The first piece of advice you receive upon getting your college acceptance letter is “don’t room with your best friend!” There’s a general consensus that your college freshman year roommate will inevitably become your worst enemy, or at the very best, someone that you happen to peacefully coexist with and then go your separate ways. My roommate and I are living proof that this doesn’t have to be true.
Everyone who knows us well expresses their shock at how well we get along; we know each other’s families (and family drama), swap clothes and jewelry, give each other’s boyfriends gift advice, and know practically every detail about one another. We plan out our weddings while we snuggle up in blankets next to candles and talk to each other through our thin, bedroom-separating wall when we’re both trying to focus on homework. We’ve lived together since August and haven’t fought once.
Everybody assumes we must be exactly the same, or at least pretty similar, but this is wrong too. She’s from New York, loves hockey, has never been to an SEC game, drinks hot tea, loves diners, and is perfectly content staying in on a Friday night. I’m from South Carolina, my family owns a tailgating spot at an SEC school stadium, prefer hot chocolate and meat-and-threes, and have enough social life for the both of us. I want to go to medical school and she wants to be a special education teacher. I went Greek, she didn’t. I couldn’t bear to separate from my sweatpants, she prefers dresses and cardigans. She’s catsup and I’m ketchup. Looking at the situation, even I’m not sure how we get along so well.
I still remember messaging back and forth on Facebook in January, thinking we would end up talking for a couple weeks and end up rooming with someone else. We both went through potential roommate after potential roommate, returning to each other to talk about weirdos or girls who we thought were really nice. We met for the first (and only) time before move-in in March, and I remember feeling like I was catching up with an old friend. Her family treated me to Kickin’ Chicken and tried to teach me the rules of hockey (it didn’t work.) From that moment on, I had found my first and best college friend; I just didn’t know it.
As my first semester of college comes to an end, I’ve realized that I have made a lot of friends, some that I still speak to and see on a regular basis, and some who I haven’t seen since the first week of school. This being said, I only have one friend who forces me to take the stairs, helps me pick out my outfits to the last detail, travels to my house of five children for a hurricane with me, invites me to one of my favorite cities for winter break, tolerates me crashing her Facetime dates with her boyfriend, and who I’m excited to be living with again next year.
So, what’s our secret? We still have other friends (that we admittedly neglect sometimes to hang out with each other), and we spend time apart (only when we go home for breaks and we count the days down till we see each other again), but we always look forward to coming home to laugh or complain or cook together. I guess that the main lesson I want you to take away from this article is to not bash being friends with your roommate, and actually make an effort to be nice to them, even if you don’t get a best friend out of it. And if you do, it’ll be one of the best friends you ever make. Trust me.
