• Politics
  • Mossy Brackets: Why you don’t fuck your flatmate: Part I

Politics

Mossy Brackets: Why you don’t fuck your flatmate: Part I

Mossy is back with an epic two-parter. If her tale of cohabitation woes don't serve as a warning of what not to do in the chaotic dating Berlin landscape, then nothing will. Stay tuned Thursday for part two.

Image for Mossy Brackets: Why you don't fuck your flatmate: Part I
Photo by Tim Schapker (Wikimedia Commons)

You’ve read the headline, and I know what you’re thinking, so I should specify: I didn’t have sex with my housemate; I decided to let someone who I was having sex with become my housemate in the most confusing of circumstances. Which is even stupider.

A chronology of events: end of last year I had a room free in my apartment, placed an ad on wg-gesucht.de, heaps of people replied. My apartment is disproportionately posh compared to me – think Kelly Osborne keeled over vomiting in Versailles and then you’re getting close. Then just as I would’ve been choosing someone, I had a terrible bike accident and spent three months in a wheelchair.

It was a time in which my brackets grew particularly mossy, apart that time when I had broken-leg-sex with Germany’s tallest man. During this period of disability and sex with a giraffe, I decided that I wasn’t up to the task of choosing a new housemate, so a friend who was between places moved in.

When Germany’s tallest man left me for an able-bodied woman, I was heartbroken and felt discriminated against and thought it fit to spend the last of my time in the wheelchair being an alcoholic because the nice people at the Edeka started home-delivering groceries (read: drinks) to me whilst before I had been dependent on friends to shop for me. So this final month of wheelchair-grocery-shopping-freedom meant 2+2=Mossy in a wheelchair being a booze hound.

Anyway, the point of this is that I FINALLY got out of the wheelchair, quit the sauce and began to hobble and re-enter the world as semi-functioning adult. But the time spent rotting away in my apartment would have lasting effects on my ability to make rational decisions. My first re-entry into adult romance would be marked by going on date with a hot hipster who’d been chatting me up on OkCupid. Very hot and very hipster. (He even does social media for a living – that’s certified.)

He wrote “I know you from somewhere! I applied for your room on WG-Gesucht and you never wrote back to me.” We’d gone from one iconic Berlin online platform to another, without ever having met. We dated, we started having casual sex (I only call it ‘casual sex’ and not ‘wasted sex’, because that’s what everyone else calls it and I am happy to keep up the lie). We chatted heaps on Facebook, exchanged compromising photos and then did it all over again.  I jokingly suggested that now that the room was free again now, he could move in. Like one of those flirty jokes that you’re actually way too sensitive to make.

Three weeks later, and intermittent sexting in the meantime, he asked if he could move in. I was so excited. He actually wanted to live with me. Why would anyone want to live with me? I don’t even want to live with me. I mean, you don’t go from dating to living together without love, right? So obviously, he was in love with me. I started making plans: clean eating, bleached toilet porcelain, de-hair, de-slut, throw out all my bad knickers.

My friend said it would be a bad idea to live with someone whom I would have to “edit” myself around, but I thought it was a fucking great idea. Self-editing was what I’d been lacking all along. Anyway, we’d only be together as ‘housemates’ for approximately 18 days before 2 Become 1 and we consummated our love together under that same roof. And then I was going to make a shitload of money renting the ‘spare room’ on Airbnb.

Did I mention how hot he is? Prior to him moving in, both of us were clearly getting a bit excited. “Oh, but we can’t touch each other anymore,” he wrote on chat, “but we can always walk around naked ;)” I’m not German, so needless to say I don’t seize all available opportunities to prance around ohne Klammotten even at home; I’m Anglo-Saxon, I try to avoid everyone, including myself, from seeing me naked. So I would be living with a crush and the stakes were going to be high…

Stay tuned Thursday for Part II.