<p>nngmm, that’s true quite a bit of moving if you think about it.</p>
<p>That wasn’t the point though.. My friend wanted her friend to move in with her. It didn’t work out and in fact it turned out HORRIBLE.</p>
<p>My roommate and I were assigned and while we’re not the best of friends, we get along great and it has turned out very well.</p>
<p>Roommate assignment was a huge concern for me. I am very much a “by the book” kind of person. No alcohol, no smoking, no kind of drug use, etc. And I don’t tolerate it very well either. I know that I am in the small minority when it comes to that sort of thing. I was worried I’d get put with someone who drank a lot and it was something I definitely did not want.</p>
<p>It’s easier to set up guidelines with a random roommate. When two people don’t know each other, it’s kind of expected that you go in the first day or week or whatever and set up rules that you can both live with. If you already know someone, it’s easy to tell yourself that they’re a good person and will be a reasonable roommate and you wont have any problems, and so you don’t talk about the little things that you have to have (or not have, as the case may be) in your room.</p>
<p>Any room situation can work out if the roommates will talk to each other openly at the beginning of rooming together (or before they request each other as roommates) and agree to actually talk to the other person when something really bothers them.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in just about every possible situation. My university does not allow roommate requests for freshmen, and so I lived with a random roommate my first year. I lived with my best friend for sophomore year, and we were lucky enough that we had another friend who was going to go abroad the semester after I returned, and so we swapped and I was able to live with my best friend again junior year after I got back to campus. This year, we both have singles. While I was abroad, I had a triple with two people who I knew as acquaintances but did not know particularly well. Ultimately, I am still on good terms with my freshman roommate (the randomly-paired one), and I am still best friends with my sophomore and junior roommate. Of the two acquaintances I lived with abroad, one is still an acquaintance and I talk to the other all the time and she is one of my best friends.</p>
<p>So I suppose that my point is that being willing to talk to your roommate tell them what will bother you or is bothering you is the most important factor in having a situation that you can stand.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I had the best of all possible worlds – I went to the same college as my high school best friend. We asked to be assigned to the same dorm, but not to be roommates. Freshman year, we were each placed in a different quad, across the hall from one another, sharing a bathroom. The fact that we were close helped our six other roommates become close as well; the fact that we weren’t actually sharing living space helped keep our friendship going. His suite worked out sensationally well – two of the four roomed together all four years, and the four of them actually reconstituted their quad senior year (across the hall from, and sharing a bathroom with, me and three roommates, all of whom had been in our same entryway freshman year). My friend and I might not have stayed friends if we had been actual roommates – although we risked it for three months after we graduated from college, before starting law schools 3,000 miles apart.</p></li>
<li><p>My daughter has shared an apartment for the past two years with a boy who was in her class in 4th grade, and who was always a friend-of-a-friend through high school. That has worked perfectly well, too. They aren’t best friends, have very different interests, and don’t socialize much together. But there is a lot of comfort and mutual respect, and a willingness to cut each other slack that might not be there if they didn’t know so much about each other.</p></li>
<li><p>Three of my son’s good friends from his high school class are in the same four-person suite as college freshmen this year. I thought that would be a disaster – each is a little quirky, and two of them were much closer with each other (if not best friends then top 3-4) than either was with the third. Also, I would NOT have wanted to be the fourth man in that room! But apparently it has gone really well, not just for them but for the fourth roommate, too.</p></li>
</ol>