Background: My husband and I separated about two years ago, and I kept the house. I wasn’t planning on renting any rooms out, but a good friend asked if he could rent a room from me and talked me into it. I wound up hating the arrangement. I like to go home and just be by myself, walking around naked and not having to talk to anyone, and this friend messed up that whole vibe. When he moved out six months later, I resolved not to try to have any more roommates.
Current situation: A friend of mine messaged me last night asking if he could rent a room from me. When I was in the depth of my depression from my husband leaving me, I was really taking more from my friends than I was giving, and I resolved that when I could get in an emotionally stable enough situation to give again, I wanted to give back to the people who helped me through my rough time.
This one friend, who reached out to me a few times in private when he could see that I was clearly distressed in a public situation, is now going through a divorce of his own. He explained to me that he and his wife are separated but still living together to avoid having to pay mortgage on the house and rent for another place at the same time. When my husband and I separated, a friend of ours let him rent a room at a deep discount (you know, the friend rate), so that my husband could continue to help pay the mortgage until we refinanced the house. I shudder to think how much worse my situation would be if I had been forced to continue living with my husband (let alone quarantined with him!).
I have been able to afford my mortgage on my own, so I think I could potentially could give him a similar offer and let him stay with me for cheaper than he could with a stranger, at least for a few months while he looks for a more permanent living situation. I could also offer him some emotional support, having been through a divorce recently myself. But I still hate the idea of giving up the freedom of having the house to myself. What do y’all think I should do?
The best choice would be to find him a different situation with similar benefits for him – some other cleap place he could stay that wouldn’t be with his wife. Do you have friend who would LIKE to have a room mate? Maybe someone who owes you something?
If you did rent to him, is there a way to section off portions of your home so you’d still have a space where you could walk around naked and not have to talk to anyone?
I can’t find the multi-quote function in this new interface (is it still here?), so I’ll have to respond to your post and the one after it separately. The definite end date thing is something I had been giving some consideration to. He mentioned that they were planning to list their house for sale, maybe in another month. So one option could be to let him stay until the house sold, and once he got the money from the sale he could find his own place.
Consider being open and honest, About your reservations and previous experience. Then, think about some arrangements that might ease your discomforts. Perhaps he gives you two days a week when he’s mostly silent and invisible? Def consider an actual end date, (it’d be really good for both of you actually.) And absolutely establish, up front, an exit plan in case the arrangements needs to end. How much notice, who pays what, etc.
You may find he will be accommodating when he knows of your previous experience. And, having such a conversation establishes you as having adult expectations, about his presence, behaviour, and any conflict resolution. This can only work in your favour. You may even find a roommate who constantly inquires after your wishes and needs. How pleasant a change would that be?
I admire your compassion and desire to help your friend/share your home, very much. You are a great friend.
Wishing you great Good Luck!
Thank you. Your whole post is helpful, but your first sentence in particular is a great reminder of how to approach any difficult situation in life. When he first approached me, I told him that I had reservations because my previous roommate situation didn’t work out well, but that I would consider it. But being more specific would probably help him to either (a) understand why moving in with me would not ultimately be a good situation for either of us (because you really don’t want to go from one place where you don’t feel welcome to another place where you still don’t feel welcome), or (b) figure out a way to accommodate my needs better than my last roommate did.
So I would say default to “do it,” but here are my warnings and caveats from my own (current) experience.
Don’t think about what you would do in the same situation or what you have done in similar situations. This person is not you, so while you might have been respectful, courteous, and used the time to get back on your feet while trying to find another place asap, they… may not be.
Be super super realistic about them. Seeing someone in a charitable light is great when they’re your friend who lives somewhere else. If someone is your friend, it would be judgmental to worry about some of their habits. It’s their business. When they live with you, it becomes your business because it has an impact on your life.
If they’re generally a hot mess, they will not necessarily be better out of respect for you. There was a big part of me that genuinely thought mine would be- because I can’t imagine behaving otherwise. Like my car is untidy, but I can’t imagine turning someone else’s home into a pigsty and not even worrying about it. I mean… maybe they will. We’re talking about your friend, not mine. But it’s not something to count on.
Discuss explicit boundaries and expectations from the outset. How long are they welcome to stay? What household duties will they be expected to take care of (above and beyond simply cleaning up after themselves)? How do you each feel about guests? How about food/groceries- will you share food? Condiments? Who buys paper towels? Dish soap? What are your thermostat preferences/tolerances? How about noise at night or in the mornings? Make this beneficial to you and make it clear that certain things are their job, not a favor they’re doing for you. And put it in writing- not as a contract, but more as minutes of a meeting (or, hell, do it over text message/e-mail) so that there’s no confusion later as to who agreed to what.
That said, having a place to go when you need it is huge and can really be sort of life-changing help to give someone who is in a crisis situation. If I had to make the decision again with my roommate (who was in a somewhat more dire situation), I would probably still let her move in even knowing that she was going to turn my life upside-down (and then shake it, set the contents on fire, and kick the container into the middle of someone’s front yard). I just… would have set more boundaries and worried less about being a bottomless well of generosity and making her feel welcome and wanted and making sure she was taken care of. I would have laid out expectations. It’s easier to set boundaries before they’ve been violated. And 100% set an end date so that if it does end up being difficult, at least it’s not forever.
I’ve tried this before but it didn’t work out well. I think it depends on what type of person you yourself are. For example, I’m organized and I like things to happen according to a plan. Luckily my wife is the best planner I’ve ever met and she has an amazing analytical mind. I know I digress, but my brother and friends I lived with in my youth had such different lifestyles that they made terrible roommates. And I suffered because I didn’t want our relationship to be affected by my complaints. Really frustrating.
“I suffered because I didn’t want our relationship to be affected by my complaints” is something I relate so hard to. I am actually so straightforward and honest with my friends that I’m kind of “known for it.” But when a good friend of mine would walk into the room and want to engage in conversation, and I didn’t want to talk, I absolutely could not cope with the idea of straight out telling my friend “I don’t want to talk.”
Other people have given you better advice than I likely would, such as
But I can help you with this one:
Using your mouse, select the part of the post you want to quote. (Which can be the whole post.) Click the little “quote” button that will pop up, and a window will open on the bottom of your screen with the part your selected and room for you to post.
IGNORE THAT WINDOW FOR NOW.
Scroll down to the next post you want to quote, and again, select without your mouse the parts you want to quote, and then hit the “quote” button that will pop up. Now you have both bits of text in that little window on the bottom of your screen.
Repeat until you have gathered all the bits you want to reply to. Then move (with your mouse/touchpad) to the lower window and add whatever you want to say.
DO NOT WRITE ANYTHING ON THE SAME LINE AS A QUOTED POST.
I have no idea why Discourse requires quotations to have their own line (including the /quote tag part) but it does.
You can preview what it will look like on the right. And if you mess up the formatting, you have a couple of minutes to fix it using the edit button, which looks like a little icon of a pencil.
I would have a frank discussion with the man, explain that you value your privacy, but value the help and support he gave you.
I would say offer him a limited time rental agreement, say 3 or 6 months - the firm end date can make things easier to accept. You can negotiate for various other things - cleaning rota, dealing with shopping for household staples [you know, toilet paper, dish soap, stuff that both of you use] and kitchen ‘privacy’ - each gets a cupboard that is exclusively yours, a shelf in the fridge and a space in the freezer that is exclusive - anything else is free grab and use. I hate buying something special for a recipe I want to make and having a roomie use it first - I buy specialty ingredients like truffle shavings, or a small slab of pork belly, or special dried beans from France for a cassoulet, or special thick cut maple cure bacon … tiny affordable luxuries. So when we have roomies in residence, we delineate private supply spaces, and common goods [catsup, soy sauce, jam, generic bacon, butter …]
You also need to list firmly financial issues - is he paying part of the electricity, internet, cable access, amount of rent and also delineate penalties for not making the payments. You can also limit his having parties, or even overnight guests, or the number of guests coming over [I have privacy issues from some really bad roomie situations including one where they came in and robbed me while I was at work] so me personally would actually install a locking doorknob on my bedroom [but as I said, I am paranoid around strangers …]
Rather than ignoring that window, I’d put a bit of text in it; you don’t need to finish whatever you wanted to say, but that seems to hold the window in existence even if you shrink it.
Then, but not before you’ve put some text in, click the down arrow in the corner of the reply box, and it’ll shrink to a bar at the bottom which will allow you to better read the page as you work through it.
If you want to include a quote from another post, continue as puzzlegal says. If you want the reply window back, click on the up arrow that will be in the corner of the bar at the bottom of the window.
ETA: as to the original problem: I’d talk it out with your friend, and, if you do take him in, definitely set an end date.
And among the things you need to talk out right now is your friend’s attitude towards covid risks. If you differ significantly on this, mixing households would be a really bad idea.
aruvqan, thanks for all the specific examples of what to consider, this is helpful.
I had to give this question some thought. Yes, I am friends with the wife. Both the husband and wife are part of the same athletic community that I am. The only challenge I can really think that it might present is if she didn’t like that her ex was moving in with a single female rather than with another man. But I am not at all saying this WILL happen, just trying to think of possible scenarios. I will say that she is very close friends with my previous roommate, and she knows that nothing physical or emotional happened between me and that roommate.
Ooh, this is a really good point. I got together with him yesterday and it does, indeed, sound like we’ve differed on this. But it sounded like he was primarily concerned with bringing the disease home to the kids in his household (all his wife’s, not his – he would not be bringing children into my house). But it’s absolutely something I should discuss with him, because if he tried to move in and then started trying to dictate where I was allowed to go, that’d be a total disaster.
Interesting. I was thinking more in the other direction, that he might put you at risk. But yes, if you’re going to put him at risk you need at an absolute minimum to make that clear in advance. And, ideally, make it clear to everyone else you might make contact with, so they can stay away from you.
And he might well still be in contact with his kids, even if he doesn’t want to be in contact with his soon-to-be-ex wife.
My son had a nightmare roommate who invited her friend to crash on the living room couch (this was an apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room, so that was a big chunk of the total space) and then that friend invited his girlfriend to stay with him, and they had sex in the living room that the others had to walk through, and they left condoms lying around on the couch… Oh, and smoked pot leaving the whole apartment stinky.
Well, I’ll take a different position than most replies so far: You should absolutely say no.
You don 't need the money. You prefer to be alone. It sounds as if you are considering this only out of a sense of owing him, and “I owe you a favor” is something that’s fine for helping a guy move or buying him dinner but letting someone literally live with you is on another level entirely. That is way, way past him being emotional support back in the day.
The potential downsides of a new roommate are genuinely enormous and highly unpredictable. It is kind of you to want to be a good friend, but this is unwise, it is usually very difficult to evict people, and the possibility it will turn our sour is significant. You are proposing to compromise your fundamental comfort and security to repay a favor and that is a bridge too far. You have a right and a duty to yourself to maintain the boundaries that keep you happy and secure. Do not do this; you owe no one that much. If he is a good man he will understand.