Rosie’s boyfriend Carl is kind and generous – an “amazing person”. He earns more than she does, and often pays for her to come with him on work trips, or lends cash when she needs it. “He’s the kind of person who would pick up the bill in a heartbeat,” she says. Their relationship is happy – he loves her for her. But she knows, deep down, that he also loves her for her flat.
Rosie’s parents are middle class, and bought her a flat years ago when prices were lower, renting it out to pay off the mortgage. Carl’s family, meanwhile, isn’t well off, and he wouldn’t have been in a position to buy on his own – his income isn’t enough to get a mortgage and he has no savings. Both now live in the flat with a housemate.
Rosie, 31, can’t be absolutely certain the flat is a major part of her appeal, but she can tell Carl, 34, is irritated by her “irresponsible” attitude to money and her poorly paid choice of career. “Contrasted with that, the flat is a tick against my name – it makes him think I’m a safe bet, that I’m not going to be dead weight.” Then there’s the fact that Carl moved in quickly, “probably before I was ready. And I do note that all of his previous girlfriends have owned property that he lived in.”
A new, money-shaped shadow is looming over millennials’ dating lives and relationships, and it’s affecting even those, like Carl, who aren’t otherwise grasping or status-obsessed. Welcome to dating in the age of the housing crisis.
Exploding mortgage rates, average house prices at almost 10 times the average salary and rents at an all-time high: the crisis is leaving its mark on every stage of millennial relationships. It’s there on dates, with the need to find someone to buy with (or just split the rent with) as ever-present as glasses of bad wine. It’s pressing fast forward on the relationship itself: a 2022 SpareRoom survey found that nearly a quarter of respondents would consider moving in with a partner earlier than planned to save money. It’s trapping an estimated one in 10 people in relationships they aren’t happy in because they can’t afford to move out. And it hangs around even after the breakup, forcing some exes to live together for years on end.
In an even more dystopian twist, economist Peter Kenway has predicted that, as more than three-quarters of the UK’s privately held housing wealth now sits with the over-50s, we could soon see a “Jane Austen-style marriage market, as millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with millennials who stand to inherit a house”. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But then again, house prices relative to earnings haven’t been this high since the 19th century. And now, as then, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that there is a second path to inherited wealth: your choice of partner.
For Rosie, Carl’s attitude isn’t a deal breaker – not even close. It’s just a product of the bizarre wealth imbalances that the housing market is creating among young people. “To buy a house or to own a flat without family support when you’re earning a normal wage is completely impossible,” she says. “You just do what you have to do to survive.”
By their early 30s, more than half of those born in the 50s, 60s and 70s had bought property. But since then, we’ve seen a massive generational shift – even adjusted for inflation, the average UK house price has more than doubled since the 1970s. If an average house is now 10 times the average salary, and lenders will loan you up to five times your income, that means one thing: if you’re to manage to buy at all, you’ll likely need two names on that mortgage application. Andrew Montlake, managing director of mortgage broker Coreco, tells me that for years now, the norm has been for people to buy in a pair – whether that’s as a couple, or with a friend or family member. “It’s been that much harder for single people to buy.”
The ratio of salaries to house prices hasn’t been this extreme since the mid-19th century, which means that, without an inheritance or a very high income, your relationship status and your housing situation are going to be inextricably intertwined. Housing journalist Vicky Spratt says this is creating “immense” pressure on that first stage of relationships: finding a partner. “It takes an enormous amount of – I don’t even know what the adjective would be, because I’m not sure it is courage – to reject these ideas, because the sad fact is you’ll have a much more comfortable life with two incomes rather than one. The only people I know who are relaxed about it are people who have been gifted deposits or have inheritance,” she says. “I would go so far as to say it’s creating a sort of hysteria.”
The pressure’s like a weed in the back of your mind, the conversation already on the horizon. ‘Are you saving for a deposit?’
When Sam, 28, goes on dates, the last thing he wants to do is think about housing – “I don’t want to get into a relationship just because it’s some kind of life-investment vehicle. That’s horrible.” And yet, despite his best intentions, “the pressure’s like a weed in the back of your mind, even though I’ve been trying to fight it”. He’s in the early stages of dating someone new, and “you can tell the conversation is already on the horizon. ‘Are you saving for a deposit? Are you looking to buy?’”
He has good reason to fight the urge: he saw how the pressure to buy a house affected his last relationship and he’s loth to let it damage another. He’d been with his girlfriend for nine years and they were both earning £40k-£50k a year, which in London – where the average house price hovers around the half a million mark – meant that if they wanted to own, they had to save as much as they possibly could. “Our relationship was so built around these goals for the future that we’d stopped going out much, or doing date nights or anything like that – if I brought it up, she’d say we needed to prioritise saving. But it meant I felt undervalued in the here and now,” he says.
Susanna Abse, a couples therapist and author of Tell Me the Truth About Love, says the sheer cost of buying property these days has made it “as big a commitment moment in a relationship as marriage”. So while the housing crisis may speed up some couples’ decision to rent together, the process of buying could put untenable pressure on a relationship, as Sam experienced. “It stirs up further anxieties for couples deciding whether to throw their lot in together,” Abse says.
After the breakup, Sam had to pay about £2,000 to break their tenancy agreement, and more on a new rental deposit and furniture. His savings were “eviscerated”. “You have this realisation that you’re no longer part of a two-person team,” he says now. “You’re on your own, and nothing’s affordable.” The change in his housing situation “doesn’t have the same weight as the breakup, but it did compound the grief of the relationship ending. You’re in a flatshare, and it feels as if you’ve moved backwards in your life by 10 years. I had therapy after the breakup, and my therapist had to say to me a couple of times, ‘You have to forgive yourself for this housing stuff. It’s out of your control.’”
Coupledom has always, to an extent, represented security and stability, but the housing crisis has pushed that to the extreme, making it difficult to take decisions about staying or leaving a relationship uncoloured by financial realities. When I mention to friends the prospect of a “Jane Austen-style, housing-based marriage market”, they laugh, then grow more thoughtful. “I mean, whenever we have an argument, I think, ‘Would I want to have to sell up and find somewhere to live?’ The answer’s no,” says one. Another puts it bluntly: “My rent would double if we broke up.” A third laughs: “I’m never breaking up with him – we have a lovely home. Oh, and I love him.”
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Accordingly, cohabiting couples are now the fastest growing household type in the UK, while one-person households have flatlined at 30% (and fallen most dramatically in London, where property prices are highest). Meanwhile, in most European countries, the proportion of single-person households is rising steadily – and countries with strong rental protections, such as Austria, France and the Netherlands, have a high proportion.
This backdrop is forcing some couples to live in close quarters even after their relationship has broken down. Violet and her partner managed to afford a small flat just before the pandemic, “by a whisker” – it was a financial stretch for them both. Over the years their incomes have fallen, and their relationship began to fray. Ideally, they would have moved out and rented, or bought somewhere less expensive, but the costs of renting, and of a new mortgage, are so high that they concluded doing either would be “financially idiotic”. Their lack of housing options, plus the stress of their financial situation, “has left our relationship in tatters,” Violet says. So they are stuck: “We continue to live together unhappily, unsure of whether we want to stay together, and unable to give ourselves the physical space to work that out.”
Abse says the reality of being forced to stay under the same roof – a phenomenon known as “living together apart” – “turns the idea of a clean break into a fantasy, because you can’t disentangle yourself that quickly. It works for some people, but for others it’s extremely difficult.” Simon Duncan, a professor of comparative social policy at the University of Bradford, says that exes living together have been very little studied so far as a household type, despite evidence that they’re on the rise, but one 2009 survey for Shelter suggested that as many as a quarter of British adults – 11.3 million people – had done so at some point.
Vicky Spratt wanted to take on her mortgage solo after her own breakup, but had to fight hard to do so. “If it’s this hard to get a mortgage on a flat you already own, I don’t know how anyone’s doing it,” she says. She suspects more active discrimination is at play, too: “I’ve got no concrete evidence for this, but I do think that mortgage approvers and lenders prefer couples, because I don’t know how else to explain some of the things I hear about people who are being told they can’t afford a home that they bought with an ex-partner, and have then been paying the mortgage for on their own.”
As much as the housing market is causing problems for couples, it still prioritises them, making it harder and harder to live outside that norm. There is now no region in England in which a woman on a median income can afford to rent by herself, according to 2019 figures from the Women’s Budget Group, so being single in 2023 can involve revolving casts of housemates, exorbitant studio flats or moving to cheaper areas away from work or community.
View image in fullscreen‘Lots of people would be really happy being single, but they are struggling.’ Illustration: Paul Blow/The Guardian
Living in London in her 30s, Nicola Slawson variously “house-sat, sofa-surfed, lived on a houseboat, lived with an elderly lady and rented a room in a council flat, which I don’t think he was actually allowed to sublet”. Finally, she reached the heights of a studio flat – albeit one she had to walk through her landlord’s house to get to. When the pandemic hit, she decided to move back to Shrewsbury, where her parents live, despite the fear it would “tank my career”. Her rented two-bed house has “a dining room, a garden and a cellar” and costs less than the studio did. Yet she’s still struggling to save enough to be in reach of a deposit in her area.
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Slawson runs a community for single women called the Single Supplement, which explores the lows and celebrates the highs of being single, and offers a space for those who are single by choice. Yet housing pressures are making that celebration more and more difficult. “Lots of people would be really happy being single, but they are struggling at the moment,” she says. “They might want to live on their own, and they either can’t afford it at all or if they do it, then they have to stay in all the time as they have no money to go out. It means they can’t do all the things that make being single great, like going out to a gig spontaneously or seeing your friends all the time.” Young, single people were less than half as likely to be homeowners in 2021 as they were 30 years ago.
Brian is 27 and lives in Ireland, where average rents have shot up by nearly 40% since 2016 and the taoiseach has admitted to a shortage of 250,000 homes. He feels “any sort of dating or relationship is impossible” for him, for a simple reason: he shares a bunk bed with his older brother. Both live at home because of housing costs and he feels “completely resigned to this way of living” because he can’t find any rental properties within his budget. “I actively shut down anyone showing the slightest interest in me for fear of having to explain my living situation to them,” he says. “At the end of the day, you’re stuck not just sharing a room, but a bunk bed without even any room to sit up – never mind attempt anything else.”
If I meet someone and they have a house, I instantly think, well, that’s come from family money, or you’re in a relationship
Members of Slawson’s community report unsympathetic, Mrs Bennet-style responses from family members, such as: “All these problems would be solved if you could just get a boyfriend and get married.” It feels as if the clock has turned backwards, Slawson says. “Back when women weren’t allowed to buy their own houses or have bank accounts, that was what you had to do. You had to find yourself a husband.”
The housing crisis is exacerbating existing inequalities – figures from the government’s race disparity unit, for example, show that in 2015-2017, white British people spent the lowest proportion of their income on rent or mortgage payments of any ethnic group. Kieran Yates, author of the housing memoir All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In, describes British housing as “a history and tradition that really favours a certain kind of wealthy family unit. Middle-class renters simply have an easier time renting because they have either a financial cushion or they have people who can advocate for them. Single people are discriminated against, and women and ethnic minorities experience not just wage gaps but housing gaps. I’ve certainly found that with estate agents, when I’ve been looking with a [male] romantic partner, I’ve been overlooked or spoken over.”
James, 29, is gay, lives in a small one-bedroom flat and doesn’t want a relationship, but the housing market is forcing him to think otherwise. “I don’t want a boyfriend – but I do want a second bedroom,” he says. He finds it frustrating that two-person relationships are so incentivised by the housing market, and active government tax policy, such as the married couples allowance: “It means you consider being in a couple for financial reasons, even if emotionally you’re not in the place to want a relationship.”
One change over the last few years, at least, is a growing willingness to talk more openly about these issues. Millie, now 34, believed in her 20s that her lack of savings or inheritance – therefore inability to ever buy a house – would stand in the way of her finding a relationship. “I’d be ashamed of it, and feel there was so much stigma. But now it feels like that’s gone away. If I meet someone and they have a house, I instantly think, well, that’s come from family money, or you’re in a relationship. And I think, fuck it, let’s just talk about it and be open about it. It dominates in conversations I have with friends.” Freed from her shame around it, she’s able to pursue a life on her own terms: “I now don’t think I even want to get married or have children.”
So what are millennials to do? Is romance salvageable? Or are we in the fast lane back to the 19th century? Orna Guralnik, psychologist and star of the hit US docuseries Couples Therapy, says she’s seeing a similar effect with her clients in New York: more younger couples are facing housing struggles, which in turn puts pressure on their relationships. “It certainly becomes a factor when they’re making decisions about whether to live together, how quickly to move in together, whether to stay together.”
Guralnik is not sure this is always a negative thing – or that it’s ever been absent from our relationships.
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“If you start from a very romantic concept of what a couple’s life is,” she says, “then you would want financial considerations not to be a factor, right? You’d want people to feel free, to want to spend time together, and for the economics of it to come later. But that’s a very contemporary idea of what a couple is. The whole concept of marriage has always been to some degree an economic arrangement.”
Where those housing pressures rear their head, Guralnik says, couples “should be talking about it really honestly, and understand their relationship is also partially material-based – not to try to avoid that layer of things”. Housing and finances – all those unromantic-sounding realities – form a key part of the relationship itself; “part of what depending on each other means”.
Annie Lord is a dating columnist and, at 28, is surrounded by evidence that a failing housing market is leaving its mark on our relationships. “I have a lot of friends who now live with their partners,” she says, “and I think they probably wouldn’t if the housing market was different. It does make relationships a bit more claustrophobic – you know that so much of your stability relies on that person.”
I ask if the dating landscape is becoming as cynical as all the stats and graphs and calculations make it seem. Are we really heading into a future where a partner is, first and foremost, an economic asset? Is romance dead? Lord says we’re still not at the point where “Do you have a deposit?” looms over dating app conversations or first dates. “It’s more later on – I see it influencing whether people stay together, or how quickly they move in.”
She pauses to think, then laughs. “It’s weird, though … It is a nice bonus, if you go on a first date and you’re like, ‘Ooh, OK, he’s pretty rich.’ It factors in more than you would think.” Mr Darcy did have a good soul, in the end – but he also had a very large house.
Names have been changed.
