LEASE ON LOVE
A room for rent can be a recipe for romance — or a disastrous living situation
WHEN Andrea Charalambous, 26, was looking for an apartment in June, she was hoping to find a clean, responsible roommate. But she ended up getting more than just a guy who took out the trash and bought paper towels. She found love.
“When I saw him I thought, ‘He’s kinda cute,’ but that was something in the back of my head,” says Charalambous of her roommate-turned-boyfriend, Andreas Fylaktou, a 26-year-old accountant. She connected with him on the Web site Roomster, where he was looking for someone to rent the second bedroom in his Upper East Side apartment. At their initial meeting, the two hit it off, and Charalambous, a singer, moved in. The roomies quickly bonded over their shared Greek heritage, whipping up dishes such as souvlaki and moussaka.
A few weeks in, Fylaktou came to watch one of her performances and sparks soon ignited.
“We went to a friend’s place after my show for an after-party, and then we had a couple of drinks and that’s when I felt a little bit loose,” she says. “It kinda happened — this roommate dance.”
Later that night, they kissed and have been dating ever since.
Instead of falling in love and then shacking up, some New York millennials are doing it backward, and finding romance with their attractive roommates because it’s so easy and convenient. But some dating experts warn this could make for a complicated living situation.
“When you live with someone you see the best and worst in that person and you accept their quirks — it’s like falling in love with your best friend,” says Julia Bekker, owner of matchmaking service Hunting Maven in Gramercy Park. “But you won’t be able to have [personal] space when you’re living with someone.”
Sophie Schimansky, a 27-year-old
“It’s like falling in love with your best friend.” — dating expert Julia Bekker on roomies who find romance
financial journalist from Germany, found herself in a precarious living arrangement after becoming smitten with Anthony Padilla, a 29-year-old artist, when they shared a roof with five other roommates.
Schimansky found Padilla through roommate finder Web site SpareRoom in December 2015, and she says it was love at first sight.
“We were just sitting in the kitchen for an hour just talking,” she recalls of meeting him and seeing the room in the six-bedroom Bushwick pad he was renting out. “I was 100 percent sure that I wanted to move in.”
She did and was soon palling around platonically with Padilla and their five roommates.
“We’d [all] go out on the weekend and just hang out all the time,” she says.
But Schimansky and Padilla couldn’t contain their romantic feelings for each other, and started dating four months after she moved in. They kept it quiet, but one of their flatmates caught the two of them smooching at a party and expressed concern.
“He was worried at first that it would change the dynamics of the house, and things would get awkward,” she says. Schimansky and Padilla were committed to maintaining the apartment’s tight-knit dynamic to calm their roomies’ anxieties.
“Anthony would cook breakfast for everyone every Saturday morning and we’d all still go out together on the weekends,” she says. “Our roommates were happy for us eventually.”
Padilla ended up moving into Schimansky’s room in April 2016, and this February, the couple found their own one-bedroom apartment in Ridgewood.
Schimansky says there’s a huge plus to dating your roommate.
“Usually you show your best side when you’re dating, but you see the real person when you’re living with someone,” she says. “It makes the relationship very real.”
Charalambous agrees.
“I feel a lot more comfortable dating [Fylaktou] because I knew him as a person and I knew how he operates when he’s not in a relationship,” she says. “He wasn’t trying to impress me.”
Dating coaches such as Cher Gopman, owner of dating service NYC Wingwoman, says that roommates who fall in love with each other already have a strong relationship foundation.
“Moving in together is the hardest thing in a relationship, so if they can do that, that shows a lot of possibilities for this relationship to grow,” she says.
But not everyone is on board with the idea of getting cozy with a roomie.
“What if it doesn’t work out and then you have to move, and there are heightened emotions involved?” says Hana McGrath, a real-estate salesperson with TripleMint. “Moving in New York is expensive and can be time-expensive.”
She recommends that roommates with a mutual attraction stop living together before they start hooking up, lest things get messy.
That’s what happened on Bravo’s new reality show “Summer House,” which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. One of the stars, Carl Radke, a 32-year-old medical salesperson, hooked up with his co-star Lauren Wirkus, a 28-year-old banker, after only a week of sharing a place in Montauk, NY. Their relationship quickly crashed and burned when Wirkus caught Radke flirting with other women who were hanging out at the house.
“I was getting to know [Wirkus], but I was texting other people and I was really trying to juggle all these things,” says Radke, who comes off as a cad on the show. “I’m not trying to be a jerk or a ‘player,’ but it kinda just happens that way.”
Roomies Alexandra Bernardini, 25, and Tarik Walmsley, 26, were more cautious when they realized things were starting to get a little hot in the Chinatown apartment they shared in 2014. While they were attracted to each other, they didn’t confess their true feelings until their lease expired a year later.
“I feel like [dating] would have just created awkwardness,” Bernardini says. “It was nice getting to know someone on a really close level without having a weird tension.”
After a year of living together, the pair, both teachers, moved to separate places and started dating. And while they’re very much in love, Bernardini plans to stay in her Chelsea apartment, while Walmsley is living with friends in Crown Heights.
“That works for us right now and we’re not rushing into anything,” she says, adding that she’d never date someone she was living with.
“I think of a roommate as a friend,” she says. “If you want [the relationship] to transition into something more, you’d just better be sure you’d wanna be there for the long haul.”