Living With College Roommates

For a lot of people, college is the first time you ever share your living space with another person. I'd shared a room once before, but it was with my little sister 13 years ago when we were still barely old enough to write our names. For this reason, I had a fair bit of anxiety about sharing a bedroom with another person. I went through all the hysteric questions. Will she smell? Will she be a psychokiller? Will she eat really stinky food? Will she stay up all night with the lights on? Will she grind her teeth or walk around or masturbate in her sleep? Will she have horrible taste in music?

Luckily for me, I had absolutely the sweetest, most mildmannered roommate ever. She was friendly, quiet, relatively neat, she smelled lovely, she didn't do weird stuff either asleep or awake and the wildest thing I ever saw her do was eat a cookie with weed baked into it and giggle for 3 hours. We got on famously.

Of course this wasn't the case with everyone in our hall. Plenty of people got along, but there were also loads who didn't. We had girls stealing other girls' boyfriends (and a girlfriend, one time). We had people who had different study habits and would end up furiously writing papers in the hall at 2am, so as not to disturb their roomies. We had people who had decorative disagreements and ended up with nothing on the walls at all. We had people who just kind of generally hated each other for no apparent reason.

Now this is tough because I didn't have to take much of my own advice in this department since things just kind of worked out, but from watching other peoples' tiffs, I'd recommend the following in terms of roomie negotiation.

1. Communicate! You live together, guys. Ignoring a problem and avoiding eye contact is super awkward, especially when you know what the other person's knickers look like. If there's a problem, address it. If it's absolutely too painful, try to find a mediator, like a friend, an RA or an ombudsperson.

2. Share. You're already sharing space, so try not to freak if your roomie uses a pen. Obviously there's a line with this and you shouldn't expect your roommate to just help himself to your lucky socks, but fostering a sense of togetherness and making your own little community will create a bond and make you both feel more comfortable.

3. Do stuff together, but not everything. A trap that a lot of people fall into, especially during freshman year of college, is doing everything with their roommates. It's totally awesome that you have at least one instant friend when you get there, and you should definitely go see a movie or have dinner together every so often, but try to meet people who you don't live with to be your friends too.

4. Be cool. Even if you and your roomie are the best of friends, there will inevitably come a point where something goes wrong or some disagreement crops up. There's no sense in ruining a good relationship over a bad mood. Try to keep things under control and your roomie will too.