She sits on her bed in her dorm room. It has only been three months, and she is already counting down the days until her roommate moves out. She looks at her calendar. Move out day is circled by a thick black line.
Her roommate walks over to the sink to brush her teeth. She cringes as she hears her roommate brush her teeth and then gargle the extra toothpaste and water in her mouth. Kwak-plaa. The sink is, no doubt, left with a filmy spit, she thinks as her roommate walks over to the thermostat.
She bites her lip in anger as her roommate turns the temperature down to 68 degrees.
The ice queen might melt, she thinks, staring at her roommate who is still standing in front of the thermostat.
She looks back down to her calendar, re-circling the date with a black marker.
Justin Longino, a sophomore in animal science, knows from experience that having a roommate who is completely opposite him can cause problems.
He got up early for classes, while his roommate slept in, taking classes in the afternoon and at night. Longino was neat, while his roommate was messy.
But keeping the room clean wasn’t his roommate’s only problem.
“He also had a problem aiming, if you know what I mean,” Longino said. “I put down some newspaper and made some signs. I would drop little hints. I wrote one sign that said ‘Please don’t urinate on the floor. Thank you, Housekeeping.'”
According to Longino, the relationship started out congenial, but once his roommate got settled in, their relationship turned bad. His roommate would sing a cappella while Longino attempted to study and turn on all the lights when he came home late at night. On the rare occasion they did actually did talk, Longino said, they would end up fighting.
Unhappy, he said he looked into getting another roommate but his RA discouraged him, telling him he could get stuck with someone worse.
Unlike Longino, Karen Blalock, a sophomore in political science, chose her roommate, but that didn’t keep her from having problems. The two were best friends, but Blalock said that fact changed after she got a boyfriend and her roommate broke up with hers. From then on their relations soured.
“She was depressed and I tried to help her, but she would take her anger out on me, because it was easy to do,” she said. “She slammed doors and wouldn’t talk to me for days.”
Blalock said after she started filling her time with a boyfriend and a job she immediately saw a change in her friend and encountered verbal abuse. Her roommate told her she was gaining weight in response to Blalock’s question if she was “bloated or gaining weight.”
“Another time, I was eating a taco and said jokingly, ‘Could they put anything more in this taco?'” She said, “Could you complain any more? I don’t think you hit your quota for the day,'” Blalock said.
The verbal abuse and slamming of doors eventually acted as catalysts for Blalock to move out.
“I was concerned about her, but when she was trying to put me down that’s when I had to do something for myself,” she said. “She thought I would never have the guts to remove myself from the situation.”
Blalock said despite everything that happened, she hoped to remain friends, but her roommate refused. Her roommate asked her to not come back to their suite, even to visit.
While Blalock encountered verbal abuse, Katherine Wood, a freshman in textile technology, said her roommate was inconsiderate and disrespectful.
“She’d sleep all day and would drink a box of wine at night,” she said. “I’d come back and there would be ten people in the room. I couldn’t get any schoolwork done.”
Once, her roommate got a new tattoo on one of her breasts. According to Wood, she exposed her entire breast to show Wood’s boyfriend and his friend.
She said she would spend many nights over at her boyfriend’s because she was fearful of what she would come back to and didn’t want to be around her roommate.
“I didn’t confront her about it because I had somewhere to go and I’m not a very confrontational person. I’m bad at saying no,” she said.
On one occasion, Wood said her roommate put her over the edge. Wood came back to a messy room. Everything that had been on her bed was on the floor. The box where she kept her stereo was opened, and there were stains on the carpet.
She thought this was it, until a guy whom she didn’t know walked into the room from their bathroom. According to Wood, her roommate had allowed him to take a shower in her bathroom and had left him “unsupervised” while she and the boy’s girlfriend went to class.
“I was stunned and mad. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “All she said to me when she came back was, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be for Halloween.'”
Fighting and disagreements can come with the territory of living with someone, but students such as Blalock believe that the key to having a successful roommate situation is communication.
“I wish I had pushed the issue more. It was one of those things of I’m not going to talk to you if you don’t talk to me,” she said. She also said it is important for roommates “to open the lines of communication, because when those lines get cut off, it’s a battle of who’s going to break it and who’s going to talk first.”