So, maybe your roommate is your best friend, or possibly he is a rather large and especially pointy thorn shoved right up your backside by Longwood’s housing department, and you are the unlucky one to have to deal with his annoying thorniness all year. Things may get difficult, but as with everything, there are good and bad ways to handle the situation.
Women usually handle their roommate issues with passive-aggressive sticky notes, text messages, and so on and so forth. Such notes, along with an abundance of hair ties, are one way to know when a female has been present in a space for an extended period of time. Guys’ living spaces, by contrast, are usually defined by freshly strewn layers of used food wrappers, strange, most often unpleasant aromas, and of course, no sticky notes.
The reason we don’t leave sticky notes around for our roommates is because, by and large, we’d much rather just avoid dealing with the problem and not confront someone about it. In my apartment, if we have an issue, we simply fix it and then resume acting like children, as there is nothing I’d rather not do than have a serious conversation about feelings with my roommates. However, this works because my roommates and I are friends, and live rather peacefully in our tiny, messy box, but perhaps that isn’t the case for you. In such circumstances you may actually have to, wait for it, confront your issues head on.
Perhaps the conflict is simple. Maybe your roommates don’t like to change the toilet paper when it runs out. No biggie, just change it out yourself, only with sand paper instead. They’ll get the message. Maybe they don’t like to take out the trash, in which case you might consider trapping them in an ever growing fort of their own rubbish by surrounding their bed in trash-bags, until they have to either take out the trash or be totally shut off from the world.
Sharing can present another common roommate problem. Many adopt a “what’s mine is yours” policy about such things, but what happens if your roomie gets a bit over zealous and helps himself to items he shouldn’t? There are a few options to handle this problem-=you could lock up all of your things, tell him to quit, or, like a territorial dog, pee on everything you own to mark it as your territory. That’ll show him.
Dealing with difficult roommates can be, well, difficult. But of course, whenever you have a problem, the best way to handle it is not to confront it, but to instead rely on childish trickery until the problem resolves itself. Or you could talk to him like a rational adult, or just not care. Its up to you, I however, must go clutter my apartment with food trash.
