What kind of conflicts / compatibilities have you had with roommates? For example, the old stereotype is that one roommate leaves dirty dishes in the sink and it drives the other roommate crazy. What’s your pet peeve / experience / story about roommate situations?
When I shared with my friend Richard, before we moved in together we each made 5 houserules – things that were dealbreakers for sharing together things like:
you can listen to my cds whenevery you want but please put them back in their cases.
I will do the washing if you put the trash out etc.
It worked really well because we got to know each other by knowing what the priorities we had and pre-arranged compromises!
Hope this helps
Salx
Stever, in 1995 my mother had a debilitating stroke and as a result she is my roommate. I mention this because not every roommate is a stranger at college and I’d like to hear your thoughts on roommates who are adult family members (meaning you can’t just kill them and stuff their bodies in a drainage ditch in the next town over–I sure hope they feel the same moral, or at least logistic, limitation on their actions toward me!).
Love the show-hope it helps!
First day of boarding school. I am a poor scholarship student, and I arrive wearing an indecently expensive jacket, bought with my own hard-earned cash, and entirely inappropriate garb for this rural mountain hippie-run school. Roommate from privileged background mocks jacket mercilessly by way of introduction. I leave it off when I go out to find my way around a little. When I come back, jacket is gone. Where can it be? I am a little frantic. Is my new boarding school a den of thieves? Not exactly: roommate returns after a town trip, wearing jacket with no little panache. She returns it without thanks or apology, after making me ask.
Number one priority immediately becomes ‘new roommate’.
When I first moved to Boston I moved in with another alum of my college who I found through our college’s message board. She was a bit odd, didn’t wash (herself or the apartment) but I wrote that off as eccentric and did some extra cleaning. However, when she started taking pity on the local homeless guys and inviting them to sleep on our couch, that’s when I (and the other roommate) made a hasty exit from what turned into a scary situation!
my sophomore year in college I had a roommate, naomi. she and I roomed together because we were both night owls and figured that our schedules would be compatible. naomi was a really heavy sleeper and had such trouble waking up in the mornings that she had an alarm clock that sounded like an air raid alarm and could literally be heard from across the quad. unfortunately, she was still able to sleep through this alarm clock, and, even more unfortunately, she was a ‘snooze’-hitter. so after waking her up by throwing something at her, she would hit the snooze button and the whole thing would repeat 10 minutes later. she would often set her alarm clock for an hour before she really needed to wake up to accommodate her snooze habit.
then she joined the crew team and signed up for 6am practices. that meant the air raid alarm clock madness took place during the hour from 5am to 6am.
I dealt with this by deciding that if I was going to be up much later than 3am (which happened often) I would just stay up until she left at 6am and sleep uninterrupted until my noon class. this strategy was so bad for my body that I gave myself mononucleosis.
I have not shared a room since.
also, she was a big fan of the insane clown posse and had a terrifying poster of scary clowns in a burning room overrun with cockroaches.
I’m currently a first year University student in England and sharing a flat with 5 other girls. 1 I haven’t seen since roughly october, even during fire alarms (we do know she’s there though!), 1 is lovely and always tells us her boyfriend’s visiting for the weekend and so on, another one is fine – she has a heavy courseload so jsut gets on with it (quite like me) but the other 2 are dire! They go out clubbing most nights can come back at 3-4am drunk, loud etc. They never wash up or clean anything, when there was a problem with the water system and we were given half a tank of hot water (enough for 6 showers) they used it all between them leaving the rest of us with only cold water – including for washing up and drive me absolutely nuts. They also invite friends to visit and stay up all night talking without telling the rest of us – I can only find out when things like this are going to happen by eavesdropping on their phone conversations (not hard, they have rooms next to me and positively yell down the phone).
I certainly feel better after posting this! And as for how I deal with it – washing up etc gets stacked on the side neatly (it’s starting to look like a biology experiment though) and I chuck rubbish in my way in the bin and wipe down surfaces I use/get dirty. Thankfully I don’t have to deal with a shared bathroom – their’s are growing mould from where they’re too lazy to clean!
My first semester in an apartment my roommate and I both had dogs. Her dog wasn’t house trained, spent hours just barking at my dog, every time the door to my room was open he snuck in and peed on my bed, and he would attack my dog for absolutely no reason. Plus in two months she never once took out the trash, cleaned the floor, or cleaned the bathroom. The one time I refused to do dishes to make a point she let them sit in the sink until mold was growing and then complained loudly the entire time she spent washing them. She only had 1-2 hours of class every day and spent the rest of the day on the couch playing computer games and watching tv. The final straw was when her dog got an injured leg and she blamed my dog for it and accused me of not treating the two dogs equally (which she herself never did).
One of my pet peeves is turning on the TV and then leaving the room. I had a roommate that would come home after me, turn off my stereo, turn on the TV (in the living room) & then go into her room and shut the door. Confronting her didn’t help, only moving out did.
Ah roommates. I’ve had good ones (who I am still friends with over 20 years later) and not so good ones.
The good ones were the ones where we addressed expectations of living together PRIOR to moving in. Not always possible in the world of assigned roommates, but helpful none the less. This includes letting each other know what bothers you the most, and letting each other know it bothers you when it first happens. Everyone grows up and is raised differently, and you don’t really figure this out until you live with them.
The roommates that I had the hardest time with were the ones that hadn’t ever lived away from home except when they were in college (and even then they went to college only a few hours from home). Therefore, I didn’t only have my roommates to negotiate with, I had their parents too, which was a bit of a culture shock.
My recommendations
- Interview your potential roommate and encourage them to do the same. Use scenario based questions like “If you meet Mr. Wonderful at the bar, and bring him home at 2 am, what expectations would you set with him about volume level and attire for the remainder of the a.m.?” “About how many times a day do you take out the garbage?” “What type of music do you listen to?”
- Set expectations ahead of time before moving in.
- Get references – i.e. former roommates. If former roommates are not available or unwilling to talk – beware…
- Lay out on the table all pet peeves and encourage potential roommates to do this as well
- PUT IT IN WRITING and post it on a community bulletin board or refrigerator door
Finally, continue to save money and seek out safe neighborhoods where you can finally have your own place. It gets a lot easier that way.
I lived with 2 guys in NYC in my first apartment after college (I’m a woman)… one I nicknamed “Pig Pen” as there seemed to be an unbelievable stench from his room whenever he opened the door (and nevermind the teeming ashtrays on the floor of his rooom), the other I nicknamed “Jabba the Butt”, as he was an Overnight Currency Trader and the only times I ever saw him he was lying on the couch in his boxers (on my way to work and then, again, when I got home). They were both kind of disasters.
While living with them I took a brief leave of absence from work to go backpacking around Australia & New Zealand for a month. Prior to leaving, I left them checks for each of the utilities and the rent, each in their own envelopes (postage included), with the dates due written on the outside of them.
While on my trip, I kept being surprised at the balances shown in my account when I went to the ATM (it wasn’t really going down!), but it wasn’t until I got home and a month later we got an eviction notice that I realized they had not paid a single bill in my absence.
It was right then and there that I pledged, no matter how cash strapped I might be, I would NEVER live with someone I wasn’t married to. And I kept that promise.
I once let a new friend stay in my spare room for “a few weeks” until he found a new place. He was a nice, charming, and funny and I thought all would be well. And then his stuff arrived…
After a week I asked him if he could move the boxes out of the hallway where they’d been set the day he moved in. At that point I wasn’t charging him to stay so I thought he could at least be somewhat unobtrusive.
As the weeks went on, I finally set some ground rules like:
- If the lettuce is ankle deep on the floor after you make a salad (truly!) could you sweep it up before you track in into the carpet?
- Please not use my loofah in the shower. (And, YUCK, why would you want to?!)
- You have a cell phone; my house phone is also my business line – please never answer it.
I let him stay on past the first few weeks because it was financially in my best interest, but I felt like my space had been invaded by a 38 year old teenager. Suddenly I was the nagging wife/mommy in the situation. NOT my favorite role!
He had one habit that I couldn’t get him to stop. Every evening he’d take his laptop into the only bathroom and sit on the toilet for hours updating his blog and IM’ing with his friends. Icky on so many levels!
He ended up staying with me for 9 months – at which point I finally moved. He instantly found some other woman to “stay with for a few weeks.”
Once we didn’t live together we were able to resume a nice friendship, but I still try not to think about it too much when he sends me an instant message!
My husband is the best roommate ever! we live in a studio apartment, and he and i have the same levels of messiness. Also, I love that he always does the dishes, in exchange i try to always vaccuum but sometimes he beats me to it. after past really horrible roommie experiences, i realize now that if you love someone, no pettinesses can ever get in the way. it made me realize how unnatural it is to live with someone as an arrangement. that said, in the past, the best roommates were the ones who were never around, aka, sleeping at their boyfriends’ every night.
One roomate thought the house should save energy by keeping the temperature at 55-60 degrees. A thermostat war ensued. Eventually the other roommates agreed to pay his part of the heating bill. He refused but stopped changing the thermostat.
My first college roomate used to have her boyfriend over. That’s ok. Sometimes he spent the night. Sort of ok. Sometimes they had sex while I was in the room. They were in the top bunk while I was in the bottom. NOT OK!! I quickly got out only to get a dorm room with a huge slob who kept a mountain of clothes as tall as me, and stole my jewelry to pay for cocaine. I joke that I got married in college so I could stop having bad roomates, but it’s only partly a joke.
I’ve had lots of roommates before getting married in my late twenties. And it might sound funny, but the main problem I had with roommates is that they weren’t like me. I like peace & quiet, they like blaring their radio. I like air conditioning, they like opening the window for fresh air. I like sleeping, they like snoring. Etc., etc. What helps is reminding myself of all their good qualities like paying half of the rent, not murdering me in my sleep, and using deodorant. This usually seems to keep the peace.
My roommate freshman year in college was a klepto…
I had a klepto roommate, once, as well. I knew it when he moved in, though, and was careful each night to lock up my silver, gold, and pearl-inlaid artificial leg…
I had a roommate (flatmate) once, and besides her being messier than me, we got along pretty well. Until she decided to wean herself off Xanax without her doctor’s support. In one week she started screaming at me regularly, accusing me of not caring about her, and generally breaking down. I ended up moving back in with my parents for a month because of it!
I think the problems come in two areas – bad communication, and not contributing equally.
I did have one roommate who owned a home. Two of us rented rooms from him .He decided to sell it without telling anyone. One day I got off work a little early because I had evening plans. I noticed a lockbox on the front door, but there were no signs in the yard. I went to take a shower before going out, and when I came out of the bathroom with just a towel around my waist, an agent was showing the home. Awkward…
My roommate has done nothing but bring girls and friends over (okay), then never clean up after himself or take a shower (not really okay)..or even organize his sides of the room (he has the bed on the right side of the room, so he has the desk, the closet and the sink- all on the right side.)<— NOT OKAY. I'm a neat freak. He's a slob. Pretty sure I'm not going to see him through til May…
i woke my roomate up having oral sex with this guy i sorta like….we dont really get along in the first place but i feel superbad. it was just worng and i dont know what to say to her. i like ran after here and i know it was a messed up thing to do but it kinda just happend. and she said she was a deep sleeper and we wernt even being loud. what do i do?
I have a roommate who slama dues on a daily basis and wakes me in the morning and it is a great disturbance to my peace in morning and throughout the day. She also, mrsses with my personal belongings in common areas; moves them, knocks them over, hides them. On 1 occasion, started arguing with me over it in front of Landlord and called me a crazy bitch. The Landlord spoke to her twice, but she has not stopped. I need to take some type of Legal action to protect my possessions and for my own right to live here in peace.