Many students have this idea and this aspiration that when we start college, our roommates will be our forever friends. We think they’ll be in our lives forever and that we’ll be inseparable. But, it doesn’t always work out that way. This ideal person we created in our minds could turn out to be a complete nightmare that we have to live with for a year. There is a bright side to this nightmare, but it’s not revealed as instantly as we would think.
Let’s paint a picture. The first dorm we move into always seems so exciting; we can get a taste of independence and learn how to be an adult after so many years of constant supervision. We imagine it like the movies, having the perfect-fit roommate to go to parties with, study, go to games, and have an eternal best friend like we’ve always seen on-screen. That exciting day arrives and we meet the person that we’ve already built in our dreams, but then realize they are the complete opposite of what we envisioned. This is a huge setback on the “ideal” college experience, especially since they aren’t willing to be as friendly as we hoped. The calls and complaints begging to come home fill your parents’ inbox because we live in a shoebox with a person who doesn’t seem to want us there. Every time we try to communicate with them, it turns into instant rejection. Eventually, we run out of ideas. Now we are anxiously waiting for the end of the semester to find somewhere else to live happily by ourselves or start fresh with someone new.
I can’t confirm that this is the same for everyone, but it’s the most common story I’ve heard since being in college. Roommates are more difficult to comprehend than we think. We are living with a person we don’t know and who probably already has their mind made up on friends and what they want to do in life. They don’t always meet the ideal expectation we saw in the movies. We all want to have the best college experience with the best roommate ever, but that isn’t reality for most people. We live with the people we are assigned, and we learn to appreciate different people and gain an understanding on how life works: We don’t always get the perfect outcome and we don’t always get what we want.
The reality is that before they were our roommates, they were human beings with their own way of doing things and their own mentality. Roommates are just people in our lives that help us learn about ourselves as we enter adulthood. With these people, we learn what we like and don’t like about others to give us a better perspective when we choose friends and the people we choose to be in our lives. Instead of seeing it as a huge setback, why not see it as a lesson and a way of learning more about ourselves and how to move forward.