There are 2 scenarios in which this would happen. First, you are going to the same college as your best friend from high school. Second, you became great friends with someone your first couple years of college and would love to find an apartment/dorm with them the upcoming year. This post is a caution to that decision. Unless you and your friend have the exact same living habits with the same expectations of each other (make sure it’s low), you might end up being only roommates by the end of the year, if you get what I mean. Here are 5 reasons why not to be roommates with your friend:
1. Ground rules will be ignored.
When you’re friends, you think you know each other too well to bother with ground rules. Or even if you did hash out the ground rules, being friends makes someone think they can be lenient with the rules. Which will start to irk the other eventually.
2. Personalities might not mesh.
The traits you enjoy in your friend might not transfer well to the traits you enjoy in a roommate. Say, your friend and you talk for hours on end over coffee all the time. But when you come to your dorm, you want silence. And your friend-who’s-now-your-roommate is still talking. Not ideal, is it? Or, you love to party with your friend, but when you live together, your friend starts bringing the party to your room. There are so many things that can go wrong here.
3. Problems might not be addressed early on.
There are two ways this can play out. First, you could ignore the problem for the sake of your friendship. That will not bode so well for anyone’s relationship, because the little problem will build and build, and pretty soon, you will blow up in the worst way possible, thus ending the friendship. Second, you could hope and hope for your friend to understand that you’re not pleased with some of their habits, and you will get annoyed that they don’t notice, thus causing you to blow up, which causes tension in the room. No good.
4. Privacy disappears because you’ll always be together.
No matter how great of friends you are, everyone appreciates a bit of privacy that living with a friend does not always give you. You will see them all the time. They will know everything, starting from the party you were invited to that they weren’t, ending with the problems you will have that you don’t want anyone to know about. They will always be there, and that is not necessarily a good thing. It’s like the married couples who work and live together. You are always together. There isn’t a time to cool off if there is an argument, because you will have likely have classes together, and you will be living together. Small talk is rendered useless because you’ll know how each other’s day went, or someone will be tired of the small talk at one point. Tension is guaranteed to grow, no matter how close you are. You’re going to have to find a new person to complain to about your roommate problems. Consider that.
5. People change.
What you thought was your best friend last year or last summer might have joined a fraternity, fallen in love with a person, gone through a traumatic event. The point is, the person you expected to live with might not be the person you end up living with. Sometimes people change for the better and you’ll become closer than ever. But not all roommates are that lucky, and you might end up with clashing personalities as friends and roommates.
These factors are, of course, the worst case scenarios. But it happens a lot, and friendships are honestly destroyed over difficult living situations. So make sure you are close enough to get past this before that becomes a possibility.
Are there other reasons why not to be roommates with your friend? Or why it’s actually better? Let us know in the comments below!
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Photo courtesy of Karine via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).