Okay, a little background. This is my third year of college, but my first away from home, and my first living with someone who isn’t family. I’ve got pretty bad anxiety, and my memory is clinically horrible, to the point where I could literally get something tattooed onto my eyes and I’d STILL forget it.
I met my roommate with my campus roommate finder, and we seemed to get along swimmingly at the beginning- we’d set hard rules regarding chores, food, the bathroom we share, etc. She used to chat with me whenever she saw me, but this was at the beginning of the school year. It’s a little past the beginning of the second semester, and she hasn’t spoken any unprompted words to me that weren’t slightly rude in quite some time.
I always try to do my dishes promptly, but every now and then I forget, because I’m human, and kind of an idiot. I never eat her food, and I don’t use any of her cooking pots or pans or the like without asking first. We both have our own sets of dishes, cups, cutlery, and other kitchen things. Occasionally I’ll buy a bottle of wine or something similar for the two of us, but she’ll never really participate. (And she does drink, we had a drinking celebration to commemorate our first day on campus.) I have two guests who come over twice a week on the same day at the same time every week for a group cooking “date” and a movie, which despite multiple attempts to get her to join in and relax a bit, she refuses to speak to us once we’re all in the same room.
She’s part of a campus sport, and is usually out of the dorm- either for classes during the week, practices, or whole weekends where the team is out for competitions. These weekends are frequent, to the point where it’s rare to see her anywhere from Thursday night to Sunday night. I take about 16 credit hours of classes, and I’m usually home when classes aren’t in session. If she IS home, she spends all her time in her room if I’m out in the kitchen or living room (which in itself is rare, I tend to stick to my own room), and waits until I’ve been in my room for some time before leaving her room for any given reason.
If she does speak to me, it’s to remind me of something I forgot that is negatively affecting her- a more recent example is that I’d forgotten I had some potatoes on a shelf of our rotating bottom cabinet in the kitchen, and I came home to them on the table, slowly growing spores, and when I asked where they came from, I got a very bitter response back from her, who was just relaxing in her room. I’d completely forgotten I’d even had potatoes, and she knows I hate wasted food more than anything else in the world because of the way I was raised. I’m sure it wasn’t her intention to upset me, but she could have let me know they were there beforehand so I could make something with them, or at least thrown them away if she wanted to let them sit there and then just tell me later. I felt like a nuisance.
I was raised in a poor household, where passive aggressiveness was VERY common. Things like setting the milk jug down too hard, leaving obvious things in odd places, or folding a sock angrily at someone was a way my family members could silently say, “I’m mad at you.”
Am I misreading our situation as an issue, or is it just my anxiety about trying to please a roommate for the first time?