Every college freshman is asked the same questions: When do you leave for school? Are you excited? Do you know your classes? Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, people inquire: Does your roommate seem nice?
In an effort to prepare students for the harsh realities of the adult world, colleges across the nation tend to randomize the process by which freshmen are housed. Some colleges have devised algorithms to place like-minded freshman together in an attempt to safeguard students’ mental health and prevent emotional breakdowns as a result of the housing arrangements.
However, Wesleyan offers no more than a list of dorms with the option to suggest a preference for individual dorms (which, in essence, is meaningless). The University has thus given rise to an untold number of unpleasant pairings. You’ve no doubt heard tell of the roommate who always puked in the trashcan, or the roommate who thought that just because they had slacked on homework, it was acceptable to keep the light on until the wee hours of the morning catching up on it.
Those are the standard inconsiderate roommates. Everyone’s met them. Everyone’s had to deal with them.
Then there are the poor few who are not only paired with their not-so-best-friend, but someone who is virtually their opposite in every way. These are their stories.
One student, who has chosen to remain anonymous—like everyone who spoke with The Argus about their roommate nightmares out of privacy concerns—said that his freshman year roommate seemed normal at first.
“At the beginning of the year things were fine,” the student Solomon said.
But after some time, Solomon could detect that something was off.
“It became clear relatively soon that he had a porn problem,” Solomon said. “One time… I walked into the room… and he was sitting there watching porn. Fully clothed…”
Solomon thought that it was just a random occurrence, but it began happening with more regularity.
“I fundamentally have some disagreements with porn,” he said. “So I wasn’t super into it, but he had his headphones on, it was one time. But then it started happening more frequently. [At some point] he didn’t turn it off when I came into the room…he just decided it was fine for him to be watching porn and for me to come in and not turn it off… so I’d be here folding laundry. I’d turn around and put my pants in the drawer and see, ‘Oh, there’s some bondage.’”
After a good laugh, Solomon elaborated.
“It became that every time I came back to the room, I’d think, ‘Do I have to deal with porn right now? What’s going to happen?’ And then midterms rolled around and he had three exams one week and it must have been how he dealt with stress because he was on a fucking bender. He was going every time I walked into the room for three days. But, he never ever had his clothes off.”
In fact, to his surprise, Solomon never saw his roommate masturbating.
“I think the first time I walked in on him watching it he was like, ‘Don’t worry. I don’t do it in the room,’” Solomon said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t care what you do as long as it’s on your side of things. You know. You do what you gotta do.’ But in all of the hours I watched him do that he never masturbated to my knowledge, which kind of made it worse. Like, are you watching it for the plot? What are you doing?”
When asked if he ever confronted his roommate, Solomon said that he had tried, but that he was worried things would escalate.
“It was this weird situation that it clearly made him uncomfortable that I knew he was doing it but he kept doing it right in front of me,” Solomon said. “I spent a lot of time weighing the pros and cons; ‘If I bring this up, I’d have to deal with this really awkward situation for the rest of the year whereas if I let it keep going and try and ignore it, the rest of the roommate relations might be better.’ So I never really confronted him about it.”
Solomon ended up staying in the room and enduring his roommate’s proclivities until the end of the year, as he was uninterested in dealing with ResLife.
Another student, Lysander, had a similar experience with explicit subject matter but wound up treating the problems far more bureaucratically.
“My roommate… was a living hell to live with,” Lysander said. “He would masturbate behind his computer while I was in the same room… It was either mornings when he would leave because he always had early classes, or it would be late at night while I was trying to sleep. And that was really one of the first straws.”
As if nocturnal masturbation wasn’t enough, Lysander also experienced far more normal roommate problems.
“He loved to open the window when he left in the mornings,” Lysander said. ‘‘And as it got colder, and there was snow on the ground, he continued to leave it open when he left and wasn’t even in the room. And I’d tell him, ‘Dude, I’m getting sick.’ I had flu-like symptoms. ‘I need you to close the window.’ And he was like, ‘It’s my window. It’s on my side of the room.’ And I was like, ‘You don’t control the space. You don’t control the environment.’’’
At that point, Lysander involved an RA.
“That was really getting to a boiling point, and I was talking with an RA and I was sleeping on my friends’ floors three or four times out of the week,” Lysander said. “But I want to preface this with the fact that I would not have met such an amazing group of friends if I did not have this crazy roommate. I slept on their floors, and I got to know so many different people, and it forced me out of the room. So there was a positive out of this total negativity that was my living situation freshman year.’’
Eventually, Lysander was forced to take the issue up with the Student Judicial Board.
‘‘[What caused] the SJB hearing [was that] he tried to fight me in the room,” Lysander said. ‘‘I came back, it was pretty late, and he had the window open, and it was 32 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside…and I was like, ‘You really gotta close that window.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not going to close it.’ [And I said], ‘Well, I’m going to close it.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m just going to open it when you sleep.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to stand here, because this is ridiculous.’ And he walked up to me, pushed me across the room, and started saying, ‘My window, my room.’ And he had his hands up at me, in a position to start fighting me, you know, he’s a big guy. So I said, ‘I’m not going to fight you, I’m going to [go to] an RA, and file a report for a bit of an assault that just occurred. You tried to fight me.’ It was a really stressful situation.’’
Lysander provided The Argus with a copy of an email his roommate sent him during their Student Judicial Board meeting:
“I am waiting to be assign to another room.
Reslife is not that fast as you thought. Have fun in your temporary single.
I am going to enjoy the final days in my… ‘temporary’ single too. You need to know if you pick to go the hard way, than you just have to suffer the consequence of your own decision.
Remember, this will never past ever.
Surprise by the e-mail by the way, you have my phone and Facebook.
Oop, I forget, you may just delete them by accident.”
The student eventually won the case and a friend moved into his double.
Although these accounts would fill any incoming freshman with anxiety, it is worth noting that not all horror stories begin with a roommate. Some merely involve a hallmate. Clyde recounted his experiences with someone who lived on his hall freshman year.
‘‘The kid was wearing a tie-dye shirt and I was like, ‘That’s cool. He’s a chiller,’’’ Clyde said. ‘‘I didn’t think anything of it. He said, ‘I’m tie-dye [his name]’. A little title. He was like, ‘I’ve worn tie-dye every day of my life for the past 11 years.’ He even wore a tie-dye suit to… something like his sister’s wedding… He wanted to start being everybody’s buddy by supplying substances.”
However, he wasn’t able to keep up the operation for long.
“He moved a large amount of [weed] onto the floor,” Clyde said. “He didn’t really know how to conceal it, so the entire floor smelled. To a point that the RAs and PSafe were like, ‘We know it’s there.’ So they went in and searched the room. And one of his roommates actually got points for having alcohol which wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t had a reasonable explanation to search the room.’’
“So they found the substance and he got into a lot of trouble. I don’t know if he transferred due to points issues but he’s not here anymore,” Clyde continued. “Someone told me he might be doing modeling. I’m not sure.’’
So to any freshman out there that believes that they have ‘‘the worst roommate’’ because they kind of smell bad or love bringing home a hookup every Saturday night, just remember that your roommate doesn’t have a porn addiction and probably won’t attack you for asking to close the window.