Pexels

Living with roommates is a real learning curve when it comes to going to college. The vast majority of students will never have lived with roommates before, with most people living with their parents up until they leave to pursue further study. And living with your parents? Yeah, that’s very different to living with roommates.

If you had very strict parents, or folks who made you do lots of chores, you might find a kind of liberation in the freedom that comes with living with your peers and making your own rules – after all, there’s no curfew, no bedtimes, no rules to abide by. It’s no wonder that college can be a wild time for some.

But if your parents cared for you to the point that they picked up after you, cooked your meals, cleaned the house and did the laundry, then the learning curve is going to be steep. Because honestly, your roommates are not going to be happy if you expect to rely on them to clean up around you.

That’s why a set of boundaries is important in house shares at any age – because clear expectations around who does what and when are important to make sure that everyone contributes equally, and no animosity forms. And for the roommates in this story, it’s clear that a conversation about boundaries is long overdue.

Read on to find out what happened here.

Am I overreacting: Roommate’s “Guest” overstaying their welcome

I pay my roommate $700 a month to live in a small room at a house we share near our college.

We agreed that everything in the house is shared and we both have access to it. She is typically a very friendly and inviting roommate, but it comes at a cost to me. She has one particular friend, who will binge stay on our couch for days/weeks at a time.

This friend of hers doesn’t leave and go back to stay at her own house at all, and takes over the living room, including the TV, and will always be blasting something on her computer, or talking on the phone, so no one else can really be there and actually enjoy it.

This friend pays us NOTHING, but my roommate just lets her do it whenever she pleases.

Yikes. Let’s see what living with this ‘guest’ is like this time.

This time around, she’s been here for four days already, and I have not even been able to enjoy using the living room at all since.

My boyfriend and I wanted to use the living room tonight to spend time together one on one, as I won’t see him for the next week pretty much.

I texted my roommates friend and said my boyfriend and I would be coming back after I got off of work and we would need the living room.

All of a sudden my roommate blows up on me saying I was so wrong for saying that to “her guest” and that I should never have said she needed to leave (which I didn’t actually say, all I said was I needed the living room).

Understandably, this roommate is pretty aggreived by the situation.

This “guest” of hers never pays us a DIME when she stays, never contributes anything to the house, or anything at all.

Yet I’m forced to pay this outlandish rent for just this tiny room, just for my roommate to tell me off and say I was so wrong for telling this to her guest.

My roommate even went to the lengths of saying if I wanted alone time so bad that I needed to just stay in my own room and not use the living room cause her guest was there.

What would you do in this situation, and am I overreacting for thinking my roommate is being unfair and crazy about this?

This is really bad on the part of her roommate, to be so inviting and generous to her friend, yet yell at her roommate for wanting to use the living room that she pays for.

Having a guest over for a night or two every once in a while is no big deal at all, but this is basically having someone sharing the place with them rent free.

She’s right to be annoyed by it.

Let’s see what the Reddit community said about this.

This person agreed that the situation was totally unacceptable.

While others thought she should take further action.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who gets revenge on her neighbors after they keep using her trash bins.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought maybe she should look to live elsewhere.

It’s clearly unsustainable for a non rent paying friend to be basically living in their living room for long stretches. She’s taking up space on the couch and using the TV for sure, but as well as that electricity she’s using water, their internet and more – all without chipping in a penny. Maybe there are some circumstances surrounding this friend and her living situation that the woman’s roommate has chosen not to share, but that needs to be explained if that’s the case. Certainly this woman shouldn’t have been yelled at for wanting to use her living room for one evening.

There are some important conversations that need to happen here, and they need to happen here fast. Because why should this woman be paying for someone else to be using the shared spaces while she’s confined to her tiny room? Moreover, why should she be attacked for requesting to use that communal space. It’s all wrong.