Learning to live with a roommate

Harlan Cohen had several roommates while attending university. There was the one where they pretty much just coexisted and did nothing more. Another where they were more friendly. Then there was the one who gave him the silent treatment.
“That was a big one. It was in my first year of school and I told him I was going to be transferring, and he stopped talking to me for a month,” said Cohen. “It was really immature in my mind. I like to communicate, so we just coexisted. He chose to no longer get along, but I choose to still get along — but it didn’t impact my life.”
A journalist and a speaker at university and college campuses, Cohen is the bestselling author of The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run into at College, among other books. He also has more than a million social media followers on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where he offers advice, like ‘Are roommates required to be friends?’
For more than 25 years, he has interviewed thousands of students, and often encounters stories and is asked questions about roommate relationships. He hears concerns related to differences in cleanliness, sleeping habits and other lifestyle dynamics, offering advice on how to openly communicate and deal with those challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable, situations.
“The Naked Roommate is about much more than living with someone, it’s about how you get comfortable with uncomfortable situations, and living with someone can be a very uncomfortable situation if you have not done that before,” he said.
“When we can approach a living situation with reasonable expectations and a framework, then it becomes easier to tolerate the discomfort and also to communicate.”
The Naked Roommate is now in its 7th edition. The word ‘roommate’ is in the title. How impactful is that experience when it comes to post-secondary life?
Where you live, where you eat, where you sleep, where you have your quiet time — that is a really important part of our life. It is foundational and one of the big changes and transitions we experience.
When it comes to college, there are five big transitions: social, emotional, physical, financial and academic. That physical part is where you can find your safe or quiet space. When you are sharing that space with someone, it can take having certain communication skills and expectations that a lot of students don’t have and schools don’t teach.
Coming from a family home, where you have shared space with parents or siblings, how similar is that to living with a roommate, or is it comparable?
It is a dramatic difference. When you live with a sibling, you can say whatever you feel and express yourself however you want, and they are still going to be your sibling the next day. There is this understanding and a foundational relationship.
But when you are sharing a space with someone new, there is no foundation of bonding and connection. It is very new and you are forming that bond of trust and creating that relationship — and that is a hard thing for a lot of people to do.
You can tell your sibling things that you can’t tell someone you just met. Your sibling might hate you but then love you the next day, but that person you live with might hate you, and still hate you the next day.
You frequently visit campuses, what sort of questions or concerns do you hear from students when it comes to roommates?
The number one thing is their expectations. They really want their roommate to be their friend. And I tell them that there is a different between wanting your roommate to be your friend and requiring your roommate to be your friend.
When you require somebody, then they have to do certain things that friends do — share meals, invite you to hang out with their friends, share certain parts about their life — but a roommate is not a friend. It is someone you share a space with. Friendship is a bonus.
This idea that my roommate is going to solve my friend problem is an expectation that creates a lot of problems, because if that roommate does not do those things, there can be instant resentment. Understanding that and having appropriate expectations is where I see many students struggle.
They also don’t communicate clearly about the things that are important to them because they are too afraid of upsetting someone. A lot of students have anxiety when it comes to having uncomfortable conversations. I like to reframe it as, instead of having confrontations, you need to learn how to have conversations and share the things that are important to you — cleanliness, overnight guests, noise, sleeping hours. Those are things you need to discuss in a way where you can both understand your needs.
At that age, are students equipped to be able to do that?
Most of them aren’t. That’s the problem. Most of them haven’t had practice. Most of them can with the right coaching and the right expectations, but the problem is they are not prepared because they have so little information and training when it comes to having uncomfortable conversations in this kind of setting.
Think about it, you are in a new place surrounded by new people having new experiences and you are supposed to calmly communicate your needs. That is a really difficult task.
A lot of people are very uncomfortable having face-to-face conversations, so they communicate via Snapchat or text message or using technology rather than actually telling someone. It is the most dramatic difference with this current generation.
What happens is that without tone and context, there are a lot of ways to misinterpret those interactions. A punctuation mark somewhere can change the entire context. Someone might think you are angry, “You left the pizza box out,” and end the text with a period. “Wow, you used a period, what is that all about?”
What is your advice?
There are three roommate rules that are really foundational to helping to communicate in a thoughtful way and to be able to listen. Number one is that roommates who want to get along will find a way to get along. It is really important to walk into that situation with the expectation that we are going to get along. Even if your roommate does not want to get along, and is not as receptive as you want, you can still get along.
You don’t have to be anything more than people who coexist. But the moment you stop wanting to get along, is the minute things fall apart.
Number two is that friendship is a bonus. That is really crucial because most students are afraid to share things because they don’t want to upset someone, because they want that person to like them and to be their friend. But, when you live with someone, you need to be able to have uncomfortable conversations and make sure the stakes are not too high.
The third rule is that you agree to the uncomfortable rule. The uncomfortable rule says that if either of us has something that makes us uncomfortable, we are going to share it. In fact, we need to share it. if we keep it a secret, then that’s a problem. What you are doing is making having uncomfortable conversations part of your roommate agreement.
Living off-campus you can have more say with who you live with — maybe it’s a friend — does that make having a roommate easier?
If you live with someone who is a friend, then they are required to be a friend, and friends will often times take advantage of each other, are not always the best listeners and will push boundaries. What we have learned is some friends make terrible roommates.
If you are going to live with a friend, it is about making it clear. “Are we going to listen to each other?” And how do we communicate when things are really important to us, and how it is not okay when the other person doesn’t listen.
Understanding the importance of communicating, and communicating boundaries, is really fundamental for that friendship to survive living together.
What skills can you learn from having and being a roommate?
If someone ever wants to have a partner, chances are you are probably going to live with them. This is great practice to learn how to be able to share a space. It’s valuable. It’s great training.
It also teaches you about other people. One of the big things people struggle with is, “What if I live with someone who is really different from me?” Maybe a different lifestyle, choices or values. What happens is that it doesn’t change your values or beliefs, it just informs you. You have to figure out what you have in common, and agree to disagree, and still value each other.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.