By Yasmin Hussain, Second Year, English
The subtle hints, the impromptu tete-a-tetes; the awkward silence as you work up the courage to pop the question: ‘will you live with me in second year?’
There is an immense social pressure to be coupled up as early in the ‘social season’ as possible. Prices are skyrocketing – creating an imperative to find a cheap-ish, well-located house as soon as October! However, there is a fine line in between being the ‘early-bird who catches the worm’ and choosing housemates that you would actually be compatible with. This shared burden transports us to the world of Bridgerton, where a lecture hall is a ball, the flat a visiting room for gentleman callers, society formals decadent dinner parties, and you, the unwitting gentleman or maiden whose hands are tied in scouting for a spouse.
You are unwittingly thrown head-first into the ‘marriage mart’. Panic surges as engagement announcements become commonplace. Many of your peers entered the season with a suitor already on hand. Many, however, seem to be marrying for convenience, not for love, some even meeting their fiancé for the first time at the altar. Suddenly everyone knows what to do and how to do it, and you are seemingly the only wallflower left! Your mind scrambles for alternatives such as remaining in halls, renting a studio flat, commuting, or fleeing the lot to become a governess.
'Admittedly, since your windows don’t fully shut and you cannot afford a high energy bill, it does feel as though you are living in a freezing Georgian mansion.'
After sharing a dance and a doner kebab with a suitable suitor, you gratefully accept an offer. However, your engagement quickly begins to unfold. The demand to make arrangements consumes your calendar: life becomes a spiral of endless nights searching on Rightmove, phone calls to letting agents, tours around houses of horrors, ghosting and rejections. Conversation hits a nail-biting, face-reddening low when you’re forced to reveal your meagre budget. Relations begin to degrade as one prospective housemate dislikes every house you have visited, one has been of no help whatsoever, one fails to communicate essential information, and one cannot handle stress. But could you really have hoped for better when you chose them based on only a month’s courtship? Your options now are to stick with the arrangement and hope that your betrothed doesn’t turn out to be insufferable, or face scandal and the possibility of no prospects at all by breaking up the union.
Congratulations! Your turmoil has paid off: the big day has arrived at last, and you are promised housing security ’til death do you part. Your husband has promised you a manor house in the country of five thousand acres, but when you move in to your uninspiring flat there is mould in the bathroom, every surface is sticky, all of your furniture is warped or tea-stained, and nearly every plug socket is temperamental – an outrage considering the sizable dowry you were forced to pay! Admittedly, since your windows don’t fully shut and you cannot afford a high energy bill, it does feel as though you are living in a freezing Georgian mansion. Your wedding night is accompanied by the sound of traffic and someone throwing up on your doorstep. If you are lucky, you may even one day wake up to the land baron popping in unannounced.
Josie Roberts
So, why do we deal with this social charade, this inequality? The answer is demand: considering that we have no choice but to find private housing near our university, students continue to be extorted. The University of Bristol advertises that shared private rentals cost between £7,200 and £10,800 annually, excluding bills. The student maintenance loan is then between £4,915 and £10,544. Students inevitably become reliant on their parents: the bride must plead permission from her father to marry, just as the student must ask their parents whether they can afford Bristol’s rent prices, adding yet another class barrier to higher education. This financial insecurity is even further cemented by the necessity of finding a guarantor.
Is it not time for modern dating? As students we are not afforded the liberty of time, nor the ability to meet somebody and decide it is not working out (without becoming a spinster who is doomed to live alone). The soaring rent prices are a dowry we must pay simply because of our social powerlessness, while landlords modernise the term ‘landed gentry’ and bask in their own upper-class greed. We tolerate them failing to fix major problems, with the conditions bordering on the uninhabitable. Is it time to don our Phrygian caps, write pamphlets and exercise our voices, demand fairer treatment, and chant for our housing hunt to be in our own hands?
For an apt conclusion I’d like to paraphrase Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice (2005): ‘I’m nineteen years old, I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m a burden to my parents. Don’t judge me.’
Featured image: Epigram / Lilja Nassar
Are you anxious about finding a place to live/people to live with?
