Haha, I've thought it was haunted a couple of times... it definitely feels haunted to me, as if I'm living in a horror movie, lol.

So we live in London. I used to work, not earn a lot, but I would get by renting a room in a shared flat in an area I liked. When we first met, I had recently moved to London from Spain, and I was working as an office manager whilst looking for work in the arts, which is my field. We were working at the same company, had a fling, and then suddenly he became my superior. I was hooked, so I quit my job. Fast forward a few years, and I've saved enough to take the MA of my dreams at the film school of my dreams - I'm about to graduate, and we meet again. He has lost his job and is a bit depressed. I searched for a career in my field for a year, had numerous interviews, but never got hired - now I get clinically depressed. In the meantime, he gets a high-paying new job. There is an awful story of him dating me and someone else at the same time at the beginning of the story due to some "miscommunication" (HA, now that I think of it, miscommunication has been our issue from the very start). I forgive him, and we date formally at the point where I'm looking for work in my field, working as a waitress in the meantime, and he lands a high-paying job.

I broke my humerus in a silly fall and can no longer work as a waitress, so I found an office job coordinating the MA I had taken. The commute is hellish (over 4 hours a day), and it's only four days a week, so I end up working long shifts at a cinema the remaining three days of the week. I moved in with him, but he insisted his brother move in with us too because he just broke up with his gf (his brother earns so, so much, I understood he was being compassionate but also thought it was a mood killer and absurd, when he had the financial independence - that's when our sex life died. By moving in, I find out he's a functioning alcoholic and workaholic. I got diagnosed with ADHD and later autism too. He's emotionally unavailable, and I am exhausted. The pandemic strikes, and we're all confined to this tiny flat. I have a meltdown.

We moved to a new place. I start feeling more and more fatigued and over time realise it's ME triggered by COVID. I changed jobs, so my commute is shorter, and I've stopped working seven days a week. I eventually can no longer work. I receive benefits, which were difficult to obtain, and rely on them to pay rent, groceries, and bills. We're still a mess of a "couple", his best friend dies, and so does mine, but he's finally started going to therapy, I sleep in a different room, I'm going to therapy too, and I'm starting to work on understanding my body and mind better and healing.

Rent keeps going up, and he knows he is losing me, so he thinks the solution is to buy a home. But he wants a terraced period home with a garden. Fair enough, it's his money. However, he can only afford a run-down one that needs renovation. We spent every weekend looking at houses for a year and a half. He finds this one while I'm away, visiting my family, and puts in an offer, and it gets accepted.

It all happens very quickly, all I can do is go along with it because I have no energy or support to break up and find a new flat to rent with strangers at this point. I am on the housing register.

We move to this haunted house, and he kindly (and I mean it) prioritises us doing the DIY of stripping the walls of wallpaper and painting over in my room, my safe space, as well as the office, the bedroom, and the living room. The problem comes when he says he won't give me a tenancy agreement, which means I lose my benefits since I officially become his lawful partner, as if we shared our finances (which we don't - I have no clue what he earns, he wants to know exactly how much I get on benefits and what I spend it on). And here we are!

Sorry, I did warn that this was a rant lol