When a couple start living together, it can seem like a dream come true. In fact, their problems may have only just begun.
‘You can’t know someone until you have lived with them,’ Michelle says with feeling. ‘I moved in with Ben with such high expectations and before long I felt I was sharing with a stranger. Ben had somehow disappeared and left an identical twin in his place – and I wasn’t sure that I liked the substitute.’
Ben agrees, but for different reasons. ‘I thought living together was a kind of magical catalyst that would turn Michelle into the perfect domestic partner. I knew that she had never shown interest in that kind of thing, but I still somehow expected it to happen.’
Michelle and Ben found that the experience of moving in together nearly ended their relationship because they were so unprepared for the emotional and practical upheaval it caused.
Making the decision
They had been going out together for just over a year when two of their friends married and bought a house. The rented flat the newly-weds had been living in was offered to Michelle and Ben, who still lived at home.
‘We never really thought it through or talked about the effect it might have on our relationship,’ says Michelle.
Disillusionment
The two of them remember with pleasure the night they moved in. But soon afterwards, things started to deteriorate rapidly. For one thing, they both felt very differently about being in the flat.
Michelle was relieved not to be sharing with her sisters any more. Ben, however, missed his home and family. ‘It’s not that I’m a mother’s boy, but I just had no idea of how much was actually done for me.’
It also came as something of a shock for Ben to find himself seriously stretched financially for the first time and to discover that for some unexplained reason their squalor was building up around him and there never seemed to be anything to eat in the flat. As far as he could make out, it had to be Michelle’s fault that things were not running smoothly.
Resentment
Michelle was also becoming exasperated. It was one thing feeling free to make her own mess without someone nagging, but having to cope with the mess created by two people was too much. She found herself feeling resentful about cleaning up at all, because there always seemed to be so much to do. She began to find Ben rather difficult and irritable, but she did not know what was the matter with him, and did not tell him how she was feeling either.
‘Our first main row came when Ben saw me ironing a blouse one morning and brought me two of his shirts to do at the same time. I was appalled. I hate ironing at the best of times, and it seemed a real cheek that he expected me to do his as well. He brought up the fact that he had taken all the clothes to the launderette and he thought that it was the least I could do.’
It turned out that Ben had gone to the launderette in the first place because he had run out of clean socks.
‘That was rather funny actually,’ remembers Michelle. ‘He looked in the bag where we kept all the dirty things and said, “So that’s where all my socks have gone to. They’re all dirty you know.” He had never even thought of that. It had never occurred to him that somebody had to do the washing.’
That evening they patched up their disagreement about the ironing, but a rift had started – and it began to grow.
The rot sets in
‘She was really selfish,’ said Ben. ‘I came home late from work one day to find her eating some baked beans on toast. I’d come to realize that I couldn’t expect her to make a full dinner as she works too, so I just said, “That looks nice”. I suppose I hoped that she might make me some too. When she didn’t, I went into the kitchen to do it myself.
‘I found that she’d finished the bread, and had just bought one can of beans, which was now empty and in the bin. She knew it was impossible for me to do any shopping during the day, but she had just bought enough for herself and hadn’t given me a moment’s thought.’
Michelle remembers feeling rather guilty on that particular occasion. ‘I think I might have been trying to annoy him,’ she said.
The end of the road
Their relationship continued to deteriorate, as did their sex life. One night, in an attempt to patch things up, they went to an Italian restaurant that had romantic associations for them.
But going back to that restaurant turned out to be a mistake. The contrast between how they had felt then and how they felt now depressed them both.
‘I felt that I had nothing to say to Ben that wouldn’t lead to a row and all our easy intimacy seemed to have evaporated totally. I just burst into tears.’
Talking it through
When they arrived home, Michelle announced that she did not think she could go on living with Ben, and that they would have to decide who was to keep the flat and what arrangements they needed to make.
‘It was the first time we had really talked to each other about the problems facing us, without having a row, since we moved into the flat,’ Michelle says. ‘We didn’t argue, we just sadly laid out our feelings to each other and miraculously we both listened.’
Michelle told Ben of her growing feelings of loneliness in the relationship, her fear that he was taking her for granted and that all he really wanted was a mother substitute.
Then Ben talked about the way he felt. He explained to Michelle that he expected a cosy togetherness from living together, whereas he felt that she retreated into selfishness, ignoring his needs and wants and acting as if they were merely flatmates.
The solution
Ben and Michelle talked for hours and, although nothing was really resolved that night, they both admitted that they still loved each other and wanted to make it work. They both recognized that some serious compromising needed to take place on both sides.
The most important breakthrough came the next night when they sat down and sorted out the practical details of living together. Housework, cooking and shopping were discussed and timetabled. ‘We both knew at heart that we were fundamentally lazy people,’ says Michelle, ‘so we needed to be organized about chores.’
Once positive communication was more established between them, other things slotted into place.
Michelle says that the atmosphere improved very quickly. ‘There was really so little wrong with our relationship that making such relatively small efforts made all the difference.
‘When we started pulling together as a couple I found myself falling in love with Ben all over again. But it was a different feeling – deeper. I started to really see that marriage was a good idea.’
Ben also agrees with Michelle that their relationship has gradually become better than ever.