Númenor

Despite contentions by many aggravated flatmates to the contrary, agreeing to live with someone has always meant agreeing to live with any girlfriend or boyfriend they may acquire down the track. Two millennia before the invention of television, Socrates' flatmates woke up at three in the morning to find some shirtless guy mending his sandals in their vestibule.

When Hilary and I first started going out, I became the House Boyfriend. Her housemate sometimes found me in a towel mending a harmonica in their living room. I paid no rent and never did any housework.

Later, when I moved out with Colin, we swapped and Hilary became our apartment's House Girlfriend. Colin sometimes waited for forty-five minutes to take his shower while she ran through some occult cosmetics lustration in the bathroom. I don't know anything about it except that it involved filling up the sink with water.

When Colin moved to California, Hilary and I moved in together. After we broke up, I kept the apartment and invited Ken to come live with me. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of the arrangement.

Between them, Ken and his girlfriend owned one dressing gown (and it, threadbare to the point of obscenity). Until they got around to getting dressed sometime around midday, only one of them could leave their bedroom at a time.

The close quarters also foists a haphazard cognisance of your flatmates' lovemaking upon your awareness (in particular if in its course they should involve the wall that divides their bedroom from yours). I'd never dealt with this before and had assumed I'd react with one (or both) of the usual two responses we make to sexuality: arousal or embarrassment. Instead, I found it cast the condition of my newfound bachelorhood into rather severe relief. When you find yourself designing a fantasy roleplaying system on the computer at three in the morning, while your flatmate has terrific sex next door, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether you might've taken a wrong turn somewhere.