Couples · the west, Amsterdam
One name on the flat, and nineteen years of consequences
Pinned as registered_to_one_of_us
- Wants
- other couples who are also staying, for the next ten years
- Rope so far
- Fifteen years together, and over a decade in the same two rooms.
- Around
- the west, Amsterdam
The flat is in one name and has been for nineteen years. That single administrative fact has decided more about our life together than anything we ever chose on purpose: where we live, what we can do at home, why we have never moved, and why one of us has a slightly strange relationship with the paperwork of our own marriage.
Forty two and forty four, out west, together fifteen years. We both tie and we are both tied, and we have been doing this in the same two rooms for well over a decade.
Having somewhere is the reason we have any of it, and we know that perfectly well. Almost everybody we meet is in a sublet, or a shared flat, or on a lease with a date printed on it, and we have watched people stop entirely because they moved and the new place did not work and there was no way to fix that. We do not think we were clever. We think we were early.
What we would like is other couples who are also staying. Not because we mind the ones who are not, but because we have been here long enough to have said goodbye to a great many people, and we would quite like some friends we will still have in ten years.
We are settled, dull, and at home most evenings. That is the whole offer. If you want people who will still be here when your lease runs out, we are those people.