Our First Place Together Was a Small Flat in Germiston

Two Kids Pretending to Be Adults

We got married younger than most of our friends thought was sensible, Lerato and I, and we did it on almost nothing. The wedding was small, the honeymoon was two nights up the road, and the day after we came back we sat on her mother's spare bed, where we had been staying, and admitted to each other that we had no idea how to actually be married adults with our own front door. We both had jobs, brand new ones, mine at a logistics company and hers as a junior in an accounting firm, and between our two starting salaries we had exactly enough courage to try and exactly enough fear to make it interesting.

Living with her mother was kind of her, and it was killing us slowly. Not because of anything her mother did. Because a marriage needs a place to close a door and be its own small country, and we did not have that. We had a borrowed room and a suitcase each and the constant, gentle presence of a woman who loved us but could hear everything. We needed our own place, and we needed it to be near both our jobs, and we needed it to cost less than the terrifying number we had written at the top of our first ever shared budget.

The Spreadsheet That Ran Our Lives

Lerato is an accountant, and so our search for a home was, unsurprisingly, run out of a spreadsheet. She had columns I did not fully understand. Rent, obviously, but also travel cost to each of our workplaces, a guess at electricity, a line for what she called the just in case, which was money for the things that go wrong that you cannot predict but can be certain will happen. She had modelled our entire married life on a laptop before we had looked at a single actual building.

Because of where we both worked, the map kept pointing us to the same place. Germiston sat almost exactly between her firm and my depot, which meant that whatever we spent on a flat, we would save on the daily grind of getting to work. When we started seriously looking at a Germiston apartment to rent, the numbers in her spreadsheet finally stopped being red. That was a strange, quiet moment, the two of us leaning over the laptop at her mother's kitchen table, watching a total go from impossible to just barely possible, and knowing it meant we could actually begin.

Memorising a Home We Had Not Seen

We are of the generation that falls in love with a place online before we ever stand in it. We had the floor plan of that flat memorised for a week before the viewing. We argued about where the couch we did not yet own would go. Lerato worked out that if the bed went against the far wall we could fit a small desk for her studies, because she was already talking about the next qualification she wanted, of course she was. I paced out the imaginary kitchen in her mother's lounge, to her mother's visible amusement, working out whether two people could cook in it without a fight.

By the time we drove out to see it in person, we half expected to be disappointed, the way you are when the real thing cannot match the version in your head. It did not disappoint. It was small, yes. But it was clean, and it was safe, which mattered enormously to both our mothers, and it was ours in a way nothing had ever been ours. We stood in the empty lounge and Lerato took my hand and neither of us said anything, because there was nothing that needed saying. We both knew.

The First Night, on the Floor

We moved in with almost no furniture. A mattress on the floor, two camping chairs, a kettle, and boxes we used as tables for the first fortnight. That first night we ate takeaway sitting on the floor of our empty lounge, the sound of our own voices echoing slightly off the bare walls, and I remember thinking that I had never been so broke and so happy at the same time. We had a door. We could close it. Inside it, we were nobody's children. We were a household.

We built the place up piece by piece over that first year, the way you do when you cannot afford to do it all at once. A secondhand couch from a colleague who was emigrating. A proper bed, eventually, which felt like an unimaginable luxury after months on the floor. A little table where Lerato studied at night, her face lit by the laptop, chasing the next rung of her career while I made tea neither of us really needed just to be near her while she worked. The flat filled up slowly with our actual life.

Learning to Be Married in a Small Space

A small flat teaches you things about a marriage that a big house would let you avoid. You cannot storm off to another wing when you are cross. There is nowhere to hide a bad mood. You learn to sort things out because you are going to be sharing the same four rooms with this person in twenty minutes regardless. I think, honestly, that little flat made us better married than a bigger place would have. It forced us to actually face each other.

We also learned how much the practical stuff underpins the romantic stuff. All the things nobody tells you when you are dreaming about your wedding, they turn out to be the actual substance of a shared life. The building we were in ran well, which sounds like a boring thing to be grateful for until you have friends whose Germiston rentals came with landlords who vanished the moment something broke. Ours did not. Things worked. When they did not, they got fixed. That reliability let us stop worrying about the walls and get on with the harder, better work of learning to be a we.

The Place We Grew Up In

We are still in Germiston, though we moved to a slightly bigger place in the same area when Lerato passed her exams and got a real bump in her salary. We could have gone further afield, chased something fancier in a smarter suburb. We did not. This is where we became adults. This is where we learned to budget and forgive and share a bathroom and dream out loud. You do not walk away from the ground your marriage was built on just because you can now afford a slightly nicer view.

A younger cousin of Lerato's got married last year, just as broke and just as brave as we had been, and they came to us for advice because we were the only married people they knew who had started with nothing and made it work. We did not lecture them. We just told them the truth, that a place does not have to be big or impressive to be the making of you, and then we pointed them toward the sort of practical, well run Germiston apartments that had given us our own start. They moved in three months ago. They ate their first meal on the floor, apparently, exactly as we had. I did not tell them to do that. It just seems to be how it goes.

What the Small Flat Knew

I drive past the old block sometimes, the very first one, the mattress on the floor one. There is a light on in what used to be our window, some other young couple starting the same way we did, no doubt with their own spreadsheet and their own memorised floor plan and their own terror dressed up as excitement. I feel a strange tenderness toward them, whoever they are.

Because I know something they are only just finding out. The smallest, cheapest, most ordinary flat can be the biggest thing that ever happens to you, if it is the place where you finally get to close your own door and become who you are going to be together. Lerato and I have a whole marriage now, kids on the horizon, plans that would have seemed absurd to the two broke newlyweds on that bare floor. And all of it started in a small flat in Germiston that we could just barely afford, and loved more than any place we have lived since.