One of the greatest and most useful sources of learning experiences in college cannot be found in any classroom, textbook or library. Living with another person — or two or three other people — can at times be extremely frustrating, but it can also be a valuable learning experience.
As a freshman in the Fall of 2009, I moved into a dorm room at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. My roommate was a guy — I’ll call him Clark — whom I had never met prior to move-in day. Within just a few days of moving in, I became irritated with him.
Clark used Axe body spray every morning, and the potent aroma would force my first few conscious breaths of each day to be laced with aerosol. His use of spray deodorant as a substitute for showering made our dorm smell like a junior high school locker room. He went to bed early and complained when I would wake him up coming home late. Clark watched weird TV shows and took up all the room in the mini fridge.
At the time, Clark was — as far as I was concerned — a terrible roommate.
But since my first roommate experience in 2009, I have shared dwellings with a number of people, learning quickly that Clark really was not too bad of a roommate at all. I say this not simply because I have had comparatively worse roommates, but because I have gotten better with dealing with it all.
In the past four years, I have had roommates who were my friends upon moving in and enemies upon moving out.
I have had a roommate who enjoyed making three-course meals, but refused to do the dishes afterward. I’ve dwelled with a guy who peed on the toilet seat, never flushed and complained about the bathroom smelling of urine. I have had a roommate who regularly stayed up until nearly sunrise blaring rap music.
You will likely never entirely get along with every person you live with throughout your college career — that is just a fact. A simple Google search of “how to deal with annoying roommate” yields humorous results. There are pages upon pages of people ranting about their roommates. The postings say things like, “My roommate is so annoying, she never cleans up!” or, “My roommate is so annoying, she expects everything to be so clean!”
The easiest way to deal with what you consider to be an annoying roommate is realizing that your own habits and behavior could be seen as annoying as well.
Looking back at my time living with Clark, who annoyed me with his strange TV interests and early bedtimes, makes me see that I was surely annoying to him, too. I would wake him up by coming home late, which surely was not fun for him. And his weird TV interests weren’t necessarily “strange” — they were simply not what I personally enjoyed.
Patrick Ryan is a UF English senior. His columns appear Thursdays.
