Splitting up, but still splitting the rent
In the 2006 comedy The Breakup, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn play a quarrelling couple who call it quits but remain living together in the condominium they own because a) it’s really nice, b) they enjoy tormenting each other and c) they’re obviously still in love.
In the 2019 tragedy that is the Toronto rental market, recently split couples stay living together under the same roof, too, but for very different reasons. In Toronto, living in any apartment you can afford is a luxury — whether it has stainless steel appliances or none at all. You don’t have to love your home or the person you share it with to want to remain living there.
Sometimes the prospect of searching for a new place is daunting enough to compel you to stay put for a while, ex and all.
This is because breaking up with a live-in partner in Toronto requires getting back out there, not necessarily on the dating scene, but in a notoriously competitive rental market where the average one-bedroom unit goes for at least $2,000 a month. As Kelsey Tremblay puts it, looking for a new place in this city can feel like a “full-time job.”
Tremblay, a 28-year-old set buyer, is currently living with her ex-boyfriend in a house they rent in Etobicoke. The couple moved in together in February 2018. They split in the middle of November. Both have agreed to move out of the house. For the time being though, Tremblay’s ex, a carpenter, spends some nights at home and others at his brother’s place. When I spoke to Trem- blay in January, she told me things in the house were awkward but friendly.
“We’re in this weird purgatory,” she said. “The breakup was really amicable. But it’s weird because we hang out and make dinner. We act kind of like a couple still; we just aren’t romantic. Everyone says, ‘You guys are co-dependent’ and ‘You need to break away from each other,’ but a lot of them do sympathize with the situation.”
How could you not sympathize in our current real estate climate?
Tremblay has moved eight times in the past six years. She’s lived a wide spectrum of T.O. housing realities: she was evicted by a landlord who moved her own kids into the unit; she’s lived with “a couple random Craigslist people”; she’s lived with a grandparent, a cousin, and now with her ex.
“I honestly think there aren’t enough places to live,” she said. “I’ve been to open houses in the past and there are 70 people in line.” Upon renting her last apartment, in High Park, the landlord told her she beat out 80 other applicants for the spot. Eighty.
And yet, one could argue that Tremblay is lucky. She has a roof over her head — not a small thing in a freezing cold city where many can’t say the same — and she has her own bedroom.
Matthew, a 26-year-old Toronto server who lived with his ex-boyfriend in their downtown apartment for two months after they split up last year, did not have his own bedroom. (For personal reasons, Matthew has chosen to be identified by his first name only.) Instead, he said, “I had a blow-up mattress in the living room. That was my bed. I was living out of my suitcase.”
The first thing he saw in the morning when he woke up on his air mattress was his exboyfriend walking through the living room. It was awkward and it was definitely not friendly. “It was pretty close to the start of our breakup that we negotiated who would buy what and how that would work, and it kind of came down to, ‘If you need it, you buy it,’ ” he said. “There was not a whole lot of sharing going on.”
When it came to dating other people, things were surprisingly more genial. “Neither of us would bring anybody home to the apartment. We wouldn’t really talk about who we were seeing.” However, Matthew did occasionally hear his ex talking to another guy on the phone, which, he admitted “didn’t feel very nice. The person I was with is now with somebody else and I have to sit there and listen to it.”
The days dragged on and Matthew realized finding a new place would not be as simple as he had hoped. “The first month went by and I still hadn’t found anything. By that point, tensions were rising because obviously I was there a little bit longer than what we were anticipating. We started fighting and bickering because I was in his apartment.” Mat- thew’s ex made more money than him and paid a bigger chunk of the rent cheque as a result. This is also why Matthew was the one on the floor and his ex was in the bed.
Finally, two months into his search, an opportunity came up to move in with a co-worker on King St. W. He took it. The day he deflated his air mattress and moved out, he and his ex “ceased communication.” I asked Matthew if he thinks there should be a service — maybe an app — designed specifically to match Torontonians living with their exes to other people in similar situations, so they can join forces and look for new housing to- gether. “That would be phenomenal,” he said.
Of course, couples separating and living together post-split is not a brand new reality. But Toronto’s housing crisis — its steep competition and skyhigh rents — makes it a much longer-term reality for many people. And that’s not a good thing. This isn’t a healthy place for our city to be in.
That said, there are those who make cohabitating after a breakup work. Sydney Borton and her ex-boyfriend, Grant Quinn, seem to be doing a pretty decent job of this.
Borton, 20, and Quinn, 22, broke up a few weeks ago after living together for a year.
“It’s just as much his space as it is my space, but we’re trying to make it work out so that we’re not staying there at the same time,” said Borton. Because Quinn’s parents live in Toronto, the former couple can split their time evenly in the one-bedroom Etobicoke apartment.
When Quinn stays with his parents, Borton sleeps at the apartment. Other days, Borton stays with friends in Oakville and Quinn uses the space. He won’t sleep there, though. “We haven’t been in the apartment at the same time but there is still a different feeling attached to being there,” he said. “I can’t bring myself to spend a full night alone there.”
Borton, on the other hand, has spent several. There’s a pullout couch in the unit but she prefers the bed, which is more comfortable. “It makes me sad that it used to be a bed we shared and now it’s not, but what are you gonna do?”
Borton, who says renting a one-bedroom unit is not an option (she makes a little above minimum wage as a receptionist), recently made arrangements to move in with a friend in Oakville. The problem is that her friend’s lease ends in April. After that she’s not sure where she’ll live.
The good news is that Kelsey Tremblay does. She has, at long last, found a new apartment in Toronto’s west end, and she moves in next month. It’s not exactly within her budget — “I will be living beyond my means,” she said. Still, it beats living with an ex.