All throughout the country, there are asylum seekers looking for connection, searching for something pure.
‘I’m blaming this on Disney,’ Victor winces, burying his head in his hands.
Aged 15, he was the new kid at a school in Hackney. He had a thick Nigerian accent that he was trying hard to mask, and zero clue about the social order of teenage life in London. He’s also a sucker for love, so when his cousin introduced him to a girl who looked just like someone he knew in Lagos, he fell hard. ‘She felt like home,’ he explains. ‘And I caught feelings really fast.’
Victor was learning on the job, so he turned to the TV shows and films he grew up with, watching for a blueprint. He decided, in his infinite wisdom, that the best way to woo his crush was to serenade her. In the playground. In front of the entire school. ‘Oh God, I’m blushing,’ he squirms, in a rare break from cloud-like calm. ‘I sang Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish. I was a bit rusty so my voice cracked. To this day I can’t listen to that song.’
Did it work? ‘Nooooo!’ But, like Prince Eric himself, Victor persevered. The next time, he asked the girl out during lunch break and was turned down again. But about a month later, they finally got together.
The two ended up dating for over a year, breaking up just before they started sixth form college – arguably a model trajectory for a first relationship. But they could have had a different ending. Victor and his mum had flown from Heathrow to Nigeria in December 2020 for what Victor thought was a two-week holiday. In fact they were escaping his father’s family, who were convinced that Victor was not his father’s son and were making threats on their lives. By the time Victor started his dating life, he and his mum had overstayed.
‘I had this deep fear that the police could stop me at any point and tell me I had to go back,’ he says. ‘So I tried my best to stay inside.’ It was a relationship that existed in school corridors and DMs. So, who ended things? ‘I wanna say it was mutual, but I think she did,’ Victor concludes.
For asylum seekers in the UK, life can be deeply boring in a way that allows for space to think about little else but their predicament. Those awaiting news on claims – a process that can take anywhere from a few months to many years – are not allowed to work. There are regular check-ins at a reporting centre, with the possibility of random detention a constant threat. Housing is temporary, so putting down roots is virtually impossible. Outside of check-ins, time is filled with figuring out how to subsist on £49.18 a week in independent living, and £8.86 a week in catered accommodation.
This all makes for an unsettled existence at the edges of society. In my time working with and reporting on asylum seekers, I’ve always wondered how feasible it is to maintain a love life in the mayhem. So I put a call-out across a tight migrant network of activists, charities and WhatsApp groups, asking for stories. There was an enthusiastic response. It proved something I already knew: migrants love the opportunity to talk about anything other than their immigration status.
Wan is a 50-year-old Malaysian Muslim living in Leeds, with a four-year-old son and magnetic energy. She was trafficked to the UK six years ago by an abusive husband, who created a fake passport and used their marriage certificate to board them both onto a flight while Wan was pregnant. The stress of the experience caused her to start bleeding on landing at Heathrow Airport. She was rushed to Hillingdon Hospital, where she lost the baby.
She describes her husband playing on his phone as she bled and a nurse encouraging him to engage: ‘He said, “don’t worry, she’s not going to die today.”’ Wan will never forget the look of pity on the nurse’s face.
Six years on, Wan hardly recognises the woman she was in the hospital. Despite the fact that she is still appealing her own rejected asylum claim, she campaigns hard for migrant rights: ‘I’m proud of myself. I’ve worked hard on myself. I’ve been on TV, I’ve been to parliament three times.’
She also attends regular rape therapy sessions to manage her PTSD. It was, she explains, her therapist’s idea to get her on the dating scene: ‘She said you have to create new memories to replace the bad ones.’ By and large she’s having fun with it, laughing at the outdated profile shots and unsolicited dick pics.
21-year-old Henry came to the UK from Nigeria to reunite with his mum in 2022. ‘I’ve noticed, in the UK, when you’re having a conversation with someone, the first thing they ask you is “where are you from?”’ he says. ‘Once you tell them something about immigration, the conversation sort of changes. If you’re British, or maybe American, then you’ve got something in common. But if you’re from Africa, there’s an “ohhhh” and a head tilt.’ So he now evades the question.
Henry wears a nondescript lad uniform: jeans and a navy polo shirt. But his voice is soft, his lips are glossy. ‘I think I knew I was gay from a very young age,’ he says.
So, growing up, Henry’s parents did everything they could to swerve the inevitable. They sent him to boarding school to ‘get roughened’ and to deliverance sessions at church, where he was told he was possessed by the devil.
On arrival in the UK, Henry tried to continue masking his gayness, but he found himself asking his preacher tell-tale hypothetical questions. ‘I was trying hard to not accept myself, in the belief that God would see my efforts and maybe forgive me or help me.’ His mother found out. ‘Long story short, she kicked me out and I became homeless,’ Henry explains. Her rejection, teamed with a lack of support from the church, was the final push that Henry needed to live life out proud as a gay man.
But the decision coincided with homelessness and a shaky immigration status. Henry rough-slept for several months before being housed in temporary accommodation by a charity, with no guests allowed.
‘When I first decided to be openly gay there was this impulse to want to get into a relationship, to find love,’ Henry says. ‘I saw gay people in the UK living their life and I yearned for it.’ So he got himself on Grindr, where ‘no hook-ups, looking for a relationship’ made for a futile bio. With no money and nowhere to live, he found himself relying on meet-ups in free public spaces. Privacy would be at their place, on their terms.
Plus, overcoming a lifetime of conditioning is not an overnight affair. ‘I guess when you’ve never really felt what it feels like for someone else to just accept you the way you are, it leaves you open,’ Henry says.
There were a series of bad dates and a situationship when he was at his lowest ebb. A guy he really liked slept with him, then told him not to text for at least three months. A wealthy neurologist quickly lost interest when he got to know Henry more: ‘He had a great picture of me, then I had to go and run my mouth! Finding out I was a homeless asylum seeker, it didn’t quite align with his image of me.’
Before long, Henry decided dating wasn’t for him. For just over a year now, he has been housed with a warm and generous elderly lady, who lives in a rambling townhouse at the edge of Hampstead Heath. A former doctor, she’s helping him work towards a place at university to study medicine. His grades are good, but so far he can’t find a university who will accept him before he has a decision on his asylum claim. She encourages him to get out there and meet people.
‘When I was finally free, going on dates was really hard for me. I felt this stigma that I just couldn’t escape,’ Henry says. ‘But there was so much that needed fixing in my own life. I’m leaning more towards loving the gay in me.’
Wan describes dating one English man, a music teacher, for a few blissful months. He bought her flowers on her birthday and took her to his favourite tourist spots. For their first date he treated her to dinner in a Thai restaurant – ‘I can’t afford to eat in restaurants! I was in such a good mood because of that food!’ – and then out dancing to her first ever concert.
But, as Wan puts it, she wasn’t healed enough to find new love yet. ‘He brought me to a village at Christmas,’ Wan recalls. ‘It was so beautiful and full of lights. But I saw the children running around and I started crying, thinking about my dead child.’ She ended things that night.
Wan has many plans for how she will celebrate when she finally gets her refugee status. First up, she’s going to find the nurse who helped her that day in Hillingdon Hospital and thank her.
As for Victor, he’s in a new relationship with a piano-playing Romanian and head over heels once more. He claimed asylum last year: ‘Ever since then I’ve been more sure of my status and I’ve just been optimistic about things.’ It was on the night that he was honest about his immigration status that the couple shared their first kiss.
Asylum seeker life is suspended in uncertainty. It’s difficult to put yourself out there when you lack that sense of arrival; what the kids might call becoming your best self. But Wan has thoughts: ‘You shouldn’t make it a reason to stop living your life. When you start to love yourself, you’re unstoppable,’ she cries. ‘Dating is fun! I can decide for myself because I don’t belong to someone else and that is very nice! It makes me feel good!’
