Whenever things went awry in my shared living set-up (as they so often do), instead of having the energy, the tools and the courage to face up to it with a potentially difficult conversation, I would subconsciously detach from it, start spending more time out the house, tell myself that it was just temporary and swipe my way through potential new house shares to indulge my belief that there was a ‘just right’ house share out there.

“Detachment and dissociation are methods of coping with a traumatic situation,” says Tang. “While a stressful house share is arguably what we might call a ‘tiny trauma’ situation (not a ‘big T’ – a big traumatic event) – a sense of escapism through detaching and to some extent disassociating (which in practice might be withdrawing, not getting involved or staying out more) can cause further loneliness or sadness.”

“The trauma is real,” says fellow serial house sharer Molly Jones, 36, who has lived in five house shares in London over 14 years. “Home should be a relaxing and safe space. I’d always valued my time at home because working in an office, commuting and living a busy life is enough. You need space to relax. But in all my house shares I lived with housemates who were judgemental of my habits (one housemate would comment every time I had a glass of wine) or just made me feel uneasy in my space. One housemate I lived with played a mandolin in the living room all the time and had sort of claimed it as his space. It meant I stayed out as much as possible, which is the last thing you want after a long day at work.”

This is the sort of behaviour that kept me stuck in a cycle of detachment and never fully investing in my house shares. I moved on every time something difficult occurred, and it left me perpetually unsettled. It was only when moving into my eighth and most recent house share that it dawned on me that I needed to stay a while and work on the interpersonal skills that lay at the heart of making a house share a home – ones I had never been taught. I empathise fully with the people like me who are facing house-share burnout and need to find a way out of it that doesn’t require a £50,000 deposit.

“The stress is insidious”: house-sharing burnout is real – here’s how to overcome it