My first group of queer friends all lived together. And wow was I jealous.
I lived with my girlfriend at the time, my best friend who is, shockingly, a cis straight-ish man, and a stranger, who was very nice, but also a cis straight man. It was certainly among my best living situations, but it was not a big queer household. And I started daydreaming about moving into my friends’ apartment, especially once two of them started dating (classic).
I never got to move in. They still live together, so theoretically the dream is alive, but it was never about that specific household anyway, love them as I do. It was about any queer household made up of three to four lovely humans. And last month I found that.
Autostraddle’s money survey revealed that 29.15% of us live with friends or strangers, 23.8% live alone, and 41.6% live with a significant other. Only 5.45% live with parents or other family. Anecdotally, when I talk to straight people, that number is way higher for them. It makes sense. Queer people are more likely to have strained relationships with parents, and even if we don’t, may still prefer to be in a space with people who share our identities.
I currently live in a five-bedroom house in Echo Park with four other people. And I just adore them! I’ve lived with a lot of people over the years, 19 to be exact, and there have been some high points and low points. Some of those people became close friends and others became enemies. Enemies include my college freshman roommate who crushed on the same person as me first semester. This culminated in a very dramatic Hurricane Sandy blackout where we were all trapped together on our floor. Officially I’m over it, but also he never did his dishes, so fuck that guy. I digress.
Maybe it’s because I’ve traded the cramped quarters of a New York apartment for a spacious LA house, but I’ve never felt quite so happy with a living situation as I do now. As a trans woman who often feels anxious out in the world, it’s so important to feel safe in my home. And not just physically safe, emotionally safe too. It’s a privilege to have options, and I’m so grateful to have found that.
My new roommates are also genuinely so fun to be around! Once my ex and I moved into a one bedroom I certainly felt safe and comfortable with her, but as someone who often has long periods of time working from home, it’s so nice to have a lot of roommates going in and out. I even choose to hang out with them outside our home! Sometimes multiple times a week! Amazing!
I knew when I first started forming queer community that I wanted to, at least for a period of time, live in a home with a bunch of queer people. And now I am! And it’s the best.
I want to hear about your experience with roommates. Horror stories? Success stories? Do you like the people you live with now? Or, like my friends, have you ever hooked up with or started dating your roommate? (My friends are still together but that doesn’t mean I recommend it!)
I’ve decided that roommates are queer culture, so let’s talk about them!
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Horror Story!
I had a roommate senior year of college that ended *so* badly. I did not have the tools to handle personal conflict yet and knew things were bad but wasn’t sure how to make them not bad so I would just tip toe around her tantrums and bad energy (all the while dealing with her passive & non-passive aggressive things like leaving food caked on all of my stuff, slamming the door while screaming if she was mad at me, glare at me if I was in the living room). I would’ve moved out but I was the only name on the lease so when I finally asked her to leave for second semester she: went through and cut my wall posters but in a way that I didn’t notice until months later, stuffed balls of hair into the bathroom drains to clog them, poured maple syrup into the drawers, left holes in the wall, and then told other members of our joint clubs that I was un-accepting of her mental illness.
Hindsight is 20/20 and there were definitely moments before the firework ending that I could’ve done more to proactively work on things, I sincerely hope she is taking care of herself, but boy howdy it was a scary mess for a minute.
MAPLE SYRUP IN THE DRAWERS!!!!
Wow. I am glad you got out of that situation.
Also may I ask how she sneakily cut the posters so you wouldn’t notice until later??
You may! Essentially she just cut 2-4 inch slits into them but they were taped to the walls so I didn’t notice the cuts until later. And I’m talking 8 posters including original artwork from online folks I loved. That’s really what did it for me: you were conniving enough to do it in a way that wasn’t immediately obvious so I spent MONTHS realizing new ridiculous things she did.
Aww I’m sorry that sucks so much.
But wow the attention to detail…
I’ll start with the worst: In my first roommate situation outside a college dorm, I was 19 and living with two gay men. We were all close friends, but one guy developed a massive crush on the other. The other guy didn’t reciprocate his feelings. Neither of them handled it well. Navigating that living situation was incredibly stressful, especially when the crush-ee started dating one of our other friends. We’re all still Facebook friends who talk sometimes, but at the time it felt like living in a minefield.
My BEST roommate story is… the total opposite of my worst one, haha. My current roommate and I dated for about seven months before we decided we’d live together in my one-bedroom (yeah, that’s fast, but it was partly financial too). After about five months of that, we kind of looked at each other and went “Wait, you’re more like my BEST friend than my GIRLFRIEND” and decided to end the romantic part of our relationship. We have a really great roommate dynamic, though, and we actually are best friends, so we were able to finish up our lease in the one-bedroom, move into a two-bedroom together, and now we’re getting ready to move to a whole new city (with separate bedrooms and an office). We talk, we laugh, we watch Netflix, and so far nobody either of us has dated after we broke up has been weird about it. I think I hit the breakup/roommate lottery.
I’m obsessed with this story!!
I love reminders that queer people are often able to escape certain heteronormative ideas and embrace shifting relationships. Obviously this isn’t always the case (see: your first story), but I do think it happens a lot and I’m so happy for you and your best friend!
Thank you, Drew! I feel very lucky.
My current roommate and I had a crush on the same manic pixie dream girl type we were also rooming with, which would have been harder if she had liked either of us. But she hung around and filled our lives with whimsical trips and iced coffee and just, so much foundation in our sink. And one day shortly after our five person roommate group semi peacefully split into a two(us) and three person group(more on that never) he holds up this granola bar of some kind with a very cute wrapper that she’d bought for him and says “Hey, do you want this??” And I go “I *want* to want it??” The wrapper was very cute but I wasn’t interested in the granola bar at all. “YES, GET OUT OF MY HEAD” and slam dunks the whimsy we both wanted so much to want right into the trash(which sounds wasteful, but really we also didn’t know how old the bar was)
“which would have been harder if she had liked either of us” hahahaha I laugh not at you but at myself who has def been in a similar situation lol
I love this and I love the detail of a whimsical granola bar.
Oh don’t worry, I laughed at me plenty!!!
And it was such a cute wrapper, but you know that mood you get in right after you move where you never want to own anything ever again because what was I even doing with this, looking at it on the coffee table forever??
I actually just got out of such a shitty living situation where my roommates were, not to be dramatic, the absolute worst humans on the face of the earth. They were a couple, and they should NOT have been, because they were CONSTANTLY fighting and screaming at each other. He would punch holes in the walls, and she would SCREAM at him, and their giant dog who was part wolf (WOLF!) would be howling and stress eating all the furniture, and their cat would try to sneak into my bedroom and scratch me to the point where I was bleeding…
And then! After we moved out! The leasing office charged us a shit ton of money for all the damage to the apartment (fair) and my roommates decided they didn’t want to pay! They accused me of spying on them and that must be how I knew about the damage in their room (the leasing office sent us pictures of the damage, also I HEARD him punching holes in the wall) and said that if I had been nicer to them they would pay their share, but apparently I was just so unbearably rude to them? (We got it worked out eventually. My mom is a lawyer.) I guess I should have known better than to live with a cis straight man? Anyway I live in a studio now.
I guess that’s not so much funny as much as just deeply upsetting? For a funny one, my roommate senior year of college told me that my asking her to stop smoking IN OUR DORM ROOM (I have asthma) was disrespectful to her culture — that culture being stoner culture. I told her she was disrespecting my culture as a person who wants to be able to breathe, and I moved out.
I am so sorry!! What a nightmare. I am very glad you got out and were able to work out all the financial stuff. Part wolf?? That’s all so much!
Also lol at stoner culture.
My very first girlfriend was my roommate my sophomore year of college. And we lived together! For the entirety of our relationship! Five years! WE UHAULED BEFORE WE EVEN KNEW WE WERE GAY. It was pretty gay haha. (Not sure if that counts as a roommate success story or not; she did end up dumping me in a pretty terrible way.)
My current roommate (for the past two years) is actually one of my very good friends from high school, and I really love living with her! We have an awesome place that we named Galpalla because we’re both queer. She’s pretty clean and we’re good about spending time together when we want and hanging out in our separate bedrooms when we want alone time. 10/10, will continue living with her for the foreseeable future (or at least until she kicks me out to live with her girlfriend).
That’s so interesting!! Were you both the only people living together for all five years? I feel like that must’ve made for such a unique relationship experience? Sorry about how it ended though…
I’m glad you’re in another good living situation! Long live Galpalla!
We lived with two other friends our junior year of college, then just ourselves our senior year of college, and then with another friend for two years after that, and we had another apartment together just the two of us for three months until we broke up. It was both stressful and fun! (Living with other people made it more stressful). The experience did make me realize that I am probably not going to live with a romantic partner until we’re engaged though. Moving because of a breakup SUCKS.
Thank you!! Long live Galpalla!
Oof yeah I was luckily on good terms with my ex when we broke up but it was still really difficult splitting and dealing with apartment stuff.
Buuuut I’d probs still move in with a partner in the distant future. haha
I had this roommate who was wonderful and a total badass. Her hobby was this sport where they would fight with foam weaponry. She was very frustrated because all the armor for women was sexy corset style and there was no way she could fight that way, so she bought these leather scales and built her own scale armor to fit her curves comfortably. Like I said, total bamf.
BUT my worst roommate situation was also with her. She started dating this guy from her sport, and he was just the kinda dude who took up a lot of space in whatever room he was in. This was in college, and we needed quiet to work on homework and stuff, and he’d come in and want to talk loudly about nothing. But the last straw was when he gave me and the third roommate explicit unsolicited advice on what vibrators to buy. It was bad enough for me, but way worse for the third roommate because she’s much more private than I am… Which was how we realized that roommate 1 had told him personal stuff we’d told her. We had to sit her down and be like “we need your bf not to be here.” So she stopped being around either, and it was hella awkward. Thankfully that relationship ended when college did but I still shudder thinking about that aggressive dude in my safe space.
Nooooo. A bad boyfriend can really ruin everything. Good for you and your other roommate for saying something to her though!
Worst: Passive aggressive, self-involved roommate who took but did not give. Had steadily begun drinking and smoking pot more frequently, partly to address anxiety/depression. One morning, apparently with a THC blood level over the legal limit, she backed out of our driveway in her massive SUV and struck an elderly woman. That woman passed away. The roommate’s way of processing was to try to talk to the house members about the situation a lot, smoke, and drink. None of us in the house could handle it. Really sucked.
Best: Super thoughtful and considerate. Got a dog and allowed me to enjoy all the cuddling privileges without bearing the walking/feeding/etc. responsibility. Had lots of great talks, etc. I miss living with her. :)
Oh my God… that’s horrifying. I’m so sorry you had to exert all that emotional labor.
Thank God you’ve also lived with someone generous with their dog!! What kind of dog were they?
oh boy. OH BOY, i have a few roommate stories.
freshman year of college, my randomly-assigned roommate’s boyfriend slept over at least three nights every week and he snored like a lawnmower. i walked in on them having sex once, which a) was uncomfortable for everyone involved! b) made her panic and cry that she was the worst roommate ever and that i probably hated her, and c) prompted the boyfriend to come find me in the dining hall and PINKIE PROMISE that i wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. they broke up after freshman year, but he reentered my life during senior year as an associated students senate candidate while i was editor at the newspaper and i fully could not handle conducting an editorial board endorsement interview. he was elected and for the rest of the year i had to talk to him at senate meetings and pretend like i hadn’t seen his hairy dude butt against my will in the freshman dorms. dorm life is fun!
one of my housemates sophomore year would make vegan nachos constantly. if you’ve never microwaved daiya vegan cheese, just know that our house constantly smelled like a tire fire. she got in a screaming match with another housemate and moved out halfway through the year and none of us ever heard from her again.
junior year i thought i had scored a fun house by living with two cool queer girls but joke’s on me because they kept their smelly pet rats in the hallway, smoked in the house, left seeds and stems in the carpet, let the rats in the bathtub with them, and RIPPED THE BATHROOM SINK OFF OF THE WALL. how does that even happen? the pipe was so badly bent that maintenance couldn’t even reattach it and had to replace the entire sink assembly. i think they subsisted entirely on tofu scrambles and four loko. they’re nice people but shit was wild.
last year i lived with two sweet freshmen who vacuumed without being asked and washed all of their dishes and were just the best.
for those three years i also had an amazing roommate who is a total angel and spoon-fed me pasta when i was having panic attacks and not eating. she’s an absolute sweetheart and i hope only good things happen to her for the rest of her life!!
i moved back home temporarily after graduation so my current housemates are my parents and my sister. my parents have premium cable, good booze, and a fireplace, so it’s actually one of my better living situations.
daaang You’ve been through the wringer too
WOW.
You really had me once the pet rats entered the equation.
Also the roommate being terrible and then making you comfort THEM about how they aren’t actually terrible is such a thing. I had one roommate who went into my room, looked through all my stuff until he found my pot, smoked all of it, and then carried on about how sorry he was and how much I probably hated him. Which wasn’t not true let’s be real. haha
for the record rats are very sweet pets! it’s just that they need to live in their owners’ room instead of the communal hallway. and, uh, i don’t want to share a bathtub with them.
My freshman year of college, second semester I moved in with a girl who I thought was my best friend in the world. In retrospect, she was very obviously wildly manipulative and toxic. I shit you not (and I have PTSD in part because of this experience) I found out someone was breaking into my e-mail and writing lie-ridden e-mails as me, in my voice, and starting fights and causing rifts with friends. This was in the early days of the internet so it was surprisingly easy to do. She somehow convinced me it was either my high school best friend or a mutual friend who I love but like…could not have pulled off a scam like this, computer tech-wise. Not only that, but I found out MUCH later that she was e-mailing those same people as herself and talking about how she was “worried” about me because clearly my mental health was slipping since I was lying to everybody all the time. I honestly have a hard time even telling this story because she was so good at gaslighting and because it’s so wild that I still feel like “Did that even happen? What is this story?” My whole Freshman and Sophomore year blend together because of it. I found out sophomore year (more like I just realized it had to be her) and she was also caught physically abusing the friend she tried to blame the hacking on who she now lived with. Once caught she panicked and quit our college which was for the best but left our whole group of friends reeling for the rest of our college experience. I MUCH MUCH later found out that I had bad credit and while I can’t prove that it was her taking out credit in my name, the accounts were all from that time frame and in the city we lived in and really who else would have done that?
And yet. I met my queerplatonic partner and current/forever roommate in the ordeal. They were a mutual friend of me and her and they were my confidante and supporter and the only person who never believed I was a compulsive liar who wanted to push all my friends away. They were the first person I came out too and we’ve been “us” through processing SO much trauma and pain from our past. We have snails and cats and plants. We both date but anytime we cohabitated with partners, the other person lived with us too. We’ve created a big, queer happy family whether it’s the two of us or partners or close friends needing a place to crash.
That is truly horrific. I am so sorry and so happy you made it through that experience. And SO happy you found your current queerplatonic partner. :)
“My freshman year of college … I moved in with a girl who I thought was my best friend in the world. In retrospect, she was very obviously wildly manipulative and toxic.”
Hello are you me?! Sorry you had to go through this, its 10 years on for me and I’m still picking through what happened!
I’ve had some really oddball roommates in my time. When I was in college, I had a roommate(cis-het white guy from Orange the school set me up with) where I found bread crumbs and half drank can of orange soda in the shower/tub. I asked him about and he replied, “got hungry mid-shower and decided to have a snack and a drink while showering.” I asked why he didn’t finish the drink, he said: “it didn’t taste right.” He also liked cooking steaks at 1 am, cause he found it to be the best time for a steak, he was sober cause it was mid-week. The other roommate owed me money some whiskey money and last few days of the school said his gf, will bring the money. She did not, and while cleaning the apartment-dorm up found his limited edition GameBoy, and told him I found it. Yet again said gf would come, but never did, nor did I ever see or hear from him again. Thankfully, never had a roommate was racist towards me.
How’s everyone’s week going? I am really tired because due to all the bad news and how it’s negatively affecting my work. I nearly to a point I may have to either find something different to sell, or start looking at the job market. Ugh. I miss my best friend who won’t be back until September. My friend group has really dwindled due to a lot of them moving, ugh. I spent my Sunday at Cuties, and the regulars who I usually see were not there. I did get a throw a brick, pride sticker, and tin can of tea leaves, that was hand made by a queer(really good btw). I probably will go to the beach on Sunday and just relax with the waves.
View from the bike ride I took to the local mountains.
Thank you for viewing and reading my post. Have a positive weekend!
I am cracking up at the roommate having a snack in the shower. I take long showers and sometimes even write things down on my phone mid-shower, and even that’s a bit much for me!
I’m sorry to hear about your week and your job, but wow that is a beautiful picture from your bike ride. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you. Yeah, it was fairly funny, especially since it was mid-shower. lol
I always look forward to the nature pics you post in this thread :)
Thank you!
My week has been annoying (weather) and really humid but I learned I have enough quick dri dressy casual clothing to make an office outfit which came in handy when someone forgot to turn their sprinklers off and I had no choice but the walk the watery gauntlet yesterday.
I felt like a T-1000.
If I lose power or the AC I’m going to imagine being in that mountain lake.
Good call, but it’s less of a mountain lake and more of turttle and fish pond.
If it’s deeper than a child’s wading pool it’ll do, an bonus has dinner potential.
The humidity of a tropical storm is beastly.
I have a pretty notorious roommate story among my friend group. In college I was in the marching band and sophomore year a friend from the horn section and I decided to get an apartment together (I really didn’t want to live in the dorms again). We lived together for 2 years and it was mostly fine, she was just a little wild. But my junior year was when I started realizing I was gay among a lot of other stresses in my life (classwork, my parents getting divorced, and developing sciatica which meant I was on painkillers a lot). She apparently decided that I was questioning my sexuality because of her! She went around telling everyone we knew that I was in love with her and obsessive. I was an art major, and she assumed one of the nude model drawings I had done at school was of her, I guess because the model was also blonde? It was super fucked up, and I had a really terrible year dealing with all of that! We obviously moved out away from each other and are not friends anymore, but she did apologize to me a couple of years ago for this.
Ugh I’m sorry. Glad she apologized but still ugh.
Ha ha haaaaaaa……. so. Roommates. I attended 2 hippy colleges in the mid 90’s, and in 4 years I went through NINE roommates, most of them randomly assigned, and every one of those randos was a piece of work. My freshman request for the substance free dorm was laughingly ignored, and I got stuck with two of the biggest potheads on campus, who rapidly went from smoking outside, to smoking out the window, to cracking the window, to spilling bong water and ashes on every inch of the carpet. I ended up sleeping on the couch in a common room. Neither student returned the next year.
After a month of couch surfing the admins finally got me a room in the substance free dorm, but stuck me with one of the weirdest kids I’ve ever met. Actually, everyone I ever met from New Hampshire has been a specific kind if weird, but this kid and the associated girlfriend were a mash of conflicted sexuality, inability to process three dimensional space, and dirty, dirty sheets. There were sand dunes on the hardwood floor and a stolen table from the dinning hall, with rotting food hidden in the corners. Neither student returned the next year.
Then I got a room with my girlfriend for sophomore year, but we broke up and she left the school. I finished the room with two guys I was friends with, and that was great, but I got in a fight with the film program teachers and this time I left the school.
Transferring from Vermont to the Pacific Northwest for junior year, I took a room in the substance free dorm. Yay! But my random roommate, a freshman, had no fucking clue how to live alone, so the mother would come up with her dogs to do laundry every weekend. Dogs were not allowed in the dorm, but mom breezed right past that. This kid could not do dishes we soon had flies. I got him kicked out after catching him messing with my computer and guitar. He then slashed my tires three times. He also exhibited his scholastic skills by stealing a large thermometer from the science lab, taking it back to his new dorm, and smashing it on the floor of his communal kitchen. Hazmat was called to clean it up and remove his passed out ass from the mess. The school police blotter wrote up an amusing account of the episode and suggested that he be sterilized. He went off his nut and threatened campus security with a Swiss Army knife, possibly the same one he slashed my tires with, and was promptly arrested and expelled. I spent the rest of that year alone.
Senior year! Some friends from Vermont wanted to move out to Olympia and cohabit! But they bailed at the last minute and I drove out myself and spent six weeks living in my car. Some other kids on the cleaning crew finally took pity on me and let me sleep on their couch until the third roommate moved out and I could have her room. That was nice, but then the second roommate developed screaming rage fits at the first roommate, including stomping and door slamming and rage tears. She also moved out. The other girl and I lived in that mold crusted apartment the rest of the year, when I finally graduated.
I feel like my living situations kept me from doing as well in school as I could have done. Since then I’ve only shared housing with family and lovers, and the occasional lover’s friends who were fucking bums and stole my pants. Thanks for making me remember all that!
YOU HAVE BEEN THROUGH IT!!! I’m so sorry. :(
Awww thanks Drew! At least I made it out the other side without any murder whatsoever.
Roommates are sOOOOOO queer culture — I spent most of college being the biggest queer in living situations because while art school in general is pretty queer, film decidedly is often not. Flashforward to last Summer: I’m living in this tiny loft above a kitchen in a 4-person apartment that legally should not have more than 2 people in it, and I’m helping find a subletter for the closet-sized cave ‘bedroom’ below my loft. Ultimately I find this person on Facebook that I click with immediately and think would be a good fit for the space and she moves in. Long story short we become closer and closer friends and then more and then were dating by Christmas and have since left that shitty apartment for a 1bed a few blocks away.
I’m absurdly in love and couldn’t be happier so, hook up w/ your roommates I guess?? And find roommates on Facebook? Thanks Mark Zuckerberg for doing one (1) thing for the gays. Can’t wait to read everyone else’s stories on this thread!!
My film school was so straight too!
Also wow what a success story! Do you mind me asking how much longer you had on the lease when that line was crossed? How risky was this? haha
Shit I was a film major too! The program was all dudes wanting to be Tarentino, with one other woman who wanted to make absurdist movies about Christ. What the hell?
Between the Tarantino dudes and the absurdist Christ woman I sure know who I would’ve been friends with!
When I was first coming out, I lived with two women who were evangelical Christians of the type who would have prayer meetings in my living room, complete with loud moaning, ‘yes Jesus’s” and speaking in tongues. This seemed to get worse the gayer I got.
Then, I went away for a weekend to interview for a job in a new city. I came back to find that they had piled all my possessions in the living room and that they had found their own apartment and were in effect kicking me out. Luckily, I got the job so I was moving anyway, and I swore I would screen all my future housemates for crazy religious tendencies.
Ahhh that’s so intense. Glad you got that job!
My college girlfriend and I lived together for a couple years and when she moved out after a pretty taxing breakup I got a roommate! She turned out to be the best thing to happen to me at that time. She was a ball of energy and compassion, but also needed some care and attention herself. She used to crawl into my bed hungover and tell me all about her excursions from the night before and I would tell her about all the dates I was going on and how I felt about them. It was this totally platonic but loving relationship and we had so much fun together. She really made that apartment into a special place when I thought it would make me sad. That summer she moved in was one of the best of my life and she was definitely a big part of that.
I love this so much!!! A really good post-break up roommate is so special.
Is it ok if I complain about my roommates?
I live with 3, normally 4, people, of them are straight and cis. They’re nice enough, kinda crunchy, willing to leave me alone for the most part when I need alone time, buuuut they’re still straight people with straight privilege and a lot of blind spots.
One was, I knew, fairly apolitical compared to me, but I didn’t realize just how far on that spectrum he fell until about a month ago, when I had to explain to him why he couldn’t use the word f*g.
We have a 4th person moving in soon, to replace our roommate who moved out in June. He’s definitely a white privileged dudebro, and not my first pick for a roommate, but everyone else voted in favor of him. When I voiced my concerns about living with another white privileged man I got zero support or response from anyone else in the house, and basically was told oh if you want to follow up on checking that he’s not a bigot thanks for doing so because we don’t have the energy to bother.
I haven’t really confronted any of them on it even though I probably should, but I’m just afraid I’m going to find out that they really don’t care. I love the physical space I live in, and the location is perfect for getting to work/school, and I only have a year left before I complete my degree, so I keep telling myself, just hold out for another year, and once school starts in the fall, you won’t be home much anyway.
This is far from the worst people I’ve ever lived with, but the microaggressions are beginning to wear me down.
But yeah. Living with queer roommates sounds like a dream, one I hope to attain someday.
You can totally complain and I’m really sorry you’re in that situation.
I definitely understand the experience where your roommates aren’t like horror story awful, but as a queer person you just feel so alienated from them. It is not fun and it can be really draining.
Since the place itself is convenient otherwise I hope you’re able to cope with them for now and I hope you have some home away from homes to go to when you need to escape.
And I BELIEVE in a year you will be able to find a way to live with queer roommates and you’ll be so happy when you do!
A tropical storm in the Gulf teasing us coastal residents with looped de loops, I’m getting annoyed with the indecisiveness of a weather system.
I know it’s not what you meant, but my worst literal roommate was my brother in weird times of Post-Katrina life. He threw things at while I slept because he was bored and if he managed to figure out I was on my period he’d try to keep me from our room. Because “that’s disgusting and you shouldn’t even be allowed in the house”
If the room had a window I’m pretty sure he would have tried to throw my supplies out of it.
You’d think he’d read about chhaupadi or something but I can assure that’s something he’d never stoop to reading about back then. If it wasn’t STEM it was crap.
And yet when we had separate rooms again was when he tried to kill me not when we shared one.
Any Hildegard von Bingen fans out here I have something to share with you, according to some Jesuit publication ya girl while not officially the saint of anything wrote plenty of nutritional philosophy and recipes and my conclusion from this she maaaybe could be considered unofficial saint of health food. Not starve your self food, but nutritious nourish thyself food which just makes her even gayer.
https://www.loyolapress.com/our-catholic-faith/prayer/arts-and-faith/culinary-arts/the-patron-saints-of-the-culinary-arts
Also Saint Nicholas of Tolentino has been kind of adopted as the saint of vegan and vegetarians. He was an Augustinian friar who held a vow against eating meat and one of his miracles is turning a chicken dish he was rudely given back into a living chicken by one account and roast veggies by another via the power of prayer.
After listening to dueling banjos I got gleeful digusting MAGA content suggestions and so I went down a Native music listening hole so far it ran the gamut from Buffy Sainte-Marie to Drezus who a commenter likened to Ice Cube in the days of NWA because of the wrath and the hardness of his voice.
I was delighted to learn Tanya Tagaq and Buffy Sainte-Marie have worked together.
Oof that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.
Thanks for sharing about the saints! I’d never heard of either of them!
I’m still not over the fact he chose to throw pennies at me of all things it was just too weird. And where did he even get all those pennies??
Hildegard von Bingen is pretty awesome, very happy to share her existence to anybody who doesn’t know of her and you can find her music on youtube.
Also her play Ordo Virtutum is still performed.
Yeah that’s both random and awful.
Amazing. I will definitely check out her work!
worst roommate was the one i lived with last year, she had a bad habit of leaving a pile of dishes and her boyfriend was constantly over, so his crap got all over too. Let me preface this by saying she is one of my best friends. we had a come to jesus moment the week before college ended and decided that living together was killing our relationship. than i lived w a guy friend who had boundary issues the summer after freshman year of college .My best roommates have always been strangers. NEVER LIVE WITH FRIENDS KIDDOS
Amen to that! I’ve never actually lived with close friends, but I have seen best friendships torn apart after living together.
Ugh this is so hard! It really can be terrible. But I’ve also lived with close friends and loved it…
It’s honestly impossible to tell!
To date, my best and favorite roommates were a hetero married couple a few years older than me. We’d often make dinner together and the husband would bust out his acoustic guitar and sing covers of pop music (think Adele or Alanis). They are two of the most creative people I’ve ever met, and we all adopted cats on the same day (yes, I realize how gay all of that sounds).
AND, last year the wife got super sick — stayed in the hospital for one month kind of sick — and when she got better and returned home, they bought ME a pasta roller as a thank you gift for tending to house stuff and taking care of the cat when the husband couldn’t be at home.
They moved out at the end of 2018 to move across the country and I’m still sad they are gone. The upside is that I got a really rad new roommate who is queer and is now part of my social group.
Shoutout to that hetero couple! Glad to know there are some good ones.
And that you like your current roommate too!
When I moved across the country for grad school, I had few housing choices because most people wouldn’t accept a roommate without meeting them in person- skype just wasn’t good enough and I wasn’t about to make a separate trip of 1000 miles to be blown off by people. SO I ended up living with these people, who told me AFTER I moved in that they were a lesbian couple (which is cool because I’m also queer af, but like, what if I wasn’t down with it?) They were terrible together, it was clear the relationship should have ended long ago. Also, one of them had a potbellied pig for a pet, which sounds cute, but it was way too big for a pet pig (like 80-90 lbs) and really aggressive. I think I saw my roommate spoon with her pig more than I saw her spoon with her girlfriend.
Eventually they moved out and I got to keep the house and got excellent queer roommates. I’m not close with those folks now, but I am super grateful to have shared walls with them when I did.
“I think I saw my roommate spoon with her pig more than I saw her spoon with her girlfriend.” LOL oh dear
Did you know about the 90lb pig when you agreed to move in??
My roommate my freshman year of college was the most stereotypically frat dude you can imagine (which is saying something, given that at the time, I was at a small liberal arts college that didn’t even have frats).
He did a lot of questionable things (including being drunk for 72 hours straight during homecoming weekend), but the biggest one is that, on a few occasions, he’d show up in our room at 1AM with a girl, and not even bother to sexile me. I should note, we had bunk beds, and I was on the top bunk, so all the vibration traveled upward.
The one upshot of it was that I discovered that he was not particularly gifted in the, uh, endurance category, so after a few “minute man” jokes, he stopped doing it.
LOL yeah that showed him.
I must confess that my freshman year of college my girlfriend and I definitely had sex when my roommate was (hopefully) asleep. We tried to be quiet and we were not in bunkbeds but still shitty. I was probs still resentful about earlier in the year when we were crushing on the same person so I didn’t care. lol
Freshman year, my roommate…let me tell you that when this woman fell asleep the first night, she scared the shit out of me because one second there was silence and the next it sounded like a chainsaw cutting through a metal barrel full of water. I did not sleep AT ALL. I told her about it the next day and she swore up and down that she didn’t snore so the next night I recorded her. During playback, she said she must have a cold so I recorded her every night for a week and during playback she basically told me to get over it. Believe me, I tried. I slept with headphones and earplugs but nothing could drown her out. Yes it was THAT loud. I would throw shit at her deliberately hitting her in the face sometimes and 70% of the time she didn’t even budge. I complained to my RA, but they didn’t have another room for me and I didn’t have the money to move off campus so I was stuck.
I began sleeping out in the dorm’s lobby or common areas whenever I could but that wasn’t always allowed. Then…THEN…she got a boyfriend who would sleep over a few times a week. The first time he asked if it was okay to stay over, I said yes hoping my roommate would be too embarrassed to sleep much with him there but it was so much worse. Together they were a fucking dueling chainsaw-to-barrel magnum opus symphony. I swear to you, without joking whatsoever, at times they snored in a way that it was nearly one long uninterrupted snore. It was even worse when they snored in unison because it was almost seismic…I could feel it! People would even bang on the walls sometimes because it was so loud.
I worked in the library and finally resorted to offering to close at night so I could sneak and sleep in one of the private rooms or I would skip a class or 2 during the day while she was in class. It was like that for an entire semester.
Dueling chainsaws, I’m dying.
Ahhh that’s terrible! The snoring boyfriend on top of it all is really too much. lol
Hands down, the best roommate situation I’ve ever had was the one I just had to leave about a month ago because the landlord sold the property out from under us :(
I was living with my parents after suddenly moving back to MA from Chicago, and had turned to Craigslist (gahh) in my hour of I-love-you-Mom-but-you-need-to-wait-after-you-knock. I knew I wanted to live somewhere readily accessible to downtown where I work, and ideally near Davis Square in Somerville. The catch: I have a dog, and that is NOT a fun bit of search criteria in the Boston area. I found two listings that looked good right away, by some miracle. Never heard back from one, but that was okay because the other turned out to be all I needed.
After work one day, I headed up to Teele Square to check the place out and meet my roommates. I knew from the ad, which had made a point to say that Courtney liked to cook “with her girlfriend,” that I’d be among queer people, which I was already psyched about. What I didn’t expect was to love them, and the other roommate (cis straight male) Will, immediately. What I had anticipated as a quick, maybe 20-minute visit turned into 2+ hours talking about movies, our dogs, our dietary weirdnesses, how often Courtney’s gf was there (it was fitting that she was at the roommate interview as she was, effectively, a 4th resident) and whether I was okay with that, etc. The cherry bomb on top of this whole explosive lovefest was the sign I saw on the bathroom door: “Chamber of Secrets.” These were my people. I managed to wait til I got on the commuter rail to email them and beg to be part of their world. Turns out the feeling was mutual, and we spent a fucking faboosh summer full of beach trips, Pride parties, long talks, drinks out on our front porch with an amazing sunset view, and so much more.
When Courtney and her gf (btw, she’s not out on social media so I’m not calling her out by name just in case, but she was as much a part of our household as Courtney) had to leave for New York at the end of the summer, my heart broke in that very specific way your heart breaks for people you know you’ll keep in your life forever because your bond was so instant and strong. We still talk all the time and we visit, and though it’s not the same, I know I called that one right.
I was convinced we would never find someone to fill Courtney’s room with whom we’d have a similar familial connection. Will and I interviewed several perfectly great people, and we were weary and almost ready to settle for “I could probably be okay living with this person” when in walked Sandy. I’d been suspicious when she emailed Will because she specified that she likes a “drama-free” household, and those are 9 times out of 10 the people who cause the drama to begin with. But she was that 1 person in 10. That one person in a bajillion, really. She was warm and laughed easily with us right from the jump, dealt perfectly with my weirdo dog, told us all about her Venezuelan community in the area, and casually figured out how to work the be-shitted goddamn door that had flustered everyone else. She had just about gotten back outside when I turned to Will and put my hands over my heart, and he said, “Yeah, how long do you think we should wait to email her?” We waited maybe an hour, friendos. And then we were lucky enough to have another household that felt safe, happy, fun, and supportive for several months, until the day we found out the place had been sold.
I’m not settled enough into my new place (which I had to find on about a month’s notice, again WITH A DOG IN THE BOSTON AREA, so that was fun) to know how it’ll shake out, especially since the house is seeing more tenant turnover in the next month or two. But I am well aware that what I found with the last place is so rare and beautiful, and I know better than to expect it again. I just appreciate everything I was able to have, and the continuing connections, and am so deeply thankful for found family.
This made me emotional thank you for sharing!!
I felt similarly when I visited my current home. I was like… can I just keep chatting with you all and move in now.
I think it’s great you’re going into your new situation with reasonable expectations, but I also hope you find something like that again. But even if not, you’re right those connections don’t go away just because you’re no longer roommates.
I’ve lived in some pretty complicated housing situations, but on the whole I would say living with large numbers of nursing students in hospital housing not refurbished since the 1970s was the biggest trip. Some high/lowlights:
– the time the boys downstairs forgot they were boiling an egg and went out. The smell of burnt egg stuck around for a week through the whole building and the fire brigade were not impressed.
– the time the girls down the hall decided their flat was haunted and woke us all up by trying to ‘exorcise’ the whole floor, throwing ‘holy water’ everywhere and reciting passages from the bible
– the fact that every time a fire alarm went off in the entire building (roughly once a week) we all had to evacuate into the lobby while the fire brigade did an official sweep to make sure there was actually no fire and the estates people argued over how to turn the alarm system off. We were on first name terms with several firefighters very quickly.
– the time my roommate’s fiancé who had just got back from Afghanistan (and was known for having literally slept through a bomb going off) fell asleep in our toilet. The toilet shared by ten people. No amount of banging or yelling made a difference. And to cap it off, our trips to the main entrance to use the toilet alerted the estates manager who then charged my roommate for ‘having an overnight guest’ – never mind the fact that there had been no plan for him to stay over and he definitely wasn’t using a bed.
– the time the same roommate’s fiancé came round after work (at a sawmill) with his hand wrapped in duct tape. When we asked why, he casually said he had got cut at work. When we took the tape off, he had a major laceration across his palm with CHUNKS OF WOOD in it. Then, as he refused to go to A&E, he was subjected to the well intentioned aid of about 15 enthusiastic nursing students. I’m amazed he still had a hand at the end of it.
– the many times prior to an essay deadline when I would find my two roommates amidst a pile of red bull cans and sweet wrappers, looking genuinely ill, and ask me to read through what they had so far. One of them would inevitably have about 20 pages of the same 4 paragraphs repeated in slightly different ways and the other would have two short paragraphs and lots of ideas about how I should write the rest for her.
– the time the girls down the hall got a secret hamster and then promptly lost it. The search went on for weeks and we never did find it. RIP hamster.
I’m sure there were lots of other incidents but those are the first that spring to mind. After a year and a half one of my roommates and I decided enough was enough and moved into a private flat together. It was a lot more expensive but there were no fire alarms, no exorcisms, reliable internet and phone signal, an oven that actually worked and one bathroom between the two of us. It was wonderful.
This really sounds like a movie. A movie I would like to see. haha
This thread has almost spooky synchronicity appearing today: I just arrived home from my first tour of a potential new living space! Basically I’ve lived with my parents ever since I finished college, and I am soooooo READY to move along!!! I’m not going to have a room mate. It’ll be the first time I live totally alone, all year long, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
My worst room mate appeared my freshman year of college: She had all the usual traits, sloppy, self-indulgent, passive-aggressive…. She wouldn’t really let me watch TV… The couch was so often piled high with soooo much crap, it was sometimes hard for me to tell if she was sitting on it!! It got to where I’d keep my clean silverware in my dresser drawer because she’d let her dishes pile up indefinitely.
Congratulations on your move!!
One of my roommates was into me but I did not reciprocate it. I invited another date over (just for dinner!) and gave my roommate a heads up in case they wanted to leave the house. My roommate stormed out, came back several hours later, stormed back in and slammed the door. I went to their room to find them SHARPENING A SWORD ON A ROCK. And then they said “if he comes into this apartment, I will hurt him.” We then had to have an extended conversation about why this was threatening and not okay. They eventually moved out and away and became a therapist so maybe they worked through their stuff?!!
Not sure how I’d feel about my therapist having done that!! But yeah hopefully they worked through their stuff…
Sharpening a sword on a rock is very scary and intense!
So many roommate horror stories, and one wild success!
A non-exhaustive list of terrible roommates from my college years in a town with a housing shortage: the roommates so filthy I found a can of maggots in the kitchen, the subletting couple who claimed Hitler was misunderstood, the jackass who tried to throw all my belongings out in the snow as I was leaving for a semester abroad, and the the stoner who picked all the cookie dough chunks out of my pint of ice cream with his fingers and *put the remainder back in the freezer.*
Years later I was living with a girlfriend and an awesome third housemate. The household broke up as did my relationship, but the handsome butch housemate and I stayed friendly and we eventually started dating. Reader, I married her.
My partner’s ex has an adult daughter who is also queer–we love her and she’s been our on-and-off roommate/babysitter/petsitter over the years. We are 50ish and straight people (but only straight people) are sometimes confused about our “unrelated” mid-20’s friend.
What a great success story!! And also so drama free and respectful it all happening after no one was living together and you weren’t in the prior relationship. haha
Ha! “Drama free and respectful” was not my usual dating style, but I did manage to pull it off that once.
My best friend was the worst roommate. I got so fed up with his mess and the weird chicks he’d bring home. One of them came for the night and stayed for a week. She wouldn’t let me touch the remote to my own tv and tried to give me advice constantlyeven though she had no idea who I was. Dude knew how annoyed I was and promised to clean the house after dropping me off at work…but instead he got drunk and ate my food, then threw it up all over the house. Found a pukey Star Wars pillow case in sink and him passed out in the doorway to my room. I couldn’t even move him to shut my door to be alone. He was still my best friend after that though.
You are a very forgiving friend but I’m glad you no longer live together!
All of these stories are fucking WILD and mine really does not compare, but I have had exactly one roommate and it was…not great.
We were both Australians on exchange in Canada, so naturally we got put together. I tried really hard to be social and make friends, meanwhile my roommate spent most of her time in her room alone. I thought maybe she was depressed/homesick so thought I should try to involve her more. Whenever we socialised with other people she would just bring bad energy or drink to excess and I started distancing myself a bit. She was also very privileged and didn’t cope well with living alone, so I would end up doing a lot of the cleaning, restocking milk etc, and washing the dishes for her…which I rationalised by the fact that she had to help me occasionally with visual tasks, so maybe I owed her something… There was one time when she left her fruit to rot on the counter, to the extent that the juices were seeping through the skin and created an infestation of bugs and the thought still makes me want to throw up.
But we’d already agreed to go to Iceland together, but travelling together was a fucking disaster bc of the close proximity and she ended up raging at me in a restaurant, telling me how much she hates having me around and think all of the ableist things an 8-yo would say to a blind person (I hate having to read things to you/guide you/explain where obstacles are, it’s all so hard). I just sat casually eating my chilli and was like ‘yeah I’ve known for ages, I’ve heard it all before’, which really took the force out of what she was saying. I was like, ‘we’ve just gotta get along for this week and then we’ll never speak again if I’m so inconvenient to be around’, and ofc she was like ‘no I didn’t mean it like that I still like spending time with you but just like, not when I have to help you with stuff’, but I was having none of it. She would also try to eavesdrop on my conversations with friends thinking I was talking about her, but it was problematic because she was specifically taking advantage of the fact I wouldn’t see her walk past/hovering around which was really not cool.
I don’t think it’s entirely her fault though – as I said, very privileged and her parents once finding out she had a disabled roommate, tried to push the discourse that I was needy and dependent on her, so idk if there was much hope. I distanced myself and stopped cleaning/doing her dishes, but it didn’t really feel like a safe space to be.
On the plus side, I was stressed that I didn’t know how to fix the messy situation and I opened up to one of my Canadian friends from class and it brought us so much closer, because she gave me good advice, and always reminded me both subtly and explicitly that I was not the problem and that I was reciprocating enough and didn’t owe people who treated me badly anything. It helped us build a really strong friendship that persists even though we live 10,000 miles apart now and I feel so lucky for that.
*Also, if you can work out who I am from this story (kinda unique) pls don’t out me LOL
You are being VERY compassionate towards this person which I commend but ugh just ugh.
At least you got a close friendship out of it!
My first year of college, dorms: my first roommate was wonderful and I was the bad roommate. she was gone every weekend and I had a bad habit of not washing my dishes as quickly as I should have.
second and third roommates were straight girls, including one from high school I felt pressured to still keep close with. It ended badly because of annoying hetero drama. Then I lived alone for three years.
Fourth roommate was first few months in grad school. She was SO controlling and would send texts and emails every damn day about insignificant things. I now live alone again because fuck that.
My best roommate situation was also (sadly) my briefest. I stayed with some friends for about 3 weeks one summer during college until my sublet was ready. It was GREAT! We watched a lot of Netflix, ate frozen grape tomatoes like they were candy and drank so much boxed wine.
Every roommate situation I’ve been in since I moved to DC has been some version of The Worst.
My first roommate had 2 cats. I don’t like cats (I’m more ambivalent towards them now than I was a few years ago, but I still don’t ever want to live with them), but my credit was shit and I needed a place to live and that was the first apartment I got approved for. The layout of our apartment was one long hallway/kitchen with a bedroom at either end. She had the front bedroom. If she was gone for what the cats deemed to be too long, they would vomit on the floor tiles directly in front of her bedroom door to note their disapproval. Who has 2 thumbs and had to step over cat vomit on a regular basis when she came home from work? THIS GIRL! She was also fucking a white dude with an Amy Winehouse beehive of dreadlocks. (No, I’m not exaggerating. When he let them down, they were butt length.) Their sex playlist included at least 2 songs by Creed.
The 2nd place I lived was what would normally be described as a group house in DC, except “group house” implies that the owner doesn’t live there, and that was not the case here. A more accurate description would be “unlicensed boarding house.” I was on a month-to-month word-of-mouth lease without a working oven, washer or dryer. Why the owner of the house didn’t want working appliances in her home is beyond me. It wasn’t an issue of income: every one of her renters (3 in the main house and another 2 in the separate basement apartment) paid at least $800/mo to live there, which is more than enough to pay for those appliances to be replaced and still have money left over.
My final roommate situation was a 4-person group house in a cute neighborhood that is more suited for families with kids than for young professionals who want to be close to anything resembling a social life. There was 1 roommate who the other 3 of us absolutely hated to the point where we all just announced toward the end of the lease that we wouldn’t be renewing because we couldn’t stand to be around him anymore.
I now live alone and I am dedicated to keeping it that way.
I love how all these stories always have a detail that really highlights how bad the situation was. Yours is definitely “Their sex playlist included at least 2 songs by Creed.” lol
I support you in your commitment to living alone. Especially after all that!
I’ve only had 2 roommate situations – one good and one bad. The bad one wasn’t that bad compared to a lot of the stories on here but basically I lived in a house with two other people, one of whom was this dude who called himself an “arts administrator” and “event planner” but really he was just on a bunch of boards of queer non-profits and his only income was the honoraria they paid him. So he had basically no income and he’d never ask his parents for rent until after rent was due, and he refused to get a day job. Anyways, some of the bills were in his name and some were in my other roommate’s name so each month we’d deduct the amount we owed him for the bills in his name from his rent (which he would eventually pay, but always several days late). Eventually we kicked him out and then 2 months later we found out he had never paid the bills and our power almost got cut off. And then we had to pay the bills a second time plus penalties and had no 3rd roommate for 2 months, costing us even more money. This was compounded by a landlord who didn’t care that raccoons had gnawed a hole into the attached storage area and were living in it (because it “wasn’t part of the house”), didn’t believe that the toilet was leaking into the kitchen because “he had fixed it last year” (eventually the ceiling fell into the kitchen sink and he had to “fix it – when we moved out we noticed there was a new water stain on the ceiling), and said he couldn’t do anything about the rodents living in the heating vents.
Oof yes bad roommates are one conversation but bad landlords are truly the worst!! I’ve definitely had my share of those…
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So yes, I’ve had my fair share of terrible housemates, and I’m sure I’ve been a shit housemate in my time too. But does anyone else want to fight against the notion that I should want to live on my own? I’m 27 and feel that, due to my singledom, people expect me to want to live alone. But I hate living alone. I like living with people, and as I don’t have a partner, that means flatmates. I worry about in ten years time, that I will have to live alone because I’ll have no friends left who need or want a housemate.
People in their 30s and 40s need housemates too! Plus, in ten years all your queer friends who got married in their 20s will be divorcing and they’ll need a cheap place to live.
I’ve lived alone once, a semester when I studied abroad, and I totally get this! I love living with other people even if it can sometimes be negative. I think I like how it can provide human interaction in small doses. Like if I’m home working all day, even if I don’t feel like being social, ten minutes of chatting in the kitchen does wonders for my mental health.
Keep living with roommates! And I think you’ll be able to find people of all ages based on my observations…
As someone who had been changing dorms every year (student housing is a tiresome gamble), I’ve pretty much had no juicy nor fruitful relationships develop with any of my very straight roommates. Our conversations were limited to mundanities such as “Is that your bra that fell on the floor,” “Do you mind if I eat this broccoli in the room,” and “Was it a cockroach that crawled over you” (I’m in a third-world country, after all).
My worst roommate experience has got to be with my current one – pays her shares late, hogs all the desks, and had apparently stolen from my water supply. Or maybe the straight girl who, after I had just finished Taekwondo class, tainted my eyes by having lots of bed PDA with her boyfriend during an Open House. I had to perform a pathetic passive-aggressive display of lifting dumbbells so that they take the hint and just leave my sweaty ass to take a shower.
Other than that and the occasional loud gossiper and the long, loud debates on Jesus, politics, and KPop, my roommate experiences have otherwise been uneventful… if they taught me one thing, it’s to desensitize myself enough to clean out the nightmarish eldritch abominations that is drain hair.
I unclogged my bathroom sink today and immediately thought of the phrase “nightmarish eldritch abominations that is drain hair.” lol
For those people who live in situations where it’s all straights and one queer, I could *not* do that. I’ve lived in mixed flats, but it was at least half queers and straights.
I used to have a TERRIBLE time with getting massive crushes on flatmates. I eventually grew out of it, and I never creeped on anyone deliberately, but I am sure I *was* creepy with making puppy-dog eyes and just generally being a disaster. This was in shared houses with more than one flatmate, so it was never a situation where it was one-on-one, thankfully.
One time, I had this full-on erotic dream about one of my flatmates – she was in her early 30s and I was 19. I walked out of my room in the morning, wiping the sleep out of my eyes, trying not to focus on the images in my dream, only to see her *completely topless* right in front of me. It turned out she was ironing her shirt and she was running a bit late for work. To this day, I can remember she had a very nice, er, frontal aspect. Thank god her gf lived in the flat too, and I really liked her and both of them together. So it was just a baby-dyke crush there, nothing too embarrassing – other than that dream, which only happened once.
One flatmate I did *not* ever have a crush on was the one who tried to recruit me for a pyramid scheme. It wasn’t even an MLM; it was a real pyramid scheme where you were supposed to pay $100 to the person at the head of the pyramid and recruit other people. $100 was nearly 2 weeks’ rent at the time, even if I did want to get into something that dodgy. She wouldn’t shut up about it, but I moved in with my gf of the time shortly thereafter.
The pyramid scheme flatmate also referred to sanitary pads as “surfboards”, which I *detested*. I mean, we all have catchphrases, and sometimes they’re cute, and sometimes they’re nothing in particular, but some just hit us the wrong way. I think by that time it was all like bitch eating crackers to me, but she seemed to be constantly having her period (I mean, maybe she actually had some health issues – I didn’t care enough to ask) and asking me if I had any goddamned “surfboards”. I’d been using tampons since I was 16 and I had told her that multiple times, but again, she was not really that great in the listening skills!
There was one place I lived in where there were eight of us in total – it was a huge old house, but had been modernised a fair amount. One flatmate was an actor, and her bf – who thankfully didn’t live there – was also an actor who had some minor fame in that city. He was a pretentious wanker, and I was at the height of my misandrist years, so I never liked him. They were both in some Sam Shepard play that involved lugging around a dead animal at some point. Instead of doing what any normal people would and making something out of papier mache, they bought half a sheep carcass. They had somewhere to store it in between times, but when you’re lugging the thing around for hours at time on stage or rehearsal, it starts to *stink*.
Cut to two weeks later, when the play finished its run, and I come home from work to find the back yard full of smoke and smelling like a charnel house. The idiot bf couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the stinking carcass, and decided to chuck it into a 40 gallon drum we used for burning leaves and such, throw petrol on it and light it on fire. Let me tell you, a 15kg slab of meat and bone does not burn to ash without assistance. Think about traditional cremations – there’s a lot of wood that’s required to keep the fire burning to reduce the body to ash. The boyfriend had disappeared as he was “busy” and the flatmate refused to touch the thing. (By the way, these two were vegetarians, and we cooked communally in the house – only vegetarian food. I ate meat, but not lamb or beef and not in the house.)
So it ended up being ME who put on the dish gloves and dragged the smoking stinking thing out of the 40 gallon drum, sealed it in layers of trash bags and stuck it out with the rest of the trash. I mean, it wasn’t that huge, so why they didn’t think to do that first is beyond me…
Speaking of “food”, many years later one of the other flatmates I’d lived with there was reminiscing and said, “You’re a great cook, but when we were all living together, all you made was soup or you paid for takeaway food. Why was that?” I had to remind her that my cooking night was Friday and we did the grocery shopping on Saturday. So by the following Friday, there was very little food left in the house, and whether I made soup or got takeaway depended on how *much* food there was or how tired I was after a full week at work. Honestly, I was a bit miffed that my soup hadn’t been perceived as a pretty ingenious solution to almost always finding something like 2 limp carrots and a few handfuls of lentils left in the cupboard, and not much else.
Then there was the flatmate who made fettuccine with a creamy sauce that she meant to thicken with cornstarch. Unfortunately she found the health-nut flatmate’s dolomite powder instead. Dolomite is basically limestone and is apparently great for building calcium. Let’s just say that in a creamy sauce, the result is more like gritty liquid concrete…
The BEST flatmate, for purely selfish reasons, was a young woman from Sapporo who was attending an exchange programme at the university. Her mother did not believe we had any Japanese food in the country – it actually was pretty easy to find a reasonable (albeit expensive) range at Asian supermarkets, even then – so she would send massive parcels stacked with delicious supplies. That was the first time I had grilled mochi. Shizu was more keen on sampling the delights of Makudonarudo and KFC while she was with us, so my gf and I were able to learn how to prepare some new foods and scoff most of the care parcel treats (e.g. a kilo of pickled umeboshi, when we could only get them in tiny jars) without it costing us a bomb.
Aww a 19 year old queer crushing on 30 something couple roommates is such a good baby dyke experience!
Certainly better than your experience with the carcass… how wild!
ahhh roommates.
My first roommate was a childhood friend, and also my first and only boyfriend. We weren’t what you’d call dating when were first moved in together, but we were still hooking up. Eventually, it tapered off because we realized we were better as best friends and that we were both GAY.
He was and still is very chill and for the most part, living with him was easy and enjoyable. We got into the usual roommate squabbles, but never held any resentments or anything.
Being in our early 20s, we were partying pretty hard and had friends coming over every other night. Two of these friends, whom I will call D and J were hopelessly in love with my roommate, and though he entertained real feelings for neither, he was hooking up with both of them. D and J eventually started getting mad at ME because I had brought my roommate into their lives and now he was jerking them around, nevermind that they were consenting adults making their own decisions. I tried talking to all of them at different points, but people are gonna do what they’re gonna do.
THEN, a couple years in, J got kicked out of wherever he was living at the time and my roommate decided without asking me that he could come stay with us in our two bedroom apartment on the couch. I was like fine, but we’re writing up a contract and you have to figure something else out, because my life was dramatic enough and this kid didn’t even have a job.
Eventually one of my friends hired him at one of the group homes she ran (after a month of him not really looking anywhere and me coming home from work every night to find him playing video games on my couch) and we set a date for him to move out like 2 or 3 months from then.
What once was a semi-harmonious, if dramatic living situation turned into a hellscape and J and I were fighting constantly. He also never even bothered trying to look for another place and a week before he was supposed to move out, walked out of his job (leaving vulnerable adults alone) after getting into a text fight with my roommate. I pushed for him to go to rehab, because he was drinking and smoking a lot and felt that maybe a month of self reflection and cleanliness might clear his head a little.
He lasted two days and checked himself out. I told him he couldn’t come back and he moved back in with his parents (where he still lives) and proceeded to tell anyone that would listen that I threw him out onto the street.
I lived with my roommate for a year or two after that but he eventually got really, really shitty at paying the rent for various reasons and I moved out because I wanted to remain friends with him..
I moved into a house after that with a couple friends that included D (memba him?) and that became a messy mess as well with him eventually moving out and then lived with another (girl) friend who would get very aggressive when she drank and start physical fights with me.
I live with my sister now, despite having planned last year to FINALLY get a place on my own because she needed help financially, and it’s been fine. But I fucking relish the day I get to live by myself xD
Wow yeah I don’t blame you after all that!!
I did my share of fucked up things too, I’m trying to save us all haha
tw: sexual assault
do i have a tale for you…
my sophomore year of college i lived with this guy who i had been pretty good friends with. i threatened to move out a few months in because he kept banging ppl in front of me (we shared a bedroom). i am a very chill roomie but i was noooooooooot down with that. there was another occasion where he tried to sexile me so he could sleep with this girl who was heavily shitfaced and got super pissed at me when I refused to leave…anyways after i threatened to move out we sat down and had a talk and figured it out, and he apologized and stuff, and the rest of the year was pretty fine, and we became really close again; i even spent all of august at his family home in a different state. my junior year we got a suite together with two of my other really close friends. we started hanging out with these two girls, one of which was very much a baby gay experiencing her first real crush on a girl and stuff. the guy had some incidents at the beginning of the year which I won’t go into but everything was relatively ok until this one night. all of us drank a ton, especially the two girls, and late into the night after my other roomies had gone to bed, the two girls, me, and the guy decided to watch a movie together in the guy’s room. he was acting kind of weird with the straight girl, enough to make me and baby gay uncomfortable and tell him to cut it out, but he didn’t. the straight girl didn’t say anything, though, although earlier in the day literally said she didn’t want to sleep with him. im mad at myself for not doing anything them, because i did feel really uncomfy and felt that something was awry, but i was also plastered and had to work early the next morning, so i ended up going to bed.
i woke up the next day and realized i had left my laptop in his room, so i knocked on his door before i left for work to grab it, and when he opened the door i saw the straight girl naked in his bed. i was like “oh shit,” but i was super hungover and didn’t really process how fucked up it was until i was at work. i got back from work and my other two roommates were there, and we all talked about how messed up that was. as we were talking about this, baby gay came over and told us about a bunch of stuff he had been doing to her, such as touching her when she told him that she didn’t want him to, as well as a time when she rejected his advances, saying that she wasn’t into guys at the moment, which he responded with something along the lines of “well i’ll just f*** you some way without my d***.” there was a whole list of stuff she told us, which she hadnt told us earlier because she was scared of jeapordizing the new friendship between her and me and my other roommies, because she knew how close we were to the guy
all of this came pretty out of left field; there was that time the year before with the really drunk girl but i had explained to him why that was wrong and to my knowledge he hadn’t tried anything like that again until the night before. my roommies and baby gay and i decided that we needed to confront him and we waited for him to come home. when he came back, we (mostly me) laaaaaaaaaid into him. i didnt want to make baby gay uncomfortable/put too much pressure on her, so i focused mostly on what had happened the night before. he literally just shrugged the whole thing off. like when i told him how fucked up it was to have slept with a girl that drunk his response was literally “k sorry i didnt know that was bad” and i was like….how could you not know????? especially when he tried that shit last year and i called him out on it????
anyways, we were all just shocked at his response, because he was so ambivalent about it. baby gay started to bring up the stuff he had been doing with her, and when she brought up the thing he had said to her, i started laying into him because he knew how fucked up it was to say that; i, a lesbian, was one of his best friends, and he was always super “woke” about it around me. I started laying into him about it and he interrupted me, saying that baby gay had made it up, and that he never said that. everyone was speechless. baby gay was like no…you said that, and he was like nope never happened. i should mention that this was all happening around the time of the brett kavanaugh trial stuff, and in that moment i was just like jesus chriiiist how could this guy just be flat out denying like this. i was furious and quite speechless because of just how badly this guy was refusing any sort of admission of guilt and how manipulative he was being. so i stormed off to my room and baby gay followed me in tears, and thats when i was like welp.
after that, i didn’t talk to him for over a month. ppl at my school noticed because we were usually really social together and stuff, and when i told people what had happened, i started hearing TONS and i mean TONS of similar stories about him being manipulative and really sus with women. i felt like such a cuck; we had been really close friends for years at this point and the whole time he was doing this disgusting shit. i realized in retrospect how manipulative he had been with me, as well; there had been times before where i was suspicious with him or didnt trust something he was telling me, and he would always turn it back on me with the whole “we’re so close why dont you trust me” or acting like people not believing him was a trigger for him or something. at the time i was taking nine classes and had three jobs, so i was already really really stressed out, and that whole revelation added to the stress, and on top of it i was still living with him. we didn’t still share a room thank god but his room was right by our kitchen, and i was afraid to go to the kitchen because i might run into him. i ended up losing 15-20 pounds in under two months without trying to, simply due to stress and the fact that i was scared to go into my kitchen.
things deteriorated between him and my other roommates as well (who had never been super close to him to begin with) and culminated in a fight of one of my other roomies shouting and throwing shit. that was the last straw for him, and he finally moved out. more stuff happened with him after that which i wont go into, but living with someone who used to be one of your best friends and ended up manipulating and sexually assaulting women without me knowing really sucked lemme tell you that. i still live with the other two roommies who are my ride or dies and i love them so much, and even just signed the lease on a new apartment together!
anyways im sorry this is so dark; if this is too triggering for people and stuff i totally understand if this needs to get deleted. this story happened months ago but reading this post really brought it back for some reason and i had to get it off my chest…
Thank you for sharing. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
I’m really glad you’re still with your other roommates and that you’re all able to move forward together. <3