Living With Strangers

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When I arrived in Boston for my first year of college, I moved myself and all of my earthly possessions into a dorm room that I would be sharing with not one, but five other people. Friends had told me that your college roommate can make or break your freshman year — no one wants to have to come home every night to a manipulative sociopath or perpetual complainer. So when I met the people I would be living with for the next eight months, I proceeded with caution.

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Although the girls were nice enough, I quickly learned that they were highly self-absorbed, passive aggressive, and a bit too obsessed with fifteen-year-old YouTube stars for my taste. This didn’t mean that I couldn’t live with them, it just meant that it would take some work to make the experience manageable. Over the course of the semester I learned that the best strategies for living in a small space with people that irritate you are to avoid them, avoid conflict, and something else.

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When six teenaged girls are in a room together, that room tends to get relatively loud relatively quickly, especially when said teens describe themselves as “bubbly” or “extraverted.” Within minutes, our quiet common area would become a hub of activity, with voices shouting over each other to share some earth-shattering insight about Justin Bieber’s new hairstyle or Kendall Jenner’s latest instagram photo.

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To prevent a migraine, I discovered that my best option was not to attempt to bond over One Direction with these young women, but to simply avoid spending time with them. If I chose to eat lunch in the dorm, I ate it in my bedroom rather than the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to stab myself in the eye with my fork. I discovered that when I got home from class, it was wise not to ask a roommate how her day was, if I wanted to be spared a lengthy description about her “really hot matches” on Tinder, and other things I didn’t care about.

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Avoiding too much contact was crucial, and avoiding potential conflict was even more important. With six contrasting personalities sharing a small space, one has to tread lightly. A wrong step could cause a week of tension, gossip, and passive-aggressive sticky notes. For example, when one roommate assigned each of us chores and stuck her list to the refrigerator when we were out of the room, I knew the safest option was to go along with her plans rather than point out how her behavior might be considered controlling or inconsiderate. That would of course result in sides being taken, and other fun, teenaged drama.

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When another roommate decided it would be fun to hang ten posters from the Hunger Game franchise on our shared wall, I said nothing rather than commenting that while Jennifer Lawrence is a great actress, I didn’t need to see her blown up face glaring down at me when I got my cheerios in the morning. Whenever a roommate meeting was held to “discuss an issue,” I would suddenly become conveniently unavailable — I had to meet my study group in the library or take an important phone call — thus avoiding the inevitable bloodbath that occurs when teenagers have the opportunity to “express their feelings.”

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My third and final tactic for living with five strangers was to smile and nod. Your cousin from Tennessee is staying on our couch for a week? That’s fine. You want to tell me a lengthy story about going to the UPS store? I’ll pretend to care. This approach complemented strategies one and two, contact and conflict, by demonstrating that although I wasn’t around much, I was pleasant and flexible. I wasn’t going to be anyone’s new bestie, but I would politely look at a couple pictures from your trip to Bali.

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I finished the year on relatively good terms with these people, and although I’ll probably never speak to them again, I can say that survived what could have been one of the most chaotic living situations of my life. I don’t plan on living with five strangers again, but if it ever happens again I’ll be equipped with my arsenal of tactics to avoid the situation.