What You Learn After Having Too Many Roommates

By Kaitlynne Birkett on April 16, 2012

As I finished moving into my new room today, I sat down and thought about my constant difficulties with roommates. Can it be blamed on the childhood with a single room? Am I too picky? Do I simply move out in order to avoid confrontation? The easy answer to these three is yes.

Photo from Flickr.com by ramsey everydaypants

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are certain people that living with is easy and certain people it is easier to be friends with. If you’re lucky, you’ll get assigned a roommate who is both. When I moved in with my freshman year roommate, I was in a state of bliss. As we filled in our roommate contracts together, I was extremely lenient, saying I didn’t care what time she went to bed or that I didn’t mind sharing things. When the things I said were fine on the contract began happening, I started to realize I didn’t enjoy it.  And after I moved out, I began to realize how cool my ex-roommate was. We got along really well outside of the room and could easily bond over the smallest things. It was almost surreal, watching the friendship grow as it never had when we lived together.

I ended up moving into the room of a girl I barely knew and our roommate bond was fantastic. We were both extremely easy going and constantly considerate of the other.  We grew as roommates and as friends throughout the rest of the year, and for some reason, decided not to live together again.

Problems again ensued. I chose to room with my friend of seven years, banking on the fact that we’d known each other that long, everything would work out. But because we had known each other for so long, I felt bad opening my mouth to express dislike at anything. We didn’t even fill out the roommate contract so I couldn’t rely on that either. Though we had been fantastic friends all through junior high and high school, our personalities just grated on each other; our friendship gradually began deteriorating.  As I made the choice to move out, I felt horrible, but I knew it would be better for us both in the end.

And then, I moved back in with my second roommate from freshman year. Something about our characters just simply clicked. We weren’t best friends and didn’t expect that type of relationship to come from it. One of the most common mistakes of roommates is becoming friends before becoming roommates- as a roommate, you can request certain habits to cease, yet when you are friends, you have to take that for granted. You may have two of the most different personalities, but it may work, while similar personalities may be a cause for disaster.

So in the end, I’ve realized that friendship and rooming together don’t ever necessarily mix. When choosing a room mate for the following year, make sure it is someone that you can be open and honest with. It’s hard to live with someone who you are constantly going to be walking on egg shells around. No matter what happens, it’s always possible to move out and by doing that, you may save the friendship that you had before living together.

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