For my junior year of college, my best friend and I decided we would live together in the campus apartments- but that didn’t really work out. She wasn’t just a college best friend that I randomly decided to be in my life. She was my best friend, almost like my sister. We first met at church when we were in seventh grade, about 13 years old which is already a tough year for most people. We have never gone to the same school until our sophomore year of college but living together was something we didn’t try until this year.
We thought that living together was going to be amazing but after living together for a bit, we started to have the stupidest fights. I couldn’t even tell you what most of them were about, they just ended with us not speaking to each other for a couple of days. Those days were horrible, I felt like I lost my confidant and had no one to talk to. Even the fights where I ended up crying for hours, we would make up eventually.
I realized that the issue was not with our friendship, but just with us living together. Sometimes friends just can’t live together, solely because they are so similar that they bump heads causing the conflicts. In the long run, after many arguments, tears, and hugging it out I have decided that I value my friendship with my best friend more than anything in the world. That is why for me personally, I have decided to live in a different space where she can visit but not live. This works out in the sense that we would not be clashing as poorly as we did this year, but we can also continue to grow our friendship.
If you are having an issue with your friends that you live with, maybe take a step back and figure out if it’s your friendship or it’s the clashing of living together. If you realize that it’s just living together, then you can say what I said to my best friend.
“I love you to the moon and back, but I think that for our friendship and our own personal mental health we should never live together again. And this doesn’t mean anything bad about you or our friendship, it’s just that some people can’t live together. And that’s okay.