I share a room with my girlfriend in our student house

I’ve learnt a few pointers about living with bae 24/7.

So I moved into a house this year with a few of my friends and my girlfriend. I know there’s tons of advice out there about how you shouldn’t live with your other half until your 30 and have at least 3 children, but I had already arranged to live with my girlfriend when she was just a friend – and I had a boyfriend (confusing, I know).

Roomies

We live in the same house and pay rent on separate rooms, but my room has become ‘our room’ and hers is a sleepover room for a friend who lives outside of town.

The first thing that I learnt very quickly is that you should do whatever you can to avoid sharing a single bed every night if you want to live with your boyfriend/girlfriend. Yes the single bed is do-able inconvenience when someone is just staying the night, but when you have to share that bed for the entire year it becomes a hell hole of sweat and resentment, a situation to avoid at all costs.

Most accommodations will let you use your own bed if you let them know in advance, so my advice if you want to live with your other half, is to get on eBay and split the costs between you – a few extra quid for a good night’s sleep.

Having the person I love around me 24/7 is, although lovely, a massive distraction.

She is everywhere, her stuff is everywhere, and there’s the constant temptation to go on a cute date to nandoes. But however tempting it maybe, we’re uni students and sometimes we have to actually get some work done, so I’ve had to invest in some weekly planners and set myself a bit of time for the work I need to do each day, because no lecturer is going to give me an extension if my excuse is “Netflix and chill took a lot longer than I anticipated”.

We have no idea where this cat came from

As for the one thing that everyone worries about when you tell them you’re planning on living with the person you’re in a relationship with, and I mean literally everyone, from your mum to your dad’s cousin’s creepy friend: yes, you two are going to argue.

Whether its one big argument or one hundred little ones, you can never agree on everything. And I can’t bear those smug couples who claim they’ve never argued because I can almost guarantee that they’re either lying or one of them is too scared of the other to speak their mind.

My advice for this is to make time to be alone. Whether you leave your friends at uni and have lunch on your own, or go on a walk when everyone’s home, just give yourself that time to actually not be with other people. It can be endlessly draining to have to constantly entertain people, and especially if you don’t even sleep alone.

Sometimes we have to get out the house

Storage is everything. That’s another thing I’ve learnt – Storage for your coursework to your bras, I swear it’s a life saver. In our room we have a medical draw, a drawer for chargers, a draw for towels, so many draws I can’t even begin to tell you. The last thing you want is to be in the middle of deadline week and have no idea where your 10 000 word essay on the cold war is amongst your partners piles of drama coursework that they insist is an ‘organised mess’.

All you will do is stress yourself, and majorly stress them out too, and before you know it you’ve spent the whole night arguing instead of actually getting the work done that you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

Not Netflix and chilling

But probably the most important thing I’ve found while living with my girlfriend is to enjoy living with the person that I care about. It’s so easy to feel in over your head with uni and societies and part time jobs and attempts at a social life, it’s easy to end up forgetting how much you appreciate the person that you sleep next to every night.

So try to take at least one night out of the week to dip into our overdraft and treat them to a nice night out, because no matter how stressful we might find living together, I wouldn’t change it for the world.