Sometimes, you just want your home to be a sanctuary, and then it is the exact and total opposite of a safe space, and walking through your front door feels more like entering a portal to endless anxiety. This is usually caused not by anything particular about the apartment or house, but by someone else who calls the place home as well! While I’ve certainly had people I’ve enjoyed living with, binged TV with, cooked with and maintained some semblance of a cleaning schedule alongside, I have also had a real doozy of a roommate or two. So, in honor of anyone who needs to commisserate because you’re in a situation with a roommate who’s making your life hell (or like, even just ever-so-lightly cursed) RIGHT THIS MOMENT, or because you are just not over a time in your past where cohabitating went wrong — this roundtable is for you, love. Take care out there, friend!
xoxo,
Nicole
Omg Abeni I too was a vegan housemate with a special set of pans! Everywhere I lived my non vegan housemates would use them despite me warning and labeling them. Before I moved into the apartment I live in alone now, I went to collect my pans and one of them was coated in bacon grease and I almost threw up
I had a randomly assigned roommate during a summer internship in undergrad and halfway through our six week stay her mother arrived from Hong Kong to stay with us until we moved out! I wasn’t informed of this prior and had many many conversations with her mother (roommate was constantly at work or out with friends) where her mother tried to feed me and I tried to explain my dietary restrictions. Right before I moved out I came home to find all my freezer groceries defrosting on the counter because our freezer was full of whole fish! Unwrapped! Just hanging out with their cloudy fishy eyes staring at me!
I also once had a neighbor stalk me in the weirdest and most ineffective way but he wasn’t a roommate and the story isn’t funny
My mother always jokes that I should write a book about all the wild & crazy roommate experience I’ve had because there are MANY. From the roommate who’s ex broke into our apartment with a crowbar to the roommate who would disappear for weeks at a time to the roommate who stopped speaking to me despite sharing an 8 x 8 room and everything in between! So grateful to be flying solo!
I love living by myself and I am about to move to a place where I will probably have to have roommates again, and let me tell you it is causing me endless anxiety! I can relate to roommates using your pans, one of my last roommates was very into “being healthy” and ate the same thing for dinner everyday (brown rice, frozen veggies, chicken, greek yogurt, cucumbers) which is weird but fine. Except he would use my favorite saute pan WITHOUT OIL to cook the veggies and chicken, and by cook I mean “throw everything in there and walk away until it smells like something is burning”. When I pointed out that the pan was slowly being ruined by doing this, he very dramatically bought me a new pan. Same roommate also didn’t seem to have a problem with the serious mouse problem throughout the whole house and in fact once joked about a mouse running across another roommate’s foot while doing laundry. Why I didn’t move out until he almost physically attacked me is a mystery, the things we’ll do for cheap rent!
My first roommate in college was a classic “are we in love or do we absolutely hate each other” situation, and for some reason we decided to room together for a second year and we mostly ignored each other! I chalk that one up to gay shame and immaturity since we were literally teens for most of it.
The next year I moved in with some folks who went to high school with my first roommate, and were somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One of them went home every weekend and the other worked weird hours as a pedicab, and it was fine for the first semester. Then over winter break I started dating my first serious partner, and they were pretty pushy about how much time we should spend together, and eventually moved their stuff to my apartment without checking with my roommates first! My roommates were understandably pissed, but they really went straight for bullying and harassment rather than trying to work out solutions! I moved out soon after they locked me out and fucked up a bunch of stuff in my room.
I dated that partner for years and it predictably sucked, but perhaps my worst roommate situation was moving back in with them as roommates about a year after our breakup! We had literally 5 other roommates and my room was tiny and cheap, so I figured it couldn’t be that bad. Reader! Of course it was bad! But I wasn’t on the lease, so after a few months I was able to find a cheaper and larger room with random folks from Craigslist who were actually lovely.
One of my worst roommate experiences also involved sharing an apartment with several cis guys (four, I think? It was a long time ago). They had already been living together for a few months when I got there, and things were.. bad. One memorable experience involved dismantling a pile of clutter to unearth the source of a nauseating smell that turned out to be a carton of milk that had been left sitting open on the floor for probably a month. I cleaned everything the first few days after I moved in, and it was horrendous again within a week. I moved out a week later.
This makes me feel better about my impending move to a studio apartment by myself. Yes, I will have less space but I will not be relying on another person for once. I’ve had decent roommates, but bad luck where I’ve had to move like 4 times in five years. And usually find another roommate too. The worst from one of them was probably when she went on vacation to Ireland and her dishes in the sink grew mold and I had to clean them. Otherwise, I’m probably the bad roommate out here with ADHD and having trouble cleaning, and lately not wanting to do dishes (but I do them!!).
Just remembered a much funnier roommate story: when I was a freshman in college I was in a suite, so my roommate and i shared a bathroom with another set of roommates. Our suite mates both had cars and we didn’t, so at some point we ran out of toilet paper and started just using theirs in the bathroom. We would even go into their room while they were away and get TP. Eventually they noticed and one of them left the funniest passive aggressive note I’ve maybe ever encountered: she draped a piece of paper over the TP holder that just said “THIS HAS GOT TO STOP” in sharpie. I did figure out other means of getting toilet paper (stealing it from other buildings on campus) but I think about THIS HAS GOT TO STOP like once a month to this day.
My bad roommates were just incredibly passive agressive. In my second year of college my best friend (at the time) and I paired up with an acquaintance and her best friend to live together. My friend and I were both in relationships and I worked 30 hours a week so we spent a lot of time out, which you would think would make us ideal roommates! Except my friend for some reason would come back to our room to cook and would leave dishes in the sink for days on end. I didn’t really care, I never cooked anyways as it was just a tiny hotplate, and while I agreed it was gross I wasn’t her keeper. I heard them complaining in the living room about it but figured they’d talk to her directly if they had an issue.
That was until one morning, after working the late shift at Coldstone the night before, I woke up early for a second shift to find her dishes piled in the shower, food scraps and all. It was disgusting. I guess my roommates decided to make it my problem that way? They knew she wasn’t there and that they weren’t my dishes so I still don’t get their timing. I put them back in the sink with a note that they weren’t my dishes and we could talk when I got off work if they wanted. Passive aggressive wonders that they both were, instead when I got off work I found a “roommate contract” on the fridge, completely filled out and signed by them. It stayed there, untouched, until we left for winter break.
In the spring they started having friends sleep in their rooms for weeks at a time, a practice they started without any notice or comment. I didn’t really care until I went to wash my hair and found my shampoo bottle broken with 90% of the shampoo missing. I asked my roommate directly (with words! so novel!) what had happened and she told me breezily that her friend had been using my shampoo and had dropped it, spilling the contents. I asked her to replace the somewhat pricey shampoo, she agreed, and then she tried to aggressively avoid me the rest of the semester. I would hear her talking in her room, knock on the door, and she would pretend not to be home. Her room was by the door and she would wait until my door was closed to leave, I guess she knew my schedule so she would only come back during my classes. I finally caught her leaving one day (my class had been canceled) and she gave me a tiny hotel shampoo bottle, saying that should make us even.
Looking back 10 years later these are both so petty but I was really mad at the time 🤣
THE DISHES IN THE SHOWER. It’s too much!
I really love my current roommate, but lately he’s been way into taking my things out into the backyard and then destroying them? RIP my box sets of the original L Word with the good soundtrack. And then he’s like, rub my back! Go hiking with me! Can I try some of your dinner?
(Yes it’s my puppy, I’m talking about my puppy.)
omg this was therapeutic to read!! I’m just gonna use this to vent lol if thats ok. my first roommates were an absolute nightmare. And it started so wonderfully! I found a place right next to my parents’ house, which for a first apartment, as a disabled person who also just really loves hanging out with their parents, was amazing. Also, all three of my roommates proudly called themselves leftists, one of them was queer and polyamorous, and they wanted to have a communal experience. One of them had a best friend who was an incredibly hot, funny butch who was a professional cook who would cook at our fun D&D evenings and I had a crush on her and we eventually made out sometimes at queer parties, and she’s still amazing and I’m trying to figure out if texting her would be awkward now because her best friend is one of the worst people I’ve ever met, I can’t even imagine they’re still friends. essentially, they used me as a disabled token. When I moved in, I told them because my personal assistance was not yet arranged I would need a lot of help for the first few months, but that my parents were of course going to do most of the helping. They were very excited until they realized what that implied. They told my parents that I wasn’t ready to move out and that the roommates had to “educate me like a child”. They told me I was ungrateful because “most people would never let a disabled person live with them and I would never find roommates with so much solidarity”. They despised my actual assistants, told me my friends shouldnt enter the kitchen because they made them “uncomfortable” (all of those friends were POC). They told me I was disgusting for drinking milk and eating meat, but would not change the “we eat everything together and buy a very specific set of vegan foods and nothing else is allowed” policy. They were generally very classist, would laugh about disabled people only eating frozen pizza (maybe because its easier?? wtf) and would critique MY PARENTS for buying “the wrong kind of salt”. They told me I was using them and using my disability as an excuse because I didnt want to clean up, apparently, and because I didnt water THEIR PLANTS correctly. I still get anxiety thinking about them. One time, they put holes in a beautiful cloth my mom got me from Spain and used it as living-room curtains WITHOUT ASKING ME. tbh its impossible to detail every little thing they did, especially because my assistants were at the receiving end of much of it, they could never do anything right. Sometimes I wonder if I was just paranoid but I even interpret a seemingly nice gesture as a very subtle form of annoying me: as a disabled person I am very critical of ecofascism, and a very common way that this shows itself is when people want to take plastic straws from us and replace them with metal straws even though we need them. One time, I made a milkshake for myself (or at least I was planning to), and then my roommate arrived and wanted to have some of it and asked me to make it without milk (I obliged but at that time our relationship was already so toxic that it honestly felt like a deliberate way of judging my eating again), and then she gave me a metal straw to drink from and pointed out repeatedly that it was a metal straw. Maybe I am over-interpreting this shit lol. Anyway, they made me believe for a long time that I was not made for roommates. But luckily I had two very good roommate experiences afterwards <3 still, I am very happy to now live on my own since September, because living with non-disabled people as a disabled person with personal assistance is honestly just terrible. I have never not had at least one ableist experience with non-disabled roommates.
oh, also, I am terrified of them finding this comment since they are very involved in the queer scene, but as far as I know none of them live in my city anymore, and also, they cant hurt me anymore, can they?? it just feels very cathartic to write this all down so I will just leave it here <3 )
(oh and also several of our mutual friends were cancelled out of their friend group after the drama went down, with no explanation, which makes me conclude that I might be the explanation) (okay I wrote like, a novel here, I am sorry :D )
Thank you so much for sharing this! Also very glad that you’re in a better place now.
This roundtable was sort of fun in that it unlocked for me the mostly repressed memories of one of my first roommates. It was early college and he was in varying stages of transitioning while having to live on a floor full of girls and I’m sure that was very difficult, but he was so profoundly inconsiderate and selfish in ways that I didn’t even clock as bonkers that it broke my brain a little.
We shared a tiny little dorm room in which he would eat a Jimmy Johns sandwich with extra onions maybe 3 times a week, throw them away in his tiny wastebasket, and then simply wait for me to be so upset over the stench that I would cave and take his trash out.
He also stayed in the room playing Halo loudly and brightly almost constantly (usually from before I was out of class until 2 or 3 am), and he snored really really loudly until mid-morning, so I would sleep in the communal lounge, where CSOs would wake me and ask me to leave a few times a night (my whole 4-wing complex put up signs about not sleeping in common rooms all over), or crash in friends’ rooms.
A few times when I had nowhere to go, I walked around late at night until I found a big sturdy tree to climb and chill in until sunrise, when my early riser RA would let me nap on her futon before class.
We had to have a roommate mediation for me to get him out of the room for part of one day each week. Every Thursday from like 5 until 9, he would go meet with his lgbtq group (which I wouldn’t join because he was in it and i needed my one evening away from him amongst my own things) and I would spend an hour finding the perfect compilation of sad movie clips on youtube to emotionally manipulate myself into crying, because I’m not a big crier, but felt more and more unhinged each week and thought it might be cathartic. Then I would sleep for three glorious hours, wake up to our door slamming, and go hang out with friends.
On one thursday, he tried to kick me out so he could have a mean hot lesbian republican who he had a crush on over, and you know what? I’m still mad about it. (Yes, I left. I was and am very conflict-averse.)
Before I was truly at my wit’s end with him, I brought him home to spend Thanksgiving with my family since he was also Black, and far from home, and because I’d very stupidly looked his mother in the eyes and agreed that we should look after each other at our PWI. He said something rude to my grandma, and also barely stopped talking for the entire long weekend.
Can’t believe I repressed that year and am going to start repressing it again right now.
Thanks to all the writers and even the commenters.
Once in college, I had a roommate that was so sloppy and left so many piles of trash around. In fact, there were so many mountains of trash on the couch next to her that if she was being quiet, it was hard for me to tell if she was actually there or if that was just all of her junk!! I can also relate to M above. This piles of trash girl created more awkward situations for me by the week!
One time when I was renting a house with some roommates, our basement flooded with sewage and 3 of us went down there to start cleaning it up. We asked the 4th roommate if she could help and she said, “no I’m actually about to watch a movie with a friend”??????? Like yeah the rest of us would love to be chilling on the couch drinking champagne and watching movies but we would also like to not step in literal shit in order to use the washer or dryer.
This has triggered so many memories I thought I had successfully blocked out, lol
To list a small handful:
– the girl who exclusively ate oats and boiled eggs, never washed the pots, and somehow left bits of eggshells in every room of the flat
– the aggressive, type A girl who scrubbed every inch of the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, weekly, and expected us all to do the same (she was also a notorious door slammer)
– the entire flat of 20-something babies who never cleaned up after themselves to the extent that we had slugs – slugs! – in our kitchen
– two of the guys in that same house left a DEAD FISH they had caught in our driveway, rotting, for weeks, and looked flabbergasted when I asked them to get rid of it
– the girl who left a post-it note on a single (rinsed) mug I had left overnight that said “please wash and put away EVERYTHING YOU USE”
– the guy with the guitar who practiced the same song over and over again at frequent intervals throughout the day, brought home rowdy mates when the pubs closed, and exclusively ~thundered~ up and down stairs
– the engaged straight couple who took over every inch of our shared house with wedding paraphernalia and essentially acted like they owned the place and we were their tenants
– the girl who got really into keto and cooked an entire chicken every single day
– the girls who adopted an elderly cat, refused to regularly clean out the litter box so the whole house stank, and then abandoned the cat when they moved out (one of them was keto girl)
– the landlady flatmate who kept “accidentally” locking me out of the main house at night, where the bathroom was, so I once had to pee in a plastic water bottle
– nowhere near end of list
I have absolute creeping horror chills imagining how gross that kitchen had to be that there were SLUGS. Omg.
Reading this I weirdly miss having roommates! I live with my partner now, lived with a partner before, roughly a year on my own, as well, but before that I had two to five roommates for years … and it went mostly smoothly?
I didn’t notice clutter and mold back then (would drive me crazy nowadays), didn’t mind when the roommate’s cats destroyed my wallpaper or lived in my closet for months and was the one myself that almost set the kitchen on fire once or twice after a night out. Those were the days.
I live in an expensive city and have never not been in a roommate situation :(
The highlights:
-Obnoxious rich girl who told me I was a prude bc I didn’t want to be greeted by the sight of her and her boyfriend making out, half naked, in the kitchen every day (and who let the boyfriend move in without telling us)
-Roommate who got mad when I moved out bc she said we had decided I would pay more for the bigger room and never did (we had one conversation when looking at the apartment, but never confirmed or brought it up again for the year I was there)
-Another rich girl who was controlling and self-centered, but used mental health as an excuse to force the other roommates to do what she wanted. And then called me ableist when I asked her to at least acknowledge me if we were in the same room (this was during quarantine in a tiny apartment, which made things even harder).
I’ve probably been a shitty roommate too, but it’s been so so hard to find a decent living situation that I can afford.
Ugh. My parents.
Less than a year after I moved out (age 18), my father moved in my place for about a year. Then a few months after he left, my mother moved in. A bit over a year after that, my father moved in as well. Basically it was a bizarre situation where I was paying all the rent, and still sharing a home with both my parents despite both of them being divorced. And while they weren’t great at functioning as adults even during my childhood, somehow they both got a whole lot worse.
Both had serious health and behavioral issues, neither could hold a job for long, for different reasons. My father spent most of his time drinking beer, playing video games, and never cleaned up after himself. My mother was very demanding and controlling, insisted on being the sole rule-setter for the household because it’s “my home too” (which doesn’t make sense) and took a strong “I don’t consent to your lack of consent” stance when trying to get other people to do things (which also doesn’t make sense). My father never had much of a social life, my mother burned bridges with all of her friends over time, and I was too busy working two jobs and doing most of the housework and dealing with their problems to have a life of my own.
After over a decade of this (!) my father died (suicide, because he had highly aggressive lung cancer which was discovered too late to have much hope of survival). And then not too long after that, my mother’s boyfriend moved in. I only agreed because they promised to move out together once he got back on his feet. Never happened. He lived in for about a year and a half before dying himself. Let’s just say that this period was an ungodly nightmare, in part because he was even less responsible than my father was. After that I had to deal with another half-year of my mother having frequent breakdowns and erratic behavior, before finally moving out, and I was finally able to have my own life starting at age 34(!).
It wasn’t until after a few years of her living apart from me and moving frequently because she couldn’t stand any of her roommates that she began to understand how bad of a roommate she was herself, so when she moved back in with me for one last time (for a few months) it was still stressful but she was less controlling, somewhat better behaved, and about as functional as an adult as she was during my childhood (which was, again, not that great). We have an… okay-ish relationship now.
That’s just the outline, there were quite a lot of stupid and terrible incidents over the years.
Ok when I was like 26-27 I lived with two women in their 40s. One day I left my travel coffee mug in the sink because the dishwasher was running and then I left the house for like an hour or two and when I got home one of my roommates had *put my travel mug- still unwashed!- in my bedroom*. What!!!! The other roommate loved to talk about how she was a “great communicator” but I’d been living there a year and a half before I found out it bothered her that I hung out in the living room in the evenings. She screamed in my face that I’m “impossible to relate to” and that I “deserve to be driven out of the house” and that I shouldn’t be allowed to spend time in the living room unless I paid more rent. (This house had 2 living rooms and both my roommates also had 2 bedrooms, btw!!)
I’ve also lived with MULTIPLE people who have pulled the “just tell me to clean up after myself and I’ll do it!!!” bullshit which I find incredibly obnoxious. I’m not your mom! I get that sometimes people do genuinely need help with this but “force your roommate to do extra work without compensating them in any way” is not a good solution. Plus every single person I’ve lived with who has done this has been nasty and/or passive-aggressive whenever I’ve asked them to clean up their mess… So I end up doing almost all of the housework AND cleaning up after my roommates. Ugh.