D2 just told me that her female friend from HS at Kenyon is rooming with a guy next year. They are not romantically involved, just friends. My kid is very nonchalant about it.
I think living with a romantic partner while still in college is just a bad idea all around. It might work for some, but the vast majority of those relationships are going to end, and then the housing office has to get involved.
This happened to a friend of my D’s. She and her girlfriend roomed together, broke up midway through the year in a very acrimonious split (aren’t they all at this age?) and had to figure out a new arrangement, with the help of their RA and the housing office.
Agree, MotherofDragons,
No way should gf/bf live together in college, in my view. It is so likely they will break up, and how uncomfortable not to even be able to escape, because the other one is in your room.
Trust me @NEPatsGirl - My gay son has gone to plenty of hanging-around-in-pjs-watching-chick-flicks-eating-ice-cream-sleepovers … WAIT scratch that as he would NEVER eat ice cream… way too fattening… frozen yogurt or smoothies only…
The thing is colleges have found that gender neutral dorm rooms and bathrooms work well for a lot of people … if they don’t work for you thats ok too… this just isn’t a sky-is-falling-issue…
And my best friend in college, who happened to be gay, would never be a pj/sleepover/ice cream eating ‘girl friend’. He was gay, not a substitute girl friend. Of course, I wasn’t all that girly either and preferred doing things like going to hockey games or non-chick flick movies with him.
At UChicago, everyone is placed in a different house in a dorm. Each has different cultures and different living arrangements. My house has the simplest arrangement:
Every floor is co-ed. Every bathroom is gender neutral. First years are not placed with people of a different gender but there is no rule saying that can’t happen if you choose your roommate as an upperclassman.
What isn’t simple about that?
@sayacharming, no one is forced to room with a person of the opposite sex. So there really should be no “discomfort” with the concept, since presumably they have requested this roommate arrangement.
@Tperry1982, not sure what constitutes a ‘suite’ in your sentence but I was referring to mixed gender students sharing a room, not a standard suite with 2 rooms where one room has women, and the other has men.
@HydeSnark, Late 1970s at UChicago, we had (unofficial) gender neutral bathrooms (the house ‘voted’ on it each fall) but all the double rooms in the co-ed dorm were single sex, even for upper classmen. Actually, I don’t think any of us would have even thought to ask, although I did have some non-gay male friends I would have been perfectly fine to share a room with. Not sure what the response would have been if we did make the request but probably a “say what?” Wonder how the change occurred, whether it was actually a policy change that was officially announced or whether it occurred organically with the housing office’s tacit blessing.
Just to push things back a few years, my younger sister shared an off-campus apartment with two roommates, one male and one female, 25 or so years ago. No romantic entanglements amongst any combination of them to worry about, but very little privacy, given the design of the apartment (which she said looked to have been originally designed as a one-bedroom that had had extra wall-like structures put in to bring in more rent). She and her roommates had actually looked into sharing an on-campus triple and found it would have been allowed, but it cost so much less to live off-campus that that’s what they did.
Also, I would like to interject that it isn’t just gay men who would enjoy non-romantic hanging out in PJs and eating ice cream while watching chick flicks (and not all gay men would like it, for that matter). There’s a shocking—shocking!, I say—amount of variation in preferences about that sort of thing amongst all genders and orientations.
I have to admit I don’t know any of those men… please introduce me to any that you know who are single. 
Yeah, my husband looks like a giant Viking (not the football kind, the pillage and storm the castle Khal Drogo kind), and once he watched all the seasons of Sex and the City with me because I agreed to learn how to play Call of Duty with him.
Our daughters grew up playing with robots, video games, and matchbox cars, and watching “Project Runway” and playing with my little ponies, so while we are heterosexual, we don’t see behaviors as “girly” or “manly” because there is really not a lot of that in our household-I do a lot of “manly” stuff like repair the toilets and fixtures when they break, and DH can do the dishes WAY better than I can and will watch rom coms with me.
One boyfriend of older D was dumped because he refused to let her put nailpolish on his nails. It was hilarious how upset he was, like somehow it would turn him into a girl.