Coming in to college, most freshmen want to be best friends with their new roommate. You hear all of the great stories about the friendships that were formed. You hear that you and your first roommate will be totally inseparable and the best of friends. There is also the other side, the horror side, where your roommate may become your least favorite person on campus. However, things don't always have to be like that; there is a space right in the middle that many people do not often talk about.
My freshman year, I chose my roommate instead of choosing to be assigned a random one. We had connected through Facebook and shared many common interests: our faith, a love for dancing and an obsession with the Iowa Hawkeyes. I could not wait for move-in day because I thought that my new roommate and I were going to be the best of friends; we would be inseparable. We shared all of the same interests and could connect about so many different things. However, I was also worried. What happened if we weren't best friends? What happened if we hated each other? I was excited, but also very nervous, until freshman orientation. Before orientation began, I was talking with a student admissions staff member who gave me some of the best college advice I had ever received -- it is OK if you aren't best friends with your first college roommate; in fact, it is almost better that way.
When we got to campus, my roommate was definitely one of my first friends. We stuck together for awhile but slowly headed our own directions. We had different friend groups and some of our priorities were just in different places. Some of our similarities made us close, but we still had our many differences that split us apart. However, my roommate is still one of the greatest friends I made my freshman year.
Often with best friends, there is the feeling that you need to constantly be talking and sharing what is going on every second of every day. It was nice to come back to a room where I did not feel obligated to be constantly talking and telling my roommate everything that was going on in my life. When I needed to talk, I knew she would listen; when I didn't feel like talking, she didn't push me to. But that silence when neither of us felt like talking was never uncomfortable. We could each do our own thing without a constant need to be discussing our daily lives.
Not being best friends with my roommate also meant being in different friend groups. This was great in so many ways -- we were not frequently tired of each other because we weren't together often, and there was always someone to vent to about the drama that occurs often in groups of girls. It also meant having unbiased advice for many of those situations where you weren't sure what to do about friends who were fighting or things that were going wrong. I could always trust my roommate and I knew she would give the best advice she could every single time, or at least listen to me rant for 20 minutes.
Many times, you'll hear great stories about the inseparable roommates, or you'll hear horror stories about the roommates who cannot stand each other. I am happy to say that my freshman year, my roommate and I were in the middle. We weren't each other's best friend, but I definitely do not have bad things to say about my first roommate. She was and still is a great friend to me and I will be forever thankful for the friendship that was made in my first dorm room.
