Shacking up with your boyfriend? Don't tell me you'll be my roommate!

The BBQ Pit
21

I’ve found (after roommates too numerous to count) that it’s not entirely the luck of the draw. Your chances improve substantially if (believe it or not) you

(a) move in with total strangers, ie people who you have no reason to try to get along with, people you have no problem being a hardass too (because hardassery is necessary when you’re living with others), people who you can comfortably tell to thrown out their own feminine hygeine products (ugh) and no, their friend is not welcome to crash on the couch indefinitely, and to pay their bills, or get the fuck out. You’re welcome to move in NEXT DOOR to your friends, or become friends with your roommates, but having a relationship beyond the hardass business of being roommates is inviting trouble.

(b) Put everyone’s name on the lease, get deposits for bills in your name, etc.

It also helps a lot to know your rights as a tenant thoroughly. I’ve had two housemates (different apartments, same landlord) totally illegally evicted by the landlord who took advantage of them. Here, for instance, if your and your roommate’s names are both on the lease, and s/he bails, you cannot be held responsible for their rent.

22

Blah, there’s no way I’d have roommates. Too many horror stories and too many assholes. Besides, I’m a solitary person anyway and don’t like anyone getting in my way.

I don’t trust anyone, except those closest to me, and even then, I’d sooner live with my parents, since I trust them the most.

But, that’s just me. How people manage to put up with roomates is beyond me, but I guess it’s like Paypal. For everyone has a horror story, there are many who don’t since they have no need of saying anything. Doesn’t mean I like the idea, but as I said, I’m solitary anyway. Heh.

Hope everything works out for you, Tracy Lord.

23

Ah, you remind me of my university days.

I fell in with all foreign students, some of whom would arrive from their homeland the day before classes began, staying overnight at the YMCA. :eek: They always made it work, with apparent ease, while the rest of the student body was bent out of shape if they hadn’t found a place by 1 Aug. I promise there are such people where you are.

Of course there was the summer, I left the apartment hunt to my two roommates as I returned to my home city to work. They, true to their word, found a charming Victorian rambler and rented it for Sept 1, before splitting town to spend a few weeks in the Carribean. They ended up stuck there due to a BOAC strike, while I was packing to move out of my summer digs, assuring everyone I did have housing, I just didn’t know the address.

Somehow it always shakes out, don’t sweat it. Some of the best housing and housemates I had were just happenstance.

Thanks for the memories. :smiley:

24

Last night I spoke again with the woman who’s renting her house, and I’m driving down on Thursday to take a look at it and meet the two other girls who’ll (hopefully) be living with me.

It pretty much kicks ass across the board, and I’m hoping it’ll work out – $350/mo plus utilities, we each have a bedroom plus a communal living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room, and two bathrooms, AND it’s right between the school and the Shakespeare Festival (my two Ashland necessities), about a half-mile from both.

Hopefully my potential housemates aren’t flakes or Nazis!

25

Good advice. My roomates who were my friends before we lived together weren’t so much afterward. It has also worked the other way, where I’ve lived with near-total strangers and got along fabulously.

You need to be with someone you aren’t afraid of offending.

26

To me this is the kind of thing that my college experience prepared me to deal with in the real world. I had a rather generic management major, most of what I learned in class could have been learned at home.

The real learning came from situations like this. I learned when something is really important, like where I would be living for next year, I made sure I had a good plan, and a back-up plan. Whenever you have to trust someone else to do something important for you, you have to have ways to make sure it gets done, or have a good alternatives if it doesn’t.

I assumed because I would never be as thoughtless as your friend, and leave someone who was counting on me in a bad siutation, that others would be as considerate I was. Wrong! Lots of selfish people out there can’t be bothered to live up to their obligations. College was when I learned to recognize the signs of these people, and be sure never to have to count on them.

And I also learned when things turn out bad, someone strong can think on their feet and find a way to make the bad situation work. It sounds like you did that, and everything may work out better for you this way.

You will have lots of these things happen to you. But having worked through this one, you will know next time you will work through that as well. That is valuable information to have, and worth the inconvience of having to go through them.

I have friends that have kids who are now college seniors. They never lived on their own, and never had to scramble like you just did to make things work for them. They call their moms four times every day, asking for advice on the most basic things. I don’t see that they have learned any real life skills to prepare them for being on their own. Their mothers pride themselves on having such close relationships with their kids, which is nice, but really deprives their kids from using this time of early adulthood to learn to make decisions and then live with the outcome of those decisions.

Sorry for the added rant, but after reading your post, and the posts of others, it just made me realize how important it is to learn to deal with tough situations when you are young and in the best situation to learn from them.

27

My first roomate would call her mother to come from over an hour away to deal with our situations (her half of the cleaning, for example).