Love In London: A Summer Spent Moving Our Entire Lives Across The World
- Shanai Tanwar
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
“You left your toothbrush outside the cup again.” I text my boyfriend, who recently, has been promoted to cohabitation status. Lovers living together. Toothbrushes sitting together. Except his, as usual, is not where it should be.
We’re in the midst of unpacking our belongings that have recently traveled a great distance from the tip of the Pacific Ocean, past the landmass of North America, the waters of the Atlantic, and finally landing in London. What seemed like an impossibility four months ago, has materialized into a lived reality—we actually made it here. We moved.
As we settle into our new domestic roles as a joint household, I find myself thinking of how this new home might excite us. Where my posters might go and where his perfume will sit. Consciously, I remind myself to think of it all as “ours.”. Our apartment. Our furniture. Our fridge. The “our” mentality I know will come in time.
London feels like fresh air in our relationship. After navigating a summer of tearful goodbyes, the uninhibited dread of the unknown, innumerable existential crises, and even the possibility of breaking up, it’s foreign yet comforting to hang my keys up next to his beside the door. It feels like bubbles levitating in champagne, I feel his name float up my throat when I say, “Hey baby, I’m home!”
Moving across the world is incredibly frightening and weird, but moving across the world with someone is all of the above times two. Not only did I have my anxiety, but I had his as well, living inside of me all at once. In the midst of the chaos of packing our feelings into boxes and our belongings into our hearts, it felt like we lost the secret ingredient that made us, us. For months, most of our conversations revolved around tasks—of which we had an endless and ever expanding list. “Did you check the baggage allowance?”, “Call your mother.”, “Are you really selling that/taking that with you to London?”, “Jaan, I love you, but please burn that horrendous pair of shorts with six holes in it.”.
When you’ve loved someone for as long as we have loved each other (three years), you slip into an easy routine. Whether that rhythm involves incessant task talk and a limited ability to truly connect emotionally or not, sometimes you find yourself in a cycle you didn’t even know had begun.
Our therapists tell us there are three entities in any romantic relationship—”you,” “me,” and “us.” Through the trials and tribulations of ‘A Summer Spent Moving Our Entire Lives Across the World,’ it felt like “us” had become a neglected child, as “you” and “me” struggled to fathom this mammoth of a life change ahead of us. Inevitably, it began to take a toll.
“It feels like we only ever talk about chores,” I remember professing defensively on a hot August day in Vancouver, when I was really, truly, burnt out from this moving abroad project. At this point, we were bickering almost daily about some unnecessary and yet inexplicably important agenda item. We hadn’t had a proper date in months because all of our time was spent with friends (who we so desperately miss, by the way). And to top it all off, both of us were living out of suitcases, dealing with immigration, employment, family, and every move-related hurdle you can think of.
We were committed to the idea that being in London would be different. What we had missed and so evidently needed—quality time—would be a priority once the move was done. To reignite the kindle, we wound down during our summer and indulged in romance: chess games, walks in the park, crying sessions. These small things gave us a glimpse of what made us, us again.
In actuality, it’s been a month since our summer was spent moving our entire lives across the world. We’re in this strange, foreign, exciting, and colonial city where we hang our underwear beside each other on the dryer rack, and repeatedly complain about the absence of a dishwasher. We find comfort in this new normal, something we’d missed for so many months when our relationship itself felt like an endless checklist.
Within this month, we’ve slipped into a familiar and old, yet, new routine. What brought us together three years ago was our shared love for adventure and traveling. We bonded over how we both love to wake up in new places and admire art from around the world whilst criticizing the museums that house them. Being in London has allowed us to do a lot of both, pending a visit to the British Museum which you best believe will be the most “Fuck the System” date ever.
While we are still not quite done with the project of moving our entire lives across the world, we’re settling down a bit. I feel the sweetness of his kiss when he comes to pick me up from the tube station at night and when I see a calendar invite for “LEGO date night?” pop up in my inbox. We play music on our speakers while building furniture and dance together with piles of cardboard as our audience. When we got homesick on Diwali, we went to Southall together.
To make things even better, there is so much to do in the new city. We go to the Tate Modern's After Hours event and hold hands while discussing what an asshole Andy Warhol is. We conspire together to find regular restaurants that can become guilty Deliveroo pleasures. We take trips to Poundland and marvel at how much you can get for £22, a sharp contrast to the Dollaramas we’re used to.
We let ourselves get seduced by a day trip to Oxford. We fantasize about him joining me for reading week in Edinburgh. We debate everything we’d like to do in Paris. “Get your visa first,” he reminds me. “There’s so much we can do here, for now,” I reply back, like picking up a sport you used to play. Through these possibilities, we slip back with ease into this new-familiar-old routine of being ourselves again. Our evenings begin to resemble the old us; me reading beside him while he plays games with a friend. We continue discussing the state of the world and our many Kafkaesque grievances. It’s funny to ditch chore-talk entirely for pillowtalk, but we put together pieces of our past as we unearth these possessions, these love letters to our old stories. Loving him feels like muscle memory.
As I place his toothbrush beside mine, as it should be, I think of how I can’t wait to see what our Pacific Northwestern romance will look like in London.
Edited by Zarah Hashim, Sex and Relationships Editor
