The Unregistered Lease

The standard lease in Brussels runs nine years. Everyone calls it a three-six-nine, after the years it can be broken, and everyone signs it on the way to the keys like a formality. Before mine started, a paid expert walked the empty flat for two hours and recorded every scratch in both national languages — four pages, photographed, initialed at each corner. The deposit went into a blocked account that opens for nobody without two signatures. A country builds machinery like this once it has learned one fact the hard way: two people will describe the same rooms very differently after one of them wants out.

Then there is the clause almost nobody reads. The landlord has two months to file the lease with the registration office. Filing is free. It takes about ten minutes online. And the penalty for skipping it is elegant: as long as the contract stays off the books, the tenant can leave without notice and owe nothing. You can have full occupancy — rent collected, a coat on the hook, a routine — and the arrangement has no standing anywhere outside the rooms it happens in.

Registration costs nothing. What it costs is deniability.

I have accepted relationships on paperwork no landlord would dare hand me.

Full occupancy, nothing filed

For sixteen months, across two calendar years, I was at one man's place every Thursday and most Sundays. I knew his door code. I never had a key. It took me too long to respect the difference. A key is an object someone hands you and has to ask for back — in words, to your face, an event with a date on it. A code is permission that can be changed from a phone, in an elevator, between meetings, no conversation required. He gave the cleaning service the same four digits.

Otherwise the arrangement had the full furniture of a relationship. A charger lived behind his sofa. His sister knew my coffee order. When he introduced me, the sentence was "This is Aleks," and then the sentence ended; I stood inside that full stop at eleven dinners. We made plans two and three weeks out, always inside a border I mapped by trial: never into August. August was family, and family was the official calendar, and I was not on it.

There is a note in my phone dated 11 November, 1:07 a.m., titled ask him. I edited it nine times. I sent none of the versions, because sending one would have forced the question of what, exactly, I was asking to be called, and I had learned to prefer his apartment with that question unasked. The rent was patience. I paid it monthly, and it was always received.

It ended in April the way unfiled things end. He posted a photo from a kitchen I knew with a man I didn't, and that was the entire procedure — no notice period, no walkthrough, no deposit released. When friends asked what we had been, I heard myself doing arithmetic out loud, sixteen months, roughly seventy Thursdays, like a man contesting a parking fine with a hand-drawn map. There was nothing to contest.

You cannot be evicted from a tenancy that never existed. You can only stop being let in.

Two questions found at 2 a.m.

I keep an index on this site of the questions people actually ask about modern love — the ones typed into a search bar after midnight, when autocomplete is the only witness. Two of them get found more than almost anything else I have written there: Are situationships just fear with better branding? and Why do labels feel harder now than commitment itself? The traffic peaks between one and three in the morning, phones mostly, which is its own answer.

I wrote those answers with clean hands, and I stand by the mechanics. When both people chose the terms, the arrangement is honest — some tenancies are meant to be short, and everyone packs light. When one person wants more and accepts less, because limited access to someone beats no access at all, the index calls it what it is: a sacrifice dressed as flexibility. And there is the line I keep having to reread as its author: the label doesn't create the commitment. It names a commitment that already exists — the way registration doesn't create a tenancy, it gives the tenancy standing in front of someone other than the two people inside it.

An unnamed thing can end without anyone ending it. A named thing has to be dismantled by a person, on a date, with their name attached. This is the entire appeal of the unfiled arrangement, and the fear the branding covers for: fear of asking and hearing no. Fear that the word would make it real enough to lose. Fear, on the other side of the bed, of a commitment that would need to be formally broken instead of quietly abandoned. The situationship accommodates every one of these without confronting any of them. Ambiguity is a service one person provides and the other consumes, and it is nearly always billed in the consumer's hours.

I kept the register too

I would like to file this story as a complaint. The record won't let me. Three years before those Thursdays, I held the register myself. A man wanted the noun, and I kept him a spring and a summer without it. I answered his midnight messages inside four minutes and let his one direct question — asked twice, in daylight, like an adult — age for two days before I answered around it. At a birthday dinner I introduced him as a friend and watched him rearrange his face to fit the word. When he finally tried "boyfriend" out loud, I made a joke about paperwork, and he laughed, because I had left his face nothing else to do.

He left without notice. Those were the terms I had set; I had just assumed he wouldn't read them as carefully as I wrote them. I told people it came out of nowhere. It came out of the contract.

You learn to live in places you are not on the lease for, and the training holds. You keep your life portable. You hang nothing heavy. You perfect the hallway sentence that explains your presence to strangers, and then you get so fluent in it that you list it on your profile as a virtue — easygoing, no pressure, goes with the flow. Removability, filed under strengths. I diagnosed this in other people for years before the file returned a match.

This spring, eight weeks into something with a man who crosses the city without being negotiated with, I asked the question with a noun in it. Out loud, at his kitchen table, under the overhead light — the light matters; ambiguity prefers lamps. He said the noun back. The feeling stayed the same size. What changed is what the feeling owes: a notice period. If this ends now, somebody will have to end it, on a date, with his name or mine attached.

In June the renewal on my apartment came back registered, a PDF from the tax office with a reference number I will never memorize, filed in a folder called apartment. The Tuesday after, I had a second key cut at the shop by the tram stop — four euros twenty, ninety seconds, no ceremony — and gave it to him without a speech. He hasn't needed it yet. It is cut anyway.

If you are doing the 2 a.m. arithmetic on an arrangement of your own, the longer answers live in the labels-and-definitions section of the Modern Love & Heartbreak Index. For the audit that comes after the exit, read What Love Is, According to the Evidence.