Opinion

Love and the housing crisis: Living together because the rent is too high

To what extent has the fabric of our intimate lives in post-recession Ireland been shaped by the real economy?

A friend’s lease in a house share has ended suddenly, and so he and his not-quite-girlfriend are talking about moving in together
A friend’s lease in a house share has ended suddenly, and so he and his not-quite-girlfriend are talking about moving in together
Rachel O'Dwyer
Sun Dec 08 2024 - 07:00

On a freezing evening in November, I walk to my friend’s house for drinks. His ex-girlfriend, who is still his housemate, is travelling for work. Their dog, Alfie, joins us in the sittingroom, a cartoonish shag of fur ending in four stick legs. At 13, his hips sway in a way that would make my Pilates instructor wince as he ambles over, button eyes peering out from beneath a Stevie Nicks fringe. Alfie has one more good year left, my friend says, and so will probably avoid displacement from this house because neither he nor his ex can afford to part ways any time soon.

Later in the month my husband comes home from a screening in town and tells me he has had drinks with a mutual friend. This friend’s lease in a house share has ended suddenly, and so he and his not-quite-girlfriend are talking about moving in together. They fought about it all the way to the cinema. This conversation has come too soon and is more than their relationship is ready for.

I’m reminded of these friends while reading Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, which touches on how romantic entanglements are forced to bear the weight of the rental situation in Ireland. Among the list of characters are students in inner-city squats, young women supplementing their rent with gifts and sporadic income from Only Fans, lawyers volunteering for the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), pets like Alfie rendered homeless by awkward house shares, and idyllic cottages in Leitrim – Leitrim being, like Innisfree (which coincidentally is also in Leitrim) the real and imaginary getaway of creative types who can no longer afford to live in Dublin.

“Your home, your refuge, the stage for all the private dramas of your intimate life can be taken away from you at any time, through no fault of your own, for the financial benefit of someone wealthier than you are,” Rooney once wrote in an Irish Times article on the crippling rental situation in Ireland. And when that happens? We might be asked to invest our intimate lives with economic burdens they can’t support.

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In Dublin city centre, according to Statista, the average cost of a room with a single bed is €823. A double bed is €864. Average rent in most parts of the country are roughly twice those of the average mortgage payment. Partnering up becomes something less than natural instinct and more than economic sense – it’s simple necessity. There’s no use pretending that our romantic entanglements today don’t factor in who will pay the rent or meet the deposit. Now that home ownership is unthinkable without private sector employment and intergenerational bequests, the outmoded question “what are your means?” is once again in vogue.

If our parents married for love or because living in sin was socially unacceptable, today’s young (and not so young) adults in Ireland might find that they are living together because they can’t afford to do otherwise. Forget staying together for appearances or for the sake of the children. This is staying together because the rent is too high.

Author of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, was scathing about romance. When viewing the middle-class housewives of 1950s America, she observed these women were willingly choosing a life that their foremothers had entered out of economic necessity. If women had once been married for the family farm or business, or simply so there was one less mouth to feed, today they entered the institution of their own free will. “They call it love,” Silvia Federici wrote in her manifesto Wages for Housework in 1975, “we call it unpaid labour.”

Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics, a brilliant set of interlinked short stories set in Dublin, deals with the practicality of allying your economic fortunes with those of another person

“It used to be about the money,” these women seem to say – “now it’s about feelings.” When you bring love into the equation you get cheated. You might end up paying twice. Today’s women don’t suffer from the maladies that Friedan diagnosed – they’re not intellectually frustrated or chained to the ironing board – but the same economic alliances that she observed in premodern couples have returned in modern Ireland, albeit in a new guise.

I think of Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics, a brilliant set of interlinked short stories set in Dublin. The protagonist, Margaret, moves from mid-twenties post-crash to late-thirties in grim Covid lockdown, from renting with girlfriends to first mortgages, from doomed romances to failed marriage. The stories also deal in one way or another with the practicality of allying your economic fortunes with those of another person. “There may be an economic dimension to [Margaret] being propelled towards love and affection,” Armstrong told Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ radio last April. “It makes sense to fall in love with somebody and to combine your finances and to find a way of having a mortgage and to form a family unit. It seems frivolous, but really, it determines your life choices. It determines where you put your savings.”

Margaret is a fictional character, but I’m left wondering how the fabric of our intimate lives in post-recession Ireland have been shaped by the real economy – the rent that’s too high, the families we made or those we left behind in search of cheaper housing, or had less time to care for as we worked to pay the mortgage. “When you feel you can’t afford rent or to heat your house, why wouldn’t you crave security more than you would a lifelong affection that holds out for The One?” Armstrong tells me. “My real fear with this crisis is that people are finding it much harder to climb their way back out of love, and leave relationships that are over. For most incomes it will be financially ruinous to make a bid for your own freedom and happiness.”

Perhaps the reality is that the great Irish stories were never about finding true love so much as finding a halfway decent place to live.