Rachel* realised how bad things had become when her bed fell apart. “My housemate had taken the screws out,” the 38-year-old recalls. Perhaps there had been warning signs beforehand; the housemate in question had been sneaking friends into the guest room and secretly charging them rent while pocketing the money. “When I called her out on it, things turned nasty. She called the police on my uncle after he turned up to visit me while I was at the shops, claiming I’d brought someone round to intimidate her. Then she went away for the weekend and took the broadband router out with her so I couldn’t use the internet.”
It’s one of a multitude of rental horror stories that abound in today’s increasingly precarious housing crisis. Strangers agree to live together, usually connecting via some sort of online portal – think SpareRoom, Instagram or a random “girls who rent” Facebook group. It transpires that said housemate is not the “chilled out, yoga-loving, documentary-watching” avatar they purported to be. And before you know it, living with this person becomes unbearably awkward, tense, and – in some cases – dangerous.
It’s alarmingly common. According to the latest census, the proportion of people living alone in England and Wales is 8.5 per cent. That means most of us are sharing our living spaces, either with partners or flatmates. Any number of things can spark a disagreement between us and the people with whom we cohabit, though according to a 2020 Barclays survey, the most common issues are housemates who don’t clean up after themselves and those who steal food without asking or replacing it.
Other gripes include inviting friends over without asking, not replacing key household items, not recycling properly, and taking too long in the bathroom. Given how difficult it’s becoming to rent property today, particularly in London, a lot of us are being forced into living situations without much choice. Rising demand – due to the increasing difficulty of getting on the property ladder – has led to a highly fraught landscape. Rental fees are higher than ever, competition is increasing, and let’s not forget about rogue landlords. One consequence of all this is that we wind up living with some rather questionable people. And, inevitably, sometimes those people might not like us very much.
“My old flatmate used to contaminate my food with chilli,” recalls Flora*, 41. “She blamed me for killing a plant that had already died when she went away for two weeks and it made everything really difficult. She turned the downstairs neighbours against me and I started to avoid using the living room and just kept myself in my bedroom until I could move out.”
Occasionally, the disagreements can get physical. “In one houseshare with two men and one woman, the woman seemed to dislike me pretty quickly for no real reason so I tried to avoid her,” says Rachel. “One day I came home from an evening out with friends. She was sprawled out on the sofa and shouted at me as soon as I walked in about how I never bought toilet roll. She then stormed into the bathroom when I was washing my face and splashed the water at me. Needless to say, I soon moved out.”
Then there are those involving animals. “The next flat share I had was with a guy who needed someone to look after his dog while he was away,” adds Rachel. “He left me a list of walking times and what to feed him. For those 10 days, I didn’t have a social life; my days revolved around the dog. When he got back, he weighed the dog and said that he had lost weight and that I hadn’t fed him properly.” Things got worse from there. “My roommate then refused to talk to me, started throwing a basketball at the wall for hours on end at my bedroom wall from the living room, and said he didn’t think he could live with me after that.”
There are also those audacious housemates who seem happy to take liberties with your space. “I rented a flat which I thought was with one woman, who then after a couple of weeks decided to put a partition up in the living room and rent it out to a man without telling me,” says Emma*, 35. “She then covered the oven in foil when she went out to make sure I couldn’t use it.”
None of this is easy to deal with, least of all because it often means having to leave a property and find somewhere else to live – and someone else to live with – which could be just as dire an environment. It could well be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire, and you won’t always be able to exit the situation – at least not quickly. Most tenancy agreements require you to give at least one month’s notice, and if you’re leaving before your tenancy is up, you usually have to replace yourself before you can terminate the contract. Coping strategies, then, are key.
First up, try to talk to your flatmate. “Using ‘I statements’ can help to offer our perspective, rather than making it sound like blaming,” advises counsellor Georgina Sturmer. These could be as simple as, “I feel uncomfortable with xyz”, or “I am feeling like this isn’t working because…” and so on. Sturmer adds: “If it feels too much to discuss emotional issues, then perhaps use a discussion to clarify any practical issues around the home.” When having fraught conversations about things that are hurting or bothering you, it’s important to also try to stay within what Sturmer calls your “adult self”.
“Sometimes we get pulled into a ‘parent-child’ dynamic when we have difficulties with another person,” she explains. “We might find ourselves acting overly compliant, bossy, critical or rebellious in response to the other party. If we can try to stay in a calm ‘adult’ frame of mind then it can help us to defuse any tension.”The other thing to bear in mind if your housemate is bothering you, or you feel that you’re bothering them, is to question where those feelings are coming from. Because they might not have much to do with the other person at all.
“In psychotherapy, we often think about ‘transference’, when we project old feelings onto someone in our everyday life,” says Sturmer. “In this instance, it might be that our flatmate reminds us of someone from the past. Maybe a bully or a difficult colleague or someone who left us feeling insecure.” It could also be the result of something else going on in your life that’s creating negative thought patterns that lead you to believe someone has an issue with you when they don’t.
“If we struggle with our self-esteem or with feelings of anxiety, then sometimes we might find ourselves moving into a spiral of catastrophising,” adds Sturmer. “So if someone has indicated that they don’t like something we have done, we might accelerate our thinking until we have decided that they must hate us.” Ultimately, if you’re having unresolvable difficulties with the people you live with, the best thing you can do is move out. But until that opportunity arises, the simplest way to cope is probably just to spend less time at home. And possibly to tighten the screws on your bed frame.
*Names have been changed.
