Page 44 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

The decision that we should move in was made, like all great romantic gestures, on the basis of our finances. Initially when we all got to London, Jessica lived with her friends Grace, Sophie, and Katie (known collectively as ‘the girls’) in a very damp house in Clapham. Only, they all had deposits to put down on their own flats, and therefore found themselves buying various Victorianground-floor conversions, to fill with fairy lights, ornamental gold pineapples and neon signs.

Jess, on the other hand, wasn’t in line to get a nice big 15 per cent deposit like the rest of the girls, who had rich parents or dead grandparents. So she went to look at various squats with available rooms to rent before coming to stay at my shared house with mascara under her eyes. ‘It’s fine,’ she says, as we make carbonara in the kitchen. She grates Parmesan with a grater so blunt it’s barely making shavings. I wash up the pans which are sitting in the sink, filled with grey water and marbled with soapy fat. ‘I’ll find something. There’s got to be a houseshare of non-psychos in an okay area for less than half my salary.’

She opens the fridge to get something and does a strange sort of whimper noise.

‘What?’ I ask, across the kitchen in a second.

She points into the fridge. There’s a half-smoked cigarette stubbed out into the packet of bacon we’d bought at the nice supermarket over the weekend.

‘Maybe we should move in together?’ I ask.

And so we do. Initially Jessica was talking about us finding a mews house on a cobbled street, somewhere more central so that we could save money by walking to work. ‘I’m going to grow sweet peas and tomatoes on the balcony,’ she’d announced. This idea was very short-lived when we realised that our budget wasn’t going to stretch to the garage of a mews house. In the end we found a bedsit on the top floor of a big family house in North London. It has a bedroom, a little kitchen with a sofa and space for a telly, and a tiny bathroom. There are skylights in every room, and while it’s a long walk from the Tube and the family who own the house made us swear never to have more than two people over, it’s ours. For the first few weeks, we lie in bed watching thesunset through the hole punctured in the roof and hold hands. We sleep in jumpers to save putting the heating on and all our saucepans are from Poundland, but we’re happy. So happy that we stop doing anything other than going to work, coming home and being together. Being together becomes an activity. We no longer put things in our diary or ask each other what the plan is for the weekend. The plan is Jack and Jessica. Living together is the activity. I talk to Jessica as I wake up, as I brush my teeth, as she makes us breakfast, as I get dressed, as she gets dressed, swapping over because there isn’t space to both be in the bedroom at the same time. We walk to the Tube together, text each other throughout the day and sit down together in front of the TV at night before we fall asleep next to each other.

It was nice, until it wasn’t. Now it feels like the sloping ceilings are getting lower and lower. Every noise she makes feels loud. She putsGilmore GirlsandFriendson her laptop in the background while she’s pottering around, and the chatty, cheerful dialogue drives me insane. There’s no silence and nowhere I can stretch out. Her clothes are strewn across the bed and on the floor like a sort of fabric salad. She has dozens of bottles in the bathroom, splayed paperbacks on the kitchen table and leaves as many glasses and bottles of water on her bedside table as it can accommodate. Within three weeks, the woman who I once said ‘wasn’t capable of being annoying’ is irritating me like I had never dreamed possible.

I get home from the office, throw my keys on to the table and within seconds, Jess has bounded from the bedroom. She leaves on the dot of five because she hates her job. She’s wearing pyjamas and she’s got some kind of goo on her face.

‘Hello,’ she says, throwing her arms around me. ‘I love you. How was your day?’

‘Fine.’ I start putting my things away, hanging my jacket up behind the door, placing my shoes in the shoe rack.

‘Any gossip?’

‘Not really.’

‘Oh, boring. I think Amy is pregnant again, and she literally just got back from mat leave so Sharon is going to be fucking fuming...’ She pauses. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Still fine. Just like I was two minutes ago.’

‘Someone’s grumpy. Do you want—’

‘I’m not grumpy,’ I hear myself snap. Shout, if I’m honest.

She looks taken aback. ‘Yeah, doesn’t sound like you’re grumpy at all.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, slumping a bit.

‘What’s going on with you?’

‘I just—’ I swallow, knowing that what I’m about to say is going to ruin the happy, lovely bubble that she’s inside, that she’s so happy and I’m going to take that away from her. ‘I’m struggling a little bit. With living together.’

‘Okay,’ she says, going to the fridge. ‘What do you want to do about that?’

I don’t really know how to process this because I was expecting her to shout at me, or cry, or do something befitting of the news that I’m not finding our blissful life totally blissful.

‘Did you – you realise – I just said that I’m struggling. With us. Living together.’

‘Yeah, obviously,’ she says.

‘Sorry?’

She pours herself a glass of wine and offers me one. I shake my head and she gives me a pitying look. ‘Jack, this is a massive adjustment; we’ve totally changed the whole nature of our relationship. I swear, men really need to read more magazines.’

‘Wait, are you finding it hard too?’

‘Of course I am. I love you. I love living with you, but like, more in theory than in practice right now, you know? Like you’re great, love you, but having someone else around the entire time is a lot. And you’re really easily irritated by my very normal living habits. And there’s all this stuff I can’t do when you’re here.’

‘Me too!’ I say, equal parts shocked and delighted by where this is going. ‘I just want to sit and write for a while, and there’s nowhere to do that. I can’t sit in front of you and just not talk.’

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