Yeah, I have to wonder if some of the respondents ever lived in a dorm. “Is on the computer all night” would make you a gold-class roommate compared to most stories.
Well, let me put it this way. No, you are not unreasonable. You’ve made more than enough accommodations and the way you spend your time is completely normal in terms of college life. It’s true that you’re paying for the room same as him and deserve equal consideration. Social and relaxation time IS just as important as sleep, and he’s asking for an unreasonable amount of silent time for his sleep. The fact that he gets upset about you drinking water is ridiculous. It’s obvious that you’ve both reached the breaking point where the aptly mentioned “bitch eating crackers” moment has happened where anything you do makes the other raging mad.
So fuck it.
Do whatever you want. You’ve only got a short time left. Just do what you want. You tried, and he didn’t meet you halfway. So he can just live with it now. I was kicked out of my dorm room the night of finals because my roommate wanted to screw. And I just went and slept in someone else’s room. Whoop de effin do. That’s college. You have to be adaptable. I got a new roommate next semester. You’ve already solved that problem by having a single for next year.
Alternatively you just keep doing what you’re doing now and ignore his complaints. Either way it’ll all be over soon. There’s no more point in compromising or making a big stink about fairness this late in the game. Make up your mind about what you want, and then do it.
Right, the roommate doesn’t realize how great he has it. I’m a pretty light sleeper, and I can understand how computer light or keyboard clicking or a door opening or closing can be bothersome and wake you up, I know my dorm roommates would sometimes wake me up inadvertently, but I didn’t expect them to be perfectly slightly every second I was asleep in the dorm. A light sleeper can ask for some accommodations, but can’t expect the world to revolve around them.
The OP sounds reasonable to me, but the best solution is just to wait out the rest of the semester. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sleeping roommate gets a much worse roommate next year, and will reminisce about how good the OP was in comparison.
My opinion is that neither is being overly unreasonable, but you clearly aren’t compatible as roommates. You should room with one of your friends who wants to stay up playing games all night.
Spend thousands of dollars on a gaming laptop after spending an equivalent amount on his desktop? :dubious:
Also, if you’ve been reading the thread, as I have, the OP will be an RA next semester and have his own private room, so he only has to tough out the situation for another month or so.
Hasn’t this been true of most college freshmen for awhile now? Family size has been going down while house size has been going up for decades.
I think so. Plus the opportunities they get to share space even temporarily have gone way down. My daughter points out that she shares a room at camp, and shares tents - this year for a month in a cabin - but she’s the exception. Otherwise, its sleepovers. And we know a few kids who have been helicoptered who don’t even do that.
And kids rooms these days are TV and laptop and XBox equipped, so they aren’t used to making compromises. If my son wants to game all night on a Friday night, he’s not disturbing anyone.
In certain families, there isn’t even the force your family of four into a hotel room for a week to vacation - they rent condos.
And I know kids who are only kids whose mothers still - these are high schoolers - don’t run the vacuum if the kid decides to take a nap mid day. The house runs around the need (and wants) of the kid.
So they are used to having their own space. RAing must be tough now.
This is because sharing space is
THE
WORST
Hell, even people with their own apartments in an apartment complex will get mad because they have to live directly adjacent to neighbors! It’s been long accepted that a freestanding house is the ideal for most people. People like space. I’m not even convinced that sharing space is all that necessary - empathy, consideration, understanding, etc, can be grown other ways.
I’m struggling to follow the people who believe OP is in the wrong or in any way entitled here.
We’re talking about a roommate who sleeps near twice as much as a person is normally expected to, and apparently is not only woken by his roommate doing something as innocuous as getting a drink of water, but sees it fit to bitch about this - and who adamantly refuses to reciprocate the attempts OP is making to find a mutually satisfactory solution.
Speaking as someone who shares a relatively small apartment (I sleep on a couch in the living room and my roommate gets up 3-4 hours before me to go to work) with a roommate that has a different sleeping schedule, cleaning and eating preferences, etc, you either make an effort to cooperate with your roommate or you forfeit your right to have your needs met at all. He needs his sleep, sure - but he absolutely does not fucking need 14 hours of complete undisturbed silence any more than you need to unwind with some late-night gaming a few times a week, and is a self-centered little prat in my mind for suggesting so.
How long the roommate sleeps is a red herring, that was never what this was about. The OP wants to game till 3am weekend nights, and thinks he’s entitled because he doesn’t game till 3 am other nights of the week. He seems to think this is a huge bargaining chip, though it’s he who has the no gaming during the week rule!
I kinda feel like anyone renting a bedroom ought to safely expect to be able to sleep from midnight on, every night of the week. Every night! How late they sleep isn’t really part of it, in my mind.
“Gaming” is equally a red herring. People bring it up as though it disqualifies his side because, you know, video games are dumb. Again, it’s just about two people with different schedules who need to make their co-existence work. One person is (from what we’re told) making multiple attempts to accommodate the other while the second person is just insisting that their way is law. The party assigned to mediate disagreements already agrees with the first party.
It isn’t a bedroom though - its a dorm room.
Yeah, no one thinks that, it’s entirely projection on your part, I’m afraid. The OP called it gaming, everyone else followed suit, I think. Nothing nefarious at all!
If, instead of gaming, hookers and blow till 3am was his thing, could he expect to get a free pass for every weekend just because he wasn’t doing it Mon - Fri ? After all, he’s being accommodating by NOT doing so all those other days, roommate ought to cede weekends, am I right? I think it’s lame reasoning is all. I’m not doing it Mon-Fri, therefore you owe me having it my way on the weekends.
It’s like, “I could have been a jerk Mon-Fri, but I wasn’t…so you owe me now!” It just seems childish and lame reasoning to me, that’s all.
Wait…I thought a dorm room WAS, by definition, a bedroom! Silly me!
Well, I’ve known people who did weed and had sex in their dorm room seven days a week - heck I knew some people who had an extra person living in their dorm room because you can’t separate those in “twue luwv.” The weed the RA could bust them for, the sex we were told to live with.
The drinking - it was the dark ages, you could drink at 19, that the RA couldn’t do anything about. Nor the cigarette smoking. End up with a smoker roommate - see if you can’t find someone to trade. I was actually a pawn in a three room roommate swap that involved getting two smokers in one room. My first set of roomies was horrible - it was a relief to move in with someone whose biggest crime was loudly coming in drunk a few nights every week.
Its a shared space. Yes, the compromise of “I’ll quit at a reasonable time on weeknights, but want to play all night on weekends” is reasonable.
One function of a dorm room is a bedroom. You also use it for studying, socializing, watching TV, gaming (even back when I went to school, we gamed in the dorm rooms - Apple IIs). When you are at college, it is the only non-public space you have, and you generally have to share it. Sharing a room means compromise.
I lived in a dorm for two years and a couple other communal living situations. If I knew my roommate was being bothered by an activity I was doing during his sleep time, I would absolutely do it elsewhere. Hell, neither of us would stay up late writing papers or studying in our room–that’s what the study room, library, or computer lab was for. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable request by the OP’s roommate, although his sleep hours are a bit unreasonable . A reasonable compromise, to me, would be “no gaming from midnights to 8 a.m.” or something of that nature.
I never studied at night anywhere else. But I’m female and walking from the library wasn’t a good idea, our study rooms weren’t quiet in the dorms, and computer lab - those didn’t really exist yet.
My room or a friend’s room. As did my roommates. We wrote papers on noisy typewriters at 2am on a Tuesday. Which was part of the deal - my college typewriter was a 40 pound manual monstrosity - it wasn’t hauled to the library - it barely made it from my parents car onto my desk.
I’m sure you did. We didn’t do it that way. I did have a shitty word processor/electric typewriter. I would never use it at 2 a.m. in my room if my roommate were trying to sleep. I guess if the culture were such at your school that this was normal, allowed, and tolerated, great. I would consider it beyond rude.
You are probably lucky you didn’t go to school where it was normal, allowed and tolerated.
Frankly, I was rather happy that my roommates weren’t dealing drugs out of the room or puking on my bed, like other roommates. Now THAT would be rude.