Whether you knew each other for years before move-in day or found a stranger through a matching service, you are going to fight with your roommates, especially during your freshman year of college. I didn’t know either of my roommates before moving in on that hot August day in 2018, but we certainly got to know each other after living together for a year. Now, as a senior, I wanted to recount the worst problems that came up between myself and my first roommates so you can see if you relate.
- Alcohol and Drugs
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I’ll admit it: My freshman year, I was a goody-two-shoes. But, this isn’t to say that not wanting to break rules — or the law — is a bad thing, or vice versa. I lived in an apartment my first year at UofSC and both of my roommates enjoyed their fair share of living on the more, let’s say, ‘fun’ side of college. The problem with this was that we had agreed to not keep alcohol or drugs in our shared apartment, meaning wrote it on the roommate agreement and everything. But guess what was in the freezer only one week into living together? A big ole’ bottle of tequila. And they partook in some other illicit things in the apartment as well, but, I digress.
- Late Night Noise
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I got my first job when I was 18 and a new freshie at UofSC, working at a Publix in downtown Columbia, SC right down the road from where I lived. I loved my job and everything about it, but sometimes it’s hard being an opening cashier at 6:45 in the morning, especially when your roommates come home with a parade of other people at 2:00 am and wake you up.
It wasn’t explicitly written in our roommate agreement that you had to be quiet when your roommate is dead asleep in the middle of the night, but come on, have some respect.
- Chores
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I am most certainly not the cleanest person in the world, I couldn’t even tell you the last time I did a load of laundry, but I still like to respect shared spaces. My roommates, on the other hand, did not. In fact, I can’t recall a time they took out the trash or washed a dish once in the entire year I lived with them.
They lived like absolute slobs and didn’t contain it to their own rooms; it was our shared living room and kitchen spaces as well. They were always leaving their dirty dishes on the couch (the couch!?) and if they did manage to get their dishes to the sink, they would stay there for as long as it took me to get sick of seeing them and clean them myself. Even worse than the dish epidemic was the trash. They never took the trash bags to the disposal, even though it was right down the hall. I vividly remember having my own private boycott of cleaning to see if maybe, just maybe, they would get tired of their own filth and finally take out the trash. There were TEN fully loaded bags of garbage lined up against our wall before I finally cracked and just took them — all ten bags — to the disposal myself. You could not have imagined the smell…
- Overnight Guests
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Now, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t also include at least one problem that my roommates had with me? I am not a perfect roommate, far from it, but I can admit at least one flaw I know I had: overnight guests.
Towards the tail end of my first semester in college, this prudish and still newly independent freshman got her first — and certainly not last — boyfriend. I was elated and we spent every second together, which led to him practically living with me. Let’s just say that not everyone was quite as happy for me as I was. We had said in our roommate agreement that we wouldn’t have any overnight guests for longer than three days at a time, and certainly not without warning the other roomies in advance. I’ll admit, I definitely had him over for weeks at a time and did not warn them every time he was coming to visit. In hindsight, those weren’t my best decisions and they certainly led to many, many passive-aggressive fights in the roommate group chat.
This is all to say that sometimes roommates fight, no one’s perfect. Aside from all of this, we all had our good times, and I still talk to both of my freshman year roommates three years later. I wish them all the best that life has to offer and I know that they wish the same for me, because despite our differences and our many fights, no one can take away all the amazing moments that we shared together either.