Enduring A Bad Roommate

Enduring a bad roommate can be one of the first, and most scarring events of a college students career. Usually roommates are found via social media and have no personal connection other than a few awkward messages talking about what seems important in a roommate. The conversations that aren’t had seem to be the most relevant but seem so obvious that we should not address them. When first “meeting”, (a term I use loosely because talking on social media is not meeting), my roommate I didn’t think to ask whether he planned on stealing my socks or if he was going to leave food piled up everywhere but sure enough, that is what I had the pleasure of being graced with. For someone else, this may have been okay, which is why a roommate being “bad” is subjective, but personally I feel as though I have conquered the college cliche of the “bad roommate”.

To me a roommate should be respectful of a shared space, somewhat clean and somewhat organized; which was everything that my roommate was not. My general expectation was that we would keep our sides cleaned, we would keep up with laundry so the room didn’t smell like a high school locker room, and that we would just be relatively friendly. I feel as though it isn’t entirely his fault that we ended up being incompatible as I didn’t effectively communicate these issues, but I help up my end of the deal and it is not your roommates job to be your parent and remind you to clean up your messes and do your