Good Or Shit: Housemate Interviews

I've been living with the same four people for over a year now. Two loopy blokes and two totally loopy women. And a sexy Ryan Gosling lookalike, but we don't talk about him. Despite the occasional "Who ate all my...", "How long are your dishes going to stay there...", "Whose turn is to buy toilet paper because I know it's not mine..." I love my housemates. They're a stand up bunch. We're friends. We're like a weird little family. But now one of the loopy women is leaving, shattering a dynamic, and we have to find someone to replace her.

There are probably two kinds of relationships we're the most picky about: who we date, and who we live with. These days, both start on the internet.

I've always wanted to give internet dating a crack. Shopping for people, especially people you might be attracted to, sounds like fun. Going out with new people, especially people you might be attracted to, also sounds like fun. However, the difference between internet dating and housemate hunting is this: at the end of the day, you can abscond from a shit date, you can dump a shit boyfriend. Choosing someone to live with is a commitment. There is so much riding on it.

We spent most of Saturday afternoon and a good part of Saturday night interviewing woman after woman. Sizing them up, challenging them, vetting them, and just trying to find one we could all agree on. A somewhat fascinating process, it's similar to a job interview but one where you get to discuss all the things you would never ever discuss with an HR department.

Do you have raging parties? Do you play loud music? Do you allocate fridge shelves? Do you lie around smoking pot all day? Do you clean up after yourself? I've even seen advertisements that stipulate very clearly defined specifics like – “Must love dance music” and “No reality TV watchers allowed.” People take this shit very seriously. And fair enough, you're pretty much going to be stuck with them. It's a risk. It's a gamble.

Our first two interviewees accidentally overlapped because one of them was late. I tried to get them to fight each other in the lounge room but they weren't keen on it. They were both in their mid-to-late twenties: one a pretty blonde Estonian woman who liked pop music, the other tall, alternative looking, Swedish, with structured tattooed eyebrows and taste for metal music.

"Israel or Palestine?" I asked them.

Estonia leant forward, "Is anyone here Jewish?" she asked.

Sweden, sitting next to her, raised a hand, "I am."

Now, the most facetious of my housemates has a habit of riling people by arranging his face into the perfect emulation of all-seriousness and then saying the most inappropriate thing he can think of, or just flat-out lying to you. At least once a week he plans my murder. Not quietly in his own room with the door closed. He sits on the edge of my bed while I'm reading and talks me through every gruesome, horrific, and often humiliating detail. So, when a candidate turned to the rest of us and declared "Ok, he's annoying me now," she instantly rose to the top of the list while the rest of us fell to the floor laughing.

We had a lovely, sweetly spoken Irish girl who I wished would just give me a little cuddle. And we had a softly spoken Portuguese girl who seemed so terrified about life, I wanted to cuddle her.

One girl tried to blackmail me with tickets to Vance Joy, and another one infuriated me with her snobbery:

 “I spend all my money on clothes and I just eat up fashion magazines,” she said.

“How do you feel about sharing your clothes?” I asked her.

“Not unless you've got a Balenciaga handbag.”

“I have a Michael Kors handbag.”

“Ergh. Yuk. I hate Michael Kors.”

“Oh. A friend gave it to me.”

“Yeah, I'm sure she did.”

After hours of learning about people's cleaning expectations, shower schedule needs, their top five films and the kind of music they listen to; after numerous bitchy text messages passed slyly beneath the noses of unsuspecting candidates who were rubbing one or two of three judges up the wrong way without even knowing it; after listening to the boys tell another chick, for the seventeenth time, how much they love Drake and how they finish each other's Drake sentences, our dream girl walked in. And she managed to woo all three of us.

Relaxed, cool, funny, smart, an avid reader and watcher of films, she liked to play the guitar quietly in her room, liked to listen to Tool and A Perfect Circle, but she also liked hip hop and “loads of other stuff”. It's hard to explain what it was because it was just a vibe, an aura, and it washed over us. “This is the one” we said to each other, with our eyes, when she wasn't looking.

For almost an hour she sat and drank wine with us and as the time for our next interview drew nearer, we wondered whether she would just stay and pretend she was one of our friends.

We saw two more people that night and as I closed the door on the last one, the three of us started dancing and singing the name of the girl we knew we all had picked. Like she was everything we'd ever wanted in a woman flatmate, we began dreaming of our future together.

Sigh.

For all the love we bore her, in the end she was the one who wasn't sure. When we told her we'd picked her she told us she had one more place to see and then she would get back to us. Another place to see?! We waited by the phone, but she didn't call. And when she finally did, after what seemed like an eternity, she said she needed time to think. She didn't want to make the wrong move. She was going on holidays for a few a days and would like to come and see us again after that. But she also understood if we couldn't wait for her. 

We've talked about it. Maybe we came on too strong. Maybe she doesn't like Drake. Who knows. When came to taking a risk, on us, she just wasn't willing to gamble.