When I first decided to room with my three closest friends at school, many people shook their head.
That’s a little risky, don’t you think?
Oh, you’re going to end up hating each other!
Living with someone is not the same as being friends with them.
And all points are valid, really. A lot of people have had bad experiences rooming with their friends. In fact, when I think about rooming with my 4 best friends from home, I shiver a little bit. We’re all so different and have various quirks that would make living together impossible. (To be honest, sometimes I wonder how our friendship works with so many different personalities, but somehow it works.) However, when it comes to my friends from college, I’ve noticed that it’s a different story.
For one, we all chose to attend our university for similar reasons. Right there is a connection that makes our living together easier. We value the same things, we put effort into our coursework because we worked hard to get where we are now. For this reason, work time is always easy to fit into our small 2-bedroom dorm. Sure, we get sidetracked and end up laughing about something stupid instead of doing our homework, but we put in the effort to work on what needs to be done. If we all didn’t value hard work, we all wouldn’t be going to NYU and enrolled in our difficult majors.
Second, college is a different environment than our hometowns. From the second we all started hanging out, the way in which we came together was different from how I would spend time with my friends back home. Our dorms were down the street from each other so travel time was cut from thirty minutes to five, meaning that we spent a lot of time together. Also, having a meal plan our first year made us get used to eating every meal together, for we often texted “Anyone up for Palladium?” in the group chat. Now, it’s not weird to see my roommates for all three—ha, if we’re lucky it’s three—meals of the day. In fact, I look forward to cooking together and sitting down to talk about our day.
Finally, we’re used to be together all the time. I was miserable my first month at NYU because I hadn’t made any friends. Meals were carried out in a brown paper bag to be eaten in my room while watching Friends on Netflix. Weekends were spent tentatively hanging out with people I’d just met but didn’t feel comfortable with yet. It was lonely.
Then, I met my people, and everything clicked. I think college fosters an environment of always being together with people. I haven’t decided if that’s completely a good thing just yet, but it led to me spending time with my friends for hours every day. Classes end, “Want to hit the gym?” Dinnertime, “Let’s grab something from Chelsea Market.” Homework time, “Meet you at the library in five.” If you want to be alone, you can of course, but there weren’t many times when I would choose being alone in my room over sitting in the hallway of my dorm, cracking up over nothing with my friends while we did homework. This togetherness got us used to spending a lot of time together, which makes it easy to be roommates.
I know, it’s a week into the school year so how could I possibly write that everything they tell you about living with your friends is a lie? And I anticipate that there will be trials and times when I wonder if living with strangers would have been a better decision. But this week has been one of my favorite experiences in college so far, and I have to thank my friends-turned-roommates for that.
