Dating in house shares is awkward

In the beginning, there’s the meeting the housemates for the first time. Maybe you’re on date two or three.

Then, if things reach the two or three month mark, there’s this delicate dance between carving out space to spend time alone as a couple but not too much time that it puts your housemate’s nose out of joint. Somehow, that always seems to be harder when you’re friends.

I put a call out on my Instagram last week, hoping to chat to people with experience of dating someone in a house share. I’ve been doing a lot of these call outs recently for a big writing project and I usually get a couple of responses but this time, I had loads. There’s a lot to say, it seems.

The voice notes and Insta messages told stories of not being properly introduced to housemates and bumping into them in the kitchen the morning after the night before. There you are having stayed over your date’s house for the first time, a perfect stranger to their housemates, having to introduce yourself to them while they’re buttering their toast.

Another described how, on meeting a date’s housemates for the first time, they were given the cold shoulder, the housemates being overly protective.

Then there were multiple descriptions of just how much of a nuisance you feel hanging out in someone’s else's communal living space.

I have vivid memories myself of the first few months of a relationship where, feeling so conscious that I might overstep the mark with his housemates, I would just want to hide in my new partner’s room to stay out of the way. Even opting to eat dinner and watching TV in there. I didn’t want to be an inconvenience to them. But when that was on my mind, it was hard to relax and embrace the carefree months of getting to know each other.

And then there’s the getting intimate when all that separates you from the people you’ve literally just met is a paper-thin wall.

The hive of emotional and physical activity under one roof makes for a tricky dating landscape.

Before now, I’d not given much thought to how little conversation we have in house shares about how dating someone might change the dynamic. It’s something that, when I’ve been dating myself while living in a house share, I’ve approached only when I’ve really had to. And always hesitantly, wanting to keep things as private as possible. But it’s not really possible to keep anything private when you live in such close quarters.

So it was refreshing when I picked up Urban Communal Living and found a chapter by Noah Walton. In it, he’s written a rule book for intentional communities where he outlines how sex and relationships are navigated in the rented spaces he has set up. House shares usually operate differently to intentional co-living communities, I think, but his ideas could shape a discussion for a house share group.

A rigid rule book is rarely going to work for all the different characters and lifestyles inside a house share though.

Phil

writes a Substack called Super Nuclear and talks a lot about ‘How to live near (and with) friends.’ He explains how a ‘do-ocracy’ can be powerful alternative to a rigid rulebook.

“Do-ocracy empowers individuals to make decisions in the absence of a formal hierarchy.

Do-ocracy is declaring yourself the individual who makes a given decision. For example: “I want to do something about the garden.” Congrats, by saying that you are now Chairman, CEO, Generalissimo(a), and Supreme Dictator of the garden! Now you can make the decision.

You can do anything in the best interest of the community without permission as long as it's mostly reversible.”

Since there are more of us living in house shares for longer, there’s a need to find a balance between the rulebook and the do-ocracy. It’s about allowing enough wiggle room so that we feel an appropriate level of agency over our young adult lives while respecting that we are living alongside others.

When you’re navigating the push and pull between a potential new relationship and your housemate relationships, dating in a house share is always going to feel a bit awkward. Agreeing on a few basic principles that give everyone in the house the agency to live their lives would make it less so.