challenges regardless of who or where you are. Luckily, there are many ways to foster a flat environment full of both fun and functionality, and one only has to look to marital advice to begin.
According to bestselling author Mark Manson, the number one piece of marriage advice is to ‘be together for the right reasons.’ Well, as many of you know, you don’t always have a choice about who your flatmates are. In the Hunger Games-esque arena that is the St Andrews housing market, the mere reality of securing a roof over your head can make you feel like a victor. Because of this, your flatmates may come second to your flat itself.
Perhaps you got lucky, and they are friends of your choice, or perhaps they are strangers with whom you now share an address. Either way, Manson’s advice rings true: whether you’ve known your flatmates since day one of uni or day one of your lease, you’re together for the purpose of sharing a home so that you can attend this school. Overall, it’s a pretty solid reason.
Of course, you hopefully share other reasons for living together, like creating a comfortable home base to come back to after locking in at the library or staying out at the pub, somewhere you feel good inviting friends over, getting work done, and relaxing on the sofa. Building and maintaining this sense of home is a goal that I would imagine most, if not all, flatmates would strive to achieve.
Once you identify your reasons for living together, though, you have to figure out how to realize them.
This brings us to Manson’s second piece of advice, where he broadly says that one should have realistic expectations. To circle back to the idea of a honeymoon phase, while it’s wonderful in the moment, it won’t last forever–cue the sticky floors and dirty dishes. As fun as it is to romanticise your life and pretend like you’re living in an episode of Friends or The Sex Lives of College Girls, it’s important to remember that you don’t have the luxury of a props team and cleaning crew to magically make the remnants of your last flat party or baking night disappear.
You will have a mess to clean up, and that’s okay. Your flatmates will have messes too.
Ideally, you all are responsible for doing your own cleaning, but if your flatmate is slammed with work and doesn’t have time to put away their cereal bowl and coffee mug, you may as well do it for them. Chances are, the roles will be reversed at some point, and it’s nice to keep that system of reciprocity going. However, if it turns into a situation where one person is doing all of the cleaning, that’s an issue.
That brings us to Manson’s third and fourth pieces of advice regarding the importance of respect and honesty.
As we all know, communication is a key part of any relationship. When you’re living with someone day in and day out, its importance is only heightened. Talking to your flatmates about issues–from trivial ones, like always leaving their toothbrush out on the sink, to serious ones, like responsibilities of garbage removal and electricity bills–shows the respect that you have for them and yourself.
It’s not always easy, especially if it’s regarding an aspect of their behaviour, and you don’t want to seem like an annoying, reprimanding parent, but it’s a crucial part of keeping tensions low. You may not feel the need to be besties with your flatmate, and that’s totally okay, but the level of understanding and appreciation that you will feel for each other when you have these open lines of communication will keep your flat feeling like a play you look forward to returning to.
Now Forever Hold Your Peace
Although they’re not perfectly analogous, the living situations of flatmates and married partners are pretty similar, so we can apply the advice given to the latter rather easily, if loosely, to the former.
Whether your flat is the picture of bliss, and you’re reading this article as a reminder of how well you’re doing, or you could use a little help getting your flat to a state of fun, fair fitness, hopefully you’re feeling confident in how to proceed from here. By reminding yourself of these simple ideas, I have no doubt that you’ll get your flatmates saying “I do!” to living with you again.