Wow! Your best friend is looking for new apartments in the city, and, shocker, she’s a little blind to the realities of housing! Little does she know that people will add cute little details to those fancy shmancy urban apartments to make you feel like you aren’t paying double what your friends in the suburbs are paying. Yeah, I said it.
So, she takes you downtown into what she’s calling a “luxury” apartment; has a doorman and everything. Should be nice, right? Wrong. She leads you up a seven-floor walk-up (since the elevator is conveniently out of service), and you arrive, out of breath, at a shoebox of an apartment. But, there’s a perk: exposed brick! That one feature we all love so much—but who really knows why? I guess we were programmed to think to ourselves, “Wow, this material that is meant to be on the outside of buildings is inside, how cool!”
You look over for her reaction. She’s in a daze, looks absolutely enamored. Are you both looking at the same space—paint chipping, mold in the shower, uneven floors, bits of walls crumbling? I say, “So…probably onto the next, right?” She says, “Oh my god, no! Just look at the exposed brick! It’s everything, right? I have to take it.”
You bite your tongue. You have to be supportive of her; she’s been apartment hunting for a month now. If she’s willing to settle for this shit show, maybe it’s time you accepted that you’ll just be the shoulder to cry on when the landlord mysteriously “doesn’t what she’s talking about” when she reports damages throughout her lease. No worries, you have the Ben and Jerry’s and wine fully stocked and ready.
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