Nervous about rooming with a guy

[boxed toast]

So, I'm off to University next year and I'm going to have to room with a random guy. I'm very nervous about this. I'm fairly territorial and need my personal space. I'm also a very fragile guy who hides behind technology, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that someone else could be in my studio, my source of 'nerd power.'

I am also very afraid that the person who I end up with may wish to have sex with females in the dorms. Just no. I have the power to force them not too, surveillance cameras, my presence, ect. but that would make me kind of a jerk. At the same time, just no.

There was a site to find a roommate online, but everyone turns me down. They are all sports fans and communications or mechanical engineering majors. I'm a Computer Science major who makes music and programs. There just really isn't anyone there like me. I'm sure there will be at the college, but very few are looking for a roommate.

I thought about letting the housing people know. I thought maybe I could get a single room on grounds of being Asexual and really put off by males and their sexuality. Then again, they might kick me out or get mad at me for 'making something up.' They could get away with it too since asexuality isn't on the DSM-IV or whatever.

I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm ready for college, just not rooming with a guy. Should I tell the housing department and hope that they believe me?

[voss]

Hmmmmmm you should contact the housing right away and ask if you could request a single room. Do not let them know about your condition right away but ask if they are still assigning the rooms. If that doesn't work out you can try to switch rooms with someone at the beginning of the term, which really doesn't sound possible because people are usually alright with having a single room. Have you thought of the possibility of living off-campus? As far as I know most of the places off-campus usually require you to have a housemate/roommate but that's just another opportunity if you are so against living the types of guys you mentioned.

[LadyWallflower]

I was nervous to have a roommate too. However, it might not be bad! It is really dependent on the guy you end up with. I don't think being asexual will get you out of having to have a roommate. All other sexualities have to room together after all. You don't want act like asexuality is a disorder. Many people are jittery about having a roommate, but its a part of life you will have to face (most likely).

Find out information about the guy you will be rooming with, and come up with some type of agreement. Write up a contract. This may sound silly, but at my University roommates wrote up a contract, signed it, and gave a copy to the RA. Therefore, if problems arise, you can go to the contract to see what you agreed on.

For instance, with my roommate we agreed to never have sex in the room. If your roommate doesn't agree, maybe agree that it has to be predetermined (he has to tell you beforehand, and you agree on a time, therefore you can be busy doing things elsewhere). Other rules you can come up with. The room needs to be quiet by a certain times. Lights need to be dimmed by a certain time, etc. Number of guests you can have over. Time guests have to leave by. No alcohol. Etc. It's up to you what type of rules you want.

People become very used to schedules. You will learn your roommates schedule. He will have classes and activities at a certain time, you will have free reign of the room then! Also, there are plenty of places to go relax on campus besides your room!

If things do not work out, you can usually change your room for the second semester, and by then you will know some people similar to you in personality. But give a roommate a try! People are understanding. Come clean to him about rules you want, your nervousness around people and such, and he may surprise you! My roommate situation turned out great. We were very different people, but she respected me and my rules. She had a boyfriend, but never brought him into the room.

[Astrochelonian]

Housing probably won't care, as "it will be a learning experience." Lots of people bond with random roommates, many others have horror stories. If it gets bad into the schoolyear, there usually are processes for RA arbitration and swapping rooms in the case of "irreconcilable differences." My random roommate was a French-speaking, Muslim, business major from Guinea (in Africa), and I am an English-speaking Catholic engineer of Irish descent. Together, we fight crime! She was actually very sweet and we got along well, we just didn't have much in common. My second (and last roommate) didn't know me very well before we moved in, but 13 years later she's still my best friend.

[TXartgal]

I had the worst roommate during graduate school and we were stuck together for over a year. I could write pages about how awful and inconsiderate of a person she was, but the worst was that she worked in a bar and brought home groups of random strangers from the bar, after closing time, and they all did drugs in our living room. Not joking, I woke up and found her doing cocaine while her new buddies smoked joints on our balcony. My point is, that if you are not comfortable with the person, try and change it before it's too late, you don't want to end up stuck with someone terrible.

If not, just remember that you will have to make compromises, you can't have everything your way when you have a roommate. Set ground rules at the beginning and make sure you tell them that you are not comfortable with strangers or girls being in the dorm. Learn to let go of little things that might bother you and try to tolerate each other until you can move off campus.

Good Luck!

[Techie]

There was a site to find a roommate online, but everyone turns me down. They are all sports fans and communications or mechanical engineering majors. I'm a Computer Science major who makes music and programs. There just really isn't anyone there like me. I'm sure there will be at the college, but very few are looking for a roommate.

Back when I was a freshman in 1980, we were randomly assigned roommates to start. I was in Electrical Engineering my first two years before switching to CS my junior year (I found myself enjoying working with computers and software more than all the theory and hands off work in Electrical Engineering). My first roommate was a business major and lasted three days. He found buddies from his home town and they shuffled people around so they could all room together. My next roommate was an upper class business major who lasted until the end of the first semester and he too moved to be with older upper class friends (it amazes me how when you are 18, someone two years older can seem "old"). My third roommate was from Versailles, France and we worked out fine. In fact, we are Facebook friends but he is rarely on. The next three years I wound up having a various assortment of roommates. Sophomore year I wound up living with jocks and that did not work out well. I moved twice. First time with someone I did not know was a smoker and that lasted a week. Then I moved in with a mechanical engineering student and business major who were friends from the same hometown. That worked out well. I won't go on about my remaining time there. Overall, I came to realize that I was a very picky person when it came to living with someone and it was probably a good omen as to what being married to someone would have been like (as my college noted in the orientation manual, having a roommate is like being married without the "benefits"). Besides being ACE, my roommate experience over the four years more or less "scared me straight" to the issues I might have faced if I had gotten married. Yes I found a few good matches during that time but I found the odds of getting a bad match to be pretty bad. "Love" can only carry you so far if you come to despise each other.

[Archon]

I am an asexual on campus living in the same room as someone who is very sexually active. Fortunately at the beginning we had to make a roommate agreement and it was clear that having sex in the room would not be allowed, just like in LadyWallflower's post. If my roommate wants to be with a guy, she can find some other place for that. It's important to communicate your boundaries clearly and if possible to formalize it in a contract like we did.

I don't think that the university would move you to a different room solely on the grounds of being ace, but I do think that if you get stuck with an unreasonable roommate who doesn't respect your wishes, then that would be a good reason to be moved.

[Honey_Badger]

I had to get out after my freshman roommate (she'd come back at midnight on a Sunday and proceed to do homework in the room while playing music and turning on tall the lights, and I had an 8:00 class on Mondays, she took up over 2/3 of the room, she brought strange drunk guys into the room at three in the morning while I was asleep, things like that.) However, after her I've never had a problem with my subsequent four roommates that made rooming with them impossible. My second roommate was a chem major who accidentally gave me food poisoning (not her fault, she couldn't have known that her ramen was bad,) my second roommate I never had a problem with except that she always complained if I woke up before her at all because she claimed she could hear me moving around, my third roommate I hardly ever saw, but she had a pair of pet rats half the year, and my current roommate is my best friend. We're hoping to form up an apartment share with another pair of girls if we end up getting jobs in the same city.

[boxed toast]

That's interesting; I didn't know you could set up rules in a Roommate Agreement. Maybe it won't be too bad.

[Pumpkin92]

Sharing a room with a random person that I don't know would make me really nervous too. You could request a single room or ask them about the possibilities of moving if things don't work out with the roommate you have been given? However I don't really know what to say as it isn't something that I have ever experienced before, in the UK you automatically get assigned your own room and only share the kitchen and the bathrooms. You have to specifically apply for a shared room. I hope everything goes well for you and I'm sure once you get there you will be fine. Good luck with university! :)

[TheButterflyComposer]

Honestly it went okay for me, I was in a single for the first three years and doubled up in the last two. It is much better to be in a shared space. More manageable.

[OfTheGood]

I got pretty lucky with roomates my first three years in my fourth year though I had a roomate whose boyfriend was always there. He slept over all the time in our little postage stamp of a room, and it was really awkward coming back from class and finding him laid up in her bed and her nowhere to be found. Honestly it was like I had two roommates, I lived but I was never so happy to be out of there, I am not one to even regularly interact with people so having two people in my space, one I should not have had to deal with, really chafed me but I survived. :)

[boxed toast]

Yeah, they will not let freshmen be in single rooms at my University. They want us to meet people. IDK, if it gets too bad I can just complain.

[Corretto]

[in NZ vocab.] I've never liked the thought of sharing a room with anyone else; regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. It's not so much a personal space phobia, but the threat of either of us witnessing the sleeping habits of their room-mate. It's all about what we could be doing in our sleep eg dreaming, fantasizing, snoring, talking, walking [which I do!] or 'playing with yourself'.

In my 'varsity flatting days I was unaware of the influence my flat-mate in the room next door would have on me. The regular orgies he'd enter into, thrusting and thumping, set a 'standard' I found I didn't understand, let alone achieve, myself. My inadequacy and failure to share their hyper-hetero physical interests made me the subject of ridicule and added to my inferiority complex regarding sexuality.

The thought of sharing any 'space' with anyone scares the hell out of me! I'd use any excuse I could find...Good Luck ian_mcxa!

[Sally]

Techie, on 25 Apr 2014 - 05:01 AM, said:

. "Love" can only carry you so far if you come to despise each other.

That should be printed on signs and posted in every public place in the world. Would prevent a lot of long unhappy marriages and/or divorces.