Under normal circumstances I would be pleased that, for the first time in British history, Downing Street looks set to be occupied by an unmarried couple.
However, as this couple is prime minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds it cannot be viewed as a progressive step.
Johnson is capable of misogyny and is clearly much more calculating than his ‘gaffes’ would suggest, who once described people of my race as ‘piccaninnies’ and who has stuffed his cabinet with a ‘rag-tag bunch of dead-eyed capitalists’ as my colleague wrote for gal-dem.
Meanwhile Carrie Symonds is the former director of communications at the Conservative Party headquarters where she was responsible for helping to keep this despicable man in power during his era as London mayor.
Nevertheless, on a very personal note, their news comes hot on the heels of a personal time of upheaval. In about two months time I’ll be moving in with my boyfriend of two years, the love of my life, bae etc.
I’m pretty excited, and naturally, being of the millennial generation, we haven’t even had to think about the prospect of marriage.
The number of unmarried couples cohabiting more than doubled from 1996 to 2017, when there were 3.3million doing the thing without the ring. But, perhaps unlike the happy couple currently booking their moving vans (and who reportedly bought a £1.3 million house together in Camberwell a few weeks back after only dating for 18 months), I’m taking this move very seriously.
Meanwhile, some of my friends, and my boyfriend himself, are lovingly taking the piss. In some ways, it’s fair enough. I will admit I have been reading badly-written articles from women’s sites for about six months in preparation for the move and sending them to my boyfriend intermittently.
They have generic titles like ‘How to prepare to move in with your partner for the first time’ and ‘These seven steps will mean that moving in with your boyfriend will be great’.
Not all of the advice in them is particularly helpful but I have heard too many horror stories on places like Reddit about couples who moved in together without opening up lines of communication.
A recent post told the story of a woman who was out walking one day with her boyfriend when he said he wanted ice cream. Instead of, you know, buying one, the boyfriend grabbed an ice cream out of a stranger’s hand and ran off with it and back to their shared apartment. ‘I of course demanded an explanation. He had the balls to deny he’d done anything!’ she wrote.
And while I know, obviously, that sometimes people are good at hiding their quirks, what I’m hoping is by forcing my boyfriend to talk through some of these weird articles and start thinking about ‘money taboos’ and ‘being honest about who you truly are’ we might avoid a situation as bizarre as this, when you realise that you perhaps don’t quite know the person who you love (near best) in the world as well as you thought.
I’m not wishing good luck to Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds in their move – I hope it goes disastrously in the political sense and they getting unceremoniously kicked out at the next election – but I am wishing good luck and good sense to all those out there considering moving in with a partner.
It might feel cringey or too forced to plan the natural progression of your relationship, but you never know, it might save someone’s ice cream. And in this heat, everyone deserves a cold treat.
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