Leaving the parent’s home and sharing a dormitory room or a flat with your friend or groupmate is a typical experience for a college or university life. Honestly, leaving apart from your family has a range of positive sides: you are free to do what you like, you learn how to be independent including cooking, washing, ironing, you start thinking how to earn for living as the elder you become the more wishes you have. However, very often you will need to share a room or apartment with someone else, which can be a totally new experience, especially if you have no siblings in your family.
The first thing that you will understand is that space sharing is not always easy. Here you have some tips how to stay friends with your roommates and protect your space.
- Food and dishes.
The issue of sharing food might appear really problematic to some people. Although you may feel fine about giving your dishes and foods to anyone, other people like being the only masters of their food.
Also, roommates may have different diets and eating habits. For example, when a healthy-eater and junk-food-lover start living together they will be absolutely unable to share foods. The same situation will happen to vegans and non-vegans.
In order to solve this issue try to negotiate with your roommate and learn how he or she feels about it so to avoid misunderstandings in future.
- Space sharing
As we have mentioned, it is not easy to share your personal space. If you live in one room with the person he or she will, at least, partially take part in your private life.
To make sure that both of you feel comfortable share the room space just equally. It is not possible that one person has a table and a wardrobe and another one has just one bed and keeps all his books and clothes on it.
- Inviting guests.
This question can be harsh, as well. When you are sharing a room with someone you almost never have a chance to be alone. The problem becomes sharper when your roommate is extremely out-going and arranges parties or just brings visitors almost every day. Then, you feel like you are living with five more people in one room.
This question needs to be clarified too. Talk with the person that you live with if he or she is not against friend’s visits or parties. Also, you can set the exact times or days for bringing other people, like restrict parties and hanging-outs at nights or on some special days.
Important advice: When you live with someone you should learn how to respect and be tolerant. It will refer to everything: you will need to show your respect to the person’s property, relationships, hobbies, feelings and habits. Remember that your roommate may find something annoying about you too, that is why both of you must base the relationships on tolerance and understanding of the views of others. Be sure that living with a roommate will be a great experience, which will teach you a lot: how to be independent, how to negotiate and how to be tolerant.