Last semester, my roommate and I were faced with a dilemma: Our third roommate was backing out of her lease and we had to find someone to replace it.

Turns out, that's a lot harder than it seems, especially because it was near the end of Spring semester and it seemed like almost everybody had signed leases or had agreed to live on on-campus housing already.

By the time summer had rolled around, we had given up hope. We had messaged so many people and had talked to our landlord handfuls of times with no luck on what to do. It wasn't until July, with less than a month before we were to move back to school, that our current roommate, Courtney, reached out to us through Facebook.

I remember my roommate, Jess, and I meeting at an Applebee's (gotta love those half-priced apps) that night freaking out about what to do. Do we accept and risk living with a stranger, who could very well be a potential crazy person? We had seen one too many overly dramatic Lifetime movies, and our minds were riddled of all the bad outcomes that could come with agreeing to live with a stranger. We had our concerns and we were naturally worried because you never really know who someone is until you start living with them.

But in the end, we were desperate for someone to take over the lease and we agreed. We were nervous because we had both never lived with someone we didn't know before, and we didn't want to gamble with the chance that we might be living with someone who we didn't get along with.

Of course, there was nothing more awkward than the first conversation and just in general the first few days of getting to know each other. How do you get past the "Hi, we're Jess and Anna and we don't know you at all, but we're all going to share this living room space and at some point you will see us have meltdowns about our course work and you'll probably hear us fart through the walls" stage?

However, things have been turning out almost perfectly. We all get along great, and it's like we've known each other our entire lives even though we've only been living with one another for about a month now. We laugh and joke around with each other, and within the first week, all of our nervous inhibitions seemed to melt away. Our personalities mesh together flawlessly, and in so many ways this living arrangement has turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Living with a stranger can be so scary and nerve-wracking, but I have found that taking a risk like this sometimes is a very good thing. It may have been a pretty big adjustment at first, but I am so happy that things have turned out the way they did. We are so lucky that Courtney reached out to us and I can now say that deciding to live with a complete stranger was an absolutely awesome decision.