The hunt

Last night was a very significant night in the apartment search. At L's request I met with a broker to go see an apartment on West 3rd. It was on a nice block, tucked behind Washington Square Park, with some markets nearby. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a walkup and the entire building smelled like Chinese food. m The apartment was cramped and cluttered with the previous resident's stuff. Too many dishes in the sink. They had put up a wall dividing the bedroom in half, which left room for only the bed on one side and a dank, crabbed office area on the other. I knew within a minute and a half (I knew walking up the General Tso stairway) that this would not be the apartment. But I felt obligated to look around anyway, thoughtfully examining ligh fixtures and room dimensions and muttering about the moulding.

Next the broker attempted to show me another apartment, this one on the ground floor of a building on a rowdier part of West 3rd. It was crammed in between a sandwich shop and a Chinese massage parlor. Walking through the entryway you saw a poster of the human body with all of the major muscles labeled - it was really educational. The interior hallway was painted a medicinal mint green. Sadly enough the tenant wasn't around, so we couldn't see the actual apartment. But we went ahead and ruled it out anyway.

Then! But then! I met L and another broker at a beautiful place in the village. Spacious, old, well-kept, charming. I really loved it. I'm afraid to say too much, but we spent the rest of the evening pulling together application materials and copying our financial documents. We are contacting our guarantors, trying to pull things together, trying to figure out how the hell we can afford to pay a broker's fee. But it's very exciting. I would love to live there, I really hope we get it.

In law school we have been talking about property that is jointly owned by married couples or non-married co-habitants. Most courts refuse to recognize relationships that are between non-married people in which sex is the defining factor - as the courts say, "meretricious relationships." Basically the courts don't want to acknowledge prostitutional relationships, but it is interesting to see all of these different ways of living and being sliced and diced into neat judicial categories. This new place in the village would be a great place for our non-married, soon to be married, and eventually married relationship (which is obviously extremely not meretricious).