If you’ve ever been asked by your roommate, “How do you feel about a pet snake?” then welcome to college.
When you’re an optimistic incoming freshman with eyes filled with wonder and naivety, there’s a slew of things that don’t strike you as important to think about until you’re standing face-to-face with your door to your double, locked out. Being a good roommate feels like a self-explanatory endeavor until you encounter people on campus who operate as if they never had to share a space with anyone, ever.
It’s customary to walk around Cornell and point out all the odd things happening on campus. From kids tethered, indefinitely, to the library, to chronic party-goers, to the bear skinner, too many of these interesting people come home at the end of the day to a double and a roommate. It seems unfathomable to picture the people behind these Cornell moments (flooding Sidechat) as not fleeting figments but real, full-fledged people who have an assigned co-sufferer.
Still, it seems everywhere you look, your friends are rooming with people who are neat, tidy, respectful and fun. People are surviving forced triples in Dickson with more grace, and you feel alone in this “why does my roommate want a pet snake?” level of suffering. Not only do some students finish the year with a good relationship with their roommate, but they also walk away with a friendship and a plan to live together again next year.
I’m here to dispel this notion that your roommate will be your best friend or even a friend at all. As a sophomore, I’ve witnessed the extremes of a rooming situation firsthand and through the eyes of my classmates, who have had varied living experiences. Sometimes a roommate is just someone you live with.
What I’ve come to realize is that there are levels of being a bad roommate, a sliding scale ranging from bad, to worse, to downright ugly. If you’ve had a challenging roommate, they most likely fit into one of these archetypes.
The Bad:
For many, you and your roommate are passing ships in the night, your paths rarely crossing. One roommate is consistently out til 2 a.m. enjoying the thrill of a party and the other enjoys the emptiness of the Cocktail Lounge on a Friday night. The only conversation between you while in the room is a quietly whispered “Can you turn off the light?” when it’s time to go to bed. Minimal communication can feel stiff and frustrating at times, especially if you planned to fulfill your college hopes and dreams of being the kind of roommates who eat at Morrison together or watch the sunset on the Slope. Instead, your room becomes the new set for “A Quiet Place,” and against your will, you’ve entered a nine-month long college version of the silent game.
After a point, you give up on the dream of actually being friends with your roommate. It’s as far-fetched as Okenshields having decent pizza. It’s just not happening. But after weeks of being treated like Anna Kendrick by her roommate in “Pitch Perfect,” the silence is all you expect.
Yes, moving around a mummified-like teenage girl was not on the college bucket list, but it’s still the most respectable version of a bad roommate because, hey, at least the room is clean.
The Worse:
Some people have never had to do their own laundry, and their parents have never yelled at them to clean their room — and it shows. To put it lightly, the biohazard that is now your dorm room teeters on the line between messy and uninhabitable, and now it’s up to you to figure out the extent of what you will accept living with.
Whether you’re in off-campus housing with a roommate who refuses to clean the kitchen or in a dorm room with a roommate who thinks the floor is their personal hamper, sharing a space with someone who walks around with a self-imposed air of importance means trying not to scream as they pretend they live alone when you’re two feet away. The dirty roommate impedes your ability to have company, as you can never have friends over without notice to give ample time for a lively chat (full-blown argument) with someone who believes that yes, I do have a laundry bag, but the floor is also suitable.
This ongoing war between clean and dirty creates an invisible line in the room that’s as disastrous to cross as a valley.
The Awful — Unpredictability:
Sometimes, surprise is a good thing. You’re a few weeks into college, and your new friends decide to throw you a “party” in a dorm lounge. That’s a surprise everyone would enjoy. Some surprises come in the form of a two-foot-long snake your CALS roommate swears is friendly. “Where would you put the dead mice it needs to eat?” you ask aloud while internally contemplating the logistics of a Room Change Request. Her answer: you guessed it, the communal fridge. Of course, her desire to put dead mice in the refrigerator is absurd, but it isn’t the most outlandish idea, such as, you know, packs of bear meat in the communal fridge.
Still, having an unpredictable roommate is not something anyone seeks out. Especially as Cornell students who get separation anxiety when we stray from our schedule on Google Calendar, spontaneity is the antithesis to many of our very beings. Although unpredictability doesn’t usually show up in the form of a snake or bear meat — mostly just odd sleeping hours or questionable party habits — never knowing what someone you live with will do forces you to always be on edge.
The Ugly — Fundamental Incompatibility:
I’ll admit that I’ve seen clashing roommate situations too often. Of course, one would assume that at the very least these innate incompatibilities would be snuffed out by the mandatory housing form, but the roommate questionnaire is just as misleading as a dating app profile. Everyone is just trying to put their best foot forward and seem reasonable and well-adjusted, and then they’re unreasonable.
What’s supposed to be a place for you to relax after a long, stressful day of Cornell becomes a battleground. One roommate wants the window closed because the temperature drop during the night “makes them sick,” while the other roommate sneaks in just to open the window and leave. One roommate is constantly shutting the curtain because they live on the ground floor by a bus stop, and the other lies in wait before pouncing to open the curtains to let in light whenever their opponent steps out of the room for a singular moment. A morning trip to the bathroom becomes an unpleasant experience as you come back to the sun beaming throughout the room, exposing you to the gaggle of students dragging their feet to their 10:10 a.m.
Incompatibility often manifests when sharing a dorm room with someone else. For some, their dorm is their sanctuary, and even though they claimed to be happy with others in the room on the roommate housing form, as soon as their feet touched Ithaca soil, they changed their mind. Now, two roommates who claimed to feel similarly about the state of their room are in a self-made stalemate. Or your roommate starts dating someone, and all of a sudden, there’s a forever plus one (the boyfriend) you can’t shake.
Regardless of the state of your relationship with your roommate, just know you are not alone, and you will survive. Unfortunately, it’s a cannon event.
Vanessa Long is a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be reached at vvl22@cornell.edu.
