the fine art of compromise

Where to start?

Maybe, in the spirit of fairness, I should begin by saying upfront that my flatmate Mona is not a horrid person. Neither is she grossly unreasonable. She is actually quite agreeable and understanding. She doesn’t object to me blasting the heating because she thinks it’s unfair to make me live in cold conditions in the name of electricity-saving, and she doesn’t object to me using the kitchen and cooking at all sorts of odd hours, or frying bacon in the morning and smelling up the whole flat.

We have, however, had oven issues, which came to a head today. She walked in on me making muffins and immediately objected to my use of the oven, very firmly, albeit politely, and explained that the oven ate electricity like a black hole, and that she never used it herself for this reason. Therefore, she said, if I were to keep using the oven, I would have to fork out extra for electricity.

Feeling extremely put-upon I protested (probably weakly, as assertiveness is not my strong suit) that this had not been made clear to me before I moved in, and that I had never ever had problems with using the oven elsewhere before, and that I felt it was a given in ads that said “all bills included, use of kitchen” to mean that I was free to use the oven as I liked. Whereupon I was told that in Mona’s 5 years of flatsharing she had never shared with anyone who used the oven regularly, if at all, and that she had in fact lived in a flat once where her landlord expressly forbade use of the oven because it was expensive.

This rather flabbergasted me so I was kind of speechless for a while. It seemed impossible, and ridiculous, to me to restrict oven use in this flagrant manner, and more importantly, to just assume that I would know about it without making it clear from the start. I pointed out that my frustration in this matter stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t informed of this upfront, and Mona’s (again, apologetic, but firm) counter-argument was that had I told her upfront that I liked baking, and used the oven lots, she would have quoted me a different rent. The oven, she said, cost ten times as much as the gas stove, and she didn’t think it was fair on her to be paying for it since she doesn’t use the oven at all, and she is charging me very cheap rent anyway.

Again, maybe this is just me, but is oven usage really the sort of thing one needs to be clear about when negotiating tenancy?? Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m just… ignorant, and stupid, but I felt (and still feel) so much that the onus should have been on her to tell me about the oven policy, rather than on me to tell her about my oven habits. Who discusses oven usage when meeting prospective housemates/landlords? For that matter, who has draconian oven policies like this anyway? The most bizarre thing about it all to me was that while Mona seemed to think it was entirely normal, I just… couldn’t (and still can’t) quite wrap my mind about it.

It was pretty clear to me anyway at that point that we were at an icky deadlock; while we both understood where the other person was coming from, we both felt that it was the other who should’ve been upfront about this matter from the start. I was close to tears and I didn’t want to argue anymore, so I told her I would pay the extra during billing periods when I had used the oven, and not when I hadn’t. We had some semi-reconciliatory banter about muffins, and she left me to finish up.

The thing is, financially, I don’t mind paying more, since it is true that my rent is incredibly cheap. I suppose ultimately what really bothers me is that I wasn’t told about this right off the bat. I suppose, at the end of the day, it is one of those frustrating, annoying, hair-tearing matters of principle; whatever principles of fair play I have are screaming out against my capitulation and telling me I have been very unfairly dealt with, that I should fight for the right to use the the oven, as it was on that assumption that I moved in, that I should at the very least stand firm and refuse to pay extra for this month (but do so for future months now that I have been informed).

I don’t know what to do. I tried not to cry about this while baking, though the heart had gone out of me; it was in a very dour and joyless fashion that i finished baking my muffins. I don’t even particularly feel like eating them now (which is good news for my office I guess). I don’t know if I am just being a whiny baby. I don’t know if I should feel as upset and ill-treated as I do. I just… sigh. And I don’t want to write this off as a bad flatshare and go out of my way to keep to myself. I want to try and make this work. We’re both civil and polite people with similar interests, so it must be possible to reach some kind of equilibrium, right?