The school year just started, meaning many college freshmen are experiencing sharing space with a roommate for the first time. For most, it will be an experience that they remember forever — some might even forge lifelong friendships.
But for others, it will be memorable for all the wrong reasons, like a college student on Reddit whose roommate was such an entitled nightmare that the student’s friends bought her a cake to celebrate the day the roommate finally moved out of the dorm.
That perhaps doesn’t sound entirely out of line — if you have to get up before dawn, it’s reasonable to ask for a bit of consideration. But that is pretty much the opposite of what went down in this young woman’s dorm room.
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In her Reddit postthe student admitted that she and her roommate had lots in common but came from very different backgrounds. “I’m from a middle-class suburb, lower middle class even, and was the opposite of spoiled,” she wrote. “She came from a rich town where she had a three-story home and was never told no.”
It quickly turned out that vast differences superseded anything they had in common. Because her roommate was a soccer player, she had to get up for practice every day at 4 a.m. The student did her best to be quiet and accommodating, but her roommate absolutely did not do the same.
The student wrote that she came up with all kinds of arrangements to make sure her roommate could get her sleep — she’d hang out in other parts of the building or in the dorm kitchen, and spend time at friends’ dorms to make sure her roommate could make her 8:00 p.m. bedtime.
But when it came time for the roommate to get up at 4:00? No consideration whatsoever was given. “She on the other hand would wake up at 4 a.m., turn every light on, blast music to get her ‘pumped for practice’ and FaceTime her teammates,” she wrote.
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Things quickly escalated. One night the student was leaving at 8:00 to see friends and her roommate forbade her from doing so because “you’re loud when you open the door” and socializing is optional, whereas her practices are not. “I said ‘I’ll come back home early when you stop going to soccer,'” she wrote.
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There’s truly nothing worse than having to listen to someone hack when they’re sick, and you’re trying to sleep. But of course, they can’t help it — they’re sick!
This student’s roommate had no such empathy — she told her to go sleep at the kitchen table if she was going to cough. “Obviously I said no,” the student wrote.
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Things only escalated from there — her roommate demanded she go home to visit family for her birthday so her boyfriend could visit and sleep in her bed, blamed her for a building-wide plumbing problem, and accused her of stealing clothes she had forgotten to get from the laundry room.
And when the student needed peace and quiet, all bets were off. When her roommate planned a sleepover on a night when the student had a final the next day, her roommate flatly replied that her plans were already in stone and she’d have to just cope.
Roommate conflicts are part of life, of course — most of us have had them at one time or another, and as with any conflict, communication is key.
Mental health experts say that open conversations where clear boundaries are collaboratively set by both parties can go a long way to making a difficult living situation a lot smoother. For students, so can having a conversation with a Resident Advisor, who is usually trained in managing these sorts of things.
But, of course, that requires both parties to be willing to acknowledge and accommodate each other’s needs — something that very clearly was not on the table here, since this young woman’s roommate didn’t even seem to realize other people HAVE needs and rights, let along that she needed to accommodate them.
Like every other aspect of life, some conflicts simply aren’t resolvable, and this sounds like one of them. No wonder, then, that this student “celebrated” when her roommate finally moved out. “I’m not kidding,” she wrote, “my friend bought me a little ice cream cake.” Well, there’s one silver lining at least!
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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
