Kant's "Categorical Imperative"? Pff, piece of cake. Fermat's theorem? Child's play. Choosing roommates?... now that's a tough one.
Perhaps no university-level equation is harder to solve than:
Roommate A + Roommate B + Roommate C + ... = workable living situation.
With variables like those, the combination could be volatile, indifferent, or maybe - just maybe - work out swimmingly. For those lucky enough to get the latter result, roommates are those people who you enjoy unwinding with after a hard day's night. For those of you who ended up with the former, you're quietly searching the local housing board at your institution.
Wanting to avoid bias in this "academic" paper, I chose to focus on my new girlfriend's roommates in lieu of my own. Let it be said that Garrulous Godfrey stands for nothing less than total academic integrity. Interestingly, I happened upon a real case study of roommates in action. (editor's note: I have no complaints re: my old roommates.)
Once upon a time, a beautiful girl was tricked into a relationship with a nerd-in-denial, whose romantic repetoire consists of Star Wars lines and a rant about waiting before you upgrade to Windows Vista. (In case you haven't guessed it, you're reading his note.) Boy meets girl, boy sticks around with girl while she goes back to university, boy meets girls roommates. And here is where the study begins.
So here I am, a foreigner in a strange house during first contact. This is a precarious position for many reasons. For one, my motives for dating my girlfriend are suspect to her friends, at least until I can prove my good intentions. Two, disapproval from friends is strongly correlated with eventual dismissal. And three, you're liable to screw up trying too hard whilst feeling uncomfortable in different surroundings.
But - you forget. This is Garrulous GOdfrey they're looking at.
The king of charisma. The czar of smooth-talking. The emperor of emphasis. The..., well you get the idea. So, I popped my collar and got down to schmoozing. Only, it wasn't necessary.
I had happened upon a group of very nice, engaging and multi-talented group of girls, who seemed to accept me as I was. So I sought out the best way to make myself inconspicuous on their way of life. They had reached the equilibrium in their living situation and I did not want to disrupt it.
But this equilibrium I had found is not easily duplicated. It takes a certain amount of good, ol' fashioned friendship, combined with mutual respect, plus, a necessarily small differential on standards for acceptable cleanliness. From my observation, friendships in this household sustain throughout minor dust-ups, or individual idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, there seems to be an pervading honesty that layers itself onto the mutual respect. These girls seem to be able to speak their feelings to each other without resorting to gossiping behind each other's backs. Now that is something that is priceless.
For my part, I feel my duty is to be as inconspicuous as possible. Due to my schedule, my time there is kept short, a measly one night a week to see my best gal. I mean, who can begrudge me that little amount of time with my significant other? I rarely shower there, so as to keep my impact on the utility bill down. And I genuinely enjoy talking with these girls which can be rare for some partners' roommates. So hopefully, I don't stick out ass that brooding guy in the corner.
But what I'm getting at is that I do these things not out of a sense of fear, but a real motivation to try to be as good of a roommate to them as they are to each other. You could say it is infectious. I want to limit my showers because I want to preclude any unnecessary cost to them. And I would expect nothing less than their honesty and mutual respect to apply to me. It is, if you will, the "culture" of the household and the group of friends. And I think that is what is most important in creating a workable living situation.
Roommates need time to develop a culture, something that every visitor will recognize as the status quo. It most certainly implies that the culture of the house would apply to the visitor as well. You can sense tension in those houses where a culture hasn't manifested itself. Whether it is borrowing food, sharing the couch, or turning down loud music, a visitor will implicitly adhere to the code lest they be given a hasty exit. But the visitor needs to feel that code implicitly.
Indeed, when you attach yourself to a partner, you inevitably attach yourself to their roommates. Luckily, the ones I'm stuck with present me with an easily workable living situation. With that equation taken care of, I can get back to calculating digits of pi...
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