Feel free to ask Aunt Acid a variety of questions at [email protected] at any time. Previous installments can be found here.
Dear Aunt Acid,
My roommate for most of the last decade (through college and grad school) recently moved away, to a new city and an amazing new job. I miss her tons, and am both proud of and mad at her for her new beginning, but this letter is not about her, or not directly. This letter is about how to make myself be nice to my new roommate.
My new roommate is, in theory, great. She’s funny, a good communicator, pretty clean, and has put up with the thin walls in our apartment and the annoyances that they represent. My problem is that I can’t seem to warm up to her. She’s almost… too friendly? Always asking me about my day, sitting down with me in the living room to have a chat, sharing lots of details about her life, and as soon as she starts talking to me I almost always feel this inner shrieking urging me to go hide in my room and never make eye contact with her again. What the hell? I’m usually a warm, chatty person but I sometimes can’t manage to say more than “Fine.” before leaving the room when she asks me about my day. I feel like a terrible human, or like a regular teenager.
Do you have any advice for how to turn off my inner dirt bag? Or at least how to fake it until it becomes easier? Or even advice for how to effectively appear invisible within one’s home? I appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Clear Eyes, Cold Heart
Dear Clear Eyes,
Clear out. Haha just kidding! But you wish you could, don’t you? It’s understandable. You don’t want this new person in your life. She’s fine, whatever, but like a stepmom who was brought in to replace your actual mom, she will never measure up. You love your mom—or, in your case, your original roommate, who was the best.
Here are some things you can do:
1) Let yourself mourn your roommate. You two had a relationship! It ended while you were still happy with it and without your explicit, wholehearted consent. That sucks. You have diagnosed your actions correctly—you are behaving like a teenager—without diagnosing the root cause, which is that you are acting sullen because you are experiencing hurt and betrayal. What if you let yourself feel the hurt and betrayal? Sure, it’s uncomfortable to be angry at your friends, especially close ones; it is also inevitable, and it doesn’t make you a bad friend/person/female. Say, out loud, I feel abandoned. It might not be objectively “rational,” but fuck you, voice in your head that tells you which feelings are “rational” and which you should be ashamed of. Say Fairly or unfairly, I feel abandoned. Say it to your ex-roommate. Process. Process like 13-year-old lesbians at summer camp in the mountains with no distractions and nothing else to do.
2) Give yourself a deadline. Tell yourself, If I am still unhappy with this living situation after some period of time, for whatever reason, I will change it. You have agency. You are not trapped. You know the first and best reason to leave any relationship? Because you feel like it. Unless you have signed a lease or some other contract with a person, you are allowed to act in your own best interest period no matter what exclamation point. As Lizzy Bennett said when ambushed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness.” Crochet that on a sampler.
Even if you have a lease, you can find a way out. My very first living situation in New York City became untenable quickly, and I found myself hiding from my terrifying, erratic housemate in my bedroom, the only safe place. I even stopped eating dinner because I was scared she might accost me in the kitchen. Though I was as timid and conflict-averse as only a hungry, lonely, 22-year-old liberal arts college graduate with a shitty, low-paying day job working a secretary for profane misogynists can be, even I figured out that whatever it cost me to break the lease would be worth it for my sanity. And goddamn it, it absolutely was. My boyfriend and I squeezed into a tiny upper-floor studio in a different borough and it still vastly preferable to sharing any amount of space with that latter-day Miss Minchin. (I was always scared she was going to lose it and box my ears.)
A deadline by itself can accomplish a lot. Freed from needing to like your new roommate, you might find her growing on you. Be open to that. She’s not your old roommate, but she has her good qualities; you have grudgingly conceded that much already. Maybe you can figure out how to live together. It will take work, though. It will take Processing. Relationships always do. Did you and your original roommate seamlessly become one toilet-paper-buying-and-almond-milk-drinking entity? Or did you have conversations early on about the frequency with which you’re comfortable bringing paramours over, and how often you like to clean the shower, and whether it’s okay to make bacon on the weekends even though the whole apartment then smells like treyf for thirty days?
Call a house meeting. Acknowledge that you’ve been acting a little chilly because, though Current Roommate is great, she is not Old Roommate, and you’re still adjusting to that. Make one or two requests: simple things that Current Roommate could do, or do differently, to make your home feel more like yours again. Offer to make changes yourself.
Nothing works like a bonding activity: go and out do something exciting together. Studies show that sharing a novel experience brings people together—that’s why experts recommend that married couples go scuba diving or salsa dancing rather than just dinner at Denny’s.
If she still rubs you the wrong way after all that, and you can’t talk yourself into at least a civil relationship with her, then, however objectively super she is, she’s not the right roommate for you. Maybe your inner sulky teenager is trying to tell you you’ve aged out of living with roommates and should try your own far-flung studio. Before Miss Minchin, I had a Who’s Who of crazy roommates: the one who set her rooster alarm clock for 6:20 AM every day no matter what; the one who veiled our lamps, moved her mattress onto the radiator, and told me she could only fall asleep to Marilyn Manson or the Wallflowers; the one who put nothing at all on the walls and, when I asked her what music she liked, said vaguely, “Whatever’s popular.” (She was probably a spy.) After Miss Minchin, I have never lived with a roommate again, and I have never looked back.
Love,
Aunt Acid
*
Illustrator: Liana Finck’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Lilith, Tablet, and The Forward. Her first graphic novel is called A Bintel Brief. Her webcomic, Diary of a Shadow, can be read on her website.
Tags: advice, aunt acid, roommates
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Also, consider she might be a demon. They all scoffed at Buffy when she thought this was the case, but they were all wrong.
VALID AND IMPORTANT
DO YOU BELIEVE IN LIFE AFTER LOVE
It just gets funner and funner every time you play it!
You can’t force yourself to appreciate this person’s good points until you have a really terrible roommate to contrast her with. so go live with someone who brings home vermin and terrible boyfriends and makes loud noises through the night and has sex in the living room and steals your food and gives copies of the door key to her drug dealer and never does the dishes and keeps a mold farm in the refrigerator, and then come back to this one and she’ll seem great.
or be like me and give up almost every good thing in life just so that you never ever have to live with anybody else ever again, except a cat, and even that is pretty stifling because sometimes you just want to be alone in your own home, god, this cat has no ability to understand when monosyllabic responses mean you don’t want to have a long conversation right now, how hard is that to figure out.
Some good ways to tell if she is a demon:
Does milk go bad noticeably quickly in the household?
Do crops spoil unusually early?
Have any animals — cows, sheep, goats, rats, &c. — recently been born with an abnormal number of heads? (i.e., more or fewer than 1?)
Has she demonstrated a notable aversion to the Eucharist? Does she refuse to read the Torah? Does she face conspicuously away from Mecca during daily prayers?
Is she incapable of singing in tune?
Are her feet backwards to her legs?
I don’t know about you, LW, but when a person is determined to get me to like them it makes me feel uncomfortable. I will make my mind up, why is this person pressuring me? ( I am a prickly feral hedgehog-cat hybrid disguised as a human being).
I can only offer advice based on my own feral cat-hedgehog experiences, but it’s possible she is just making you feel trapped and *forced* to make an emotional connection you aren’t ready for yet. Which is making you feel combative. So she’s all ‘Hey! Pretty kitty! Be my friend? Be my friend, kitty? Have a treat!” And you’re all “No, go away, I just want to sit in the sun and maybe look at you sometimes”
It is fine for BOTH of you to be the way you are. It is also ok for you to ask for a slightly less high-attention communication style. Maybe she just needs to back off for long enough for your fur-prickles to lie flat again, at which point you MAY consent to some brief stroking.
BUT you need to do some of the work here, too, which means grieving your old roommate and working to reduce your excessive prickling. It’s a defense mechanism, but it’s not always a useful one.
And if, in the end, it turns out your living/communication styles don’t mesh, that’s fine! Find someone you can mesh with.
(I cannot live with anyone who doesn’t understand my intense territoriality, emotional distance, pricklyness etc, which really limits my options)
“Fuck you, voice in your head that tells you which feelings are ‘rational’ and which you should be ashamed of.”
Silencing this voice is my greatest life goal. (Though I think I’ve finally gotten through to my husband that sometimes I would like to be irrational, please.)
I had this issue not with a roommate, but a coworker/officemate at a new job. We have shared responsibilities, so it was important that we established a solid working relationship in short order. She decided the way to do this was to hover, pick, and correct me (sweet biscuit, she corrected me so much). I remained very, very calm and kept reminding myself that she was clearly trying to help and establish a relationship. But, one afternoon as she was standing at the corner of my desk, filling me in on the minutiae of her schedule for the rest of the day for some reason, I literally said the words, “You need to back up.” I felt like a jerk at the time, but she did. And things have been pretty okay since. I think we still make each other insane sometimes, but we work together pretty well.
So what I’m trying to say is making sure that you get what you need is both important and not as world-ending as it might feel when you’re contemplating how to go about it.
Roommates are hard! I’ve lived with various Craigslist strangers and it always takes a while to figure out the relationship. Currently I live with 3 people who are all friends with each other. We are friendly, but not overly so, and I spend a lot of time reading in my room anyway. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but only because I’m used to being friendlier with my housemates. But it’s also pretty great, because we don’t really spend enough time together to get on each other’s nerves, and we don’t have to worry about inviting the others to our stuff. And sometimes we each have friends over and it works out fine.
Once you’ve tried the mourning thing from above, try setting some clear boundaries. Like if she sits down to talk about her day, say “I had a long day and I really don’t feel like talking! I just want to sit here and watch ANTM” or whatever. Repeat as needed. Do some stuff in your bedroom with the door closed. If she doesn’t get the signals soon, maybe you’re just incompatible roommates! Find people like mine who have their own friends and life and just need a place to sleep.
I am not a morning person. Anyone who attempts to talk to me before 10 am is engaging in a monologue with big lump of increasingly sullen fury. A roommate once timed me on how long it took me to to respond to a simple “good morning”: 17 seconds.
So sharing an apartment with my dearest friend in the world was a disaster because she starts talking the moment she’s up. The fact that, decades later, we are still the dearest of friends is a testament to, well, probably the fact that circumstances led her to move across country after about 6 months. But the point is, being friends and being roommates are two completely different things.
Everyone has different ebbs and flows of when they’re social. If you need decompression time when you get home, tell her so. If you’re not a morning person, tell her so–preferably in the evening, when you’re coherent. “Don’t take this the wrong way–I just need to stare vacantly at the tv for an hour or so after I get home before I’m ready to chat.” “You know that thing about ‘don’t bother talking to me until I’ve had my coffee’? Literal in my case. Just so you know.” Sometimes even laying it out that she’s welcome to natter away as long as she doesn’t expect you to respond makes it easier.
I once lived with a great roommate and she did this amazing thing. When she didn’t want to be conversational, but she was in a communal area (like she was in the kitchen to make coffee), she put on her sunglasses. I knew to never disturb her at these times. We were both heavily into our alone time so we barely ever encroached on each other’s socialising/hermit boundaries but this was kind of a guaranteed reassurance against my most hated social issue: pressure. So maybe whilst you’re sad about your old roommate moving out (and I would be super sad, I was totally sad about me and this great roommate parting ways consensually with full closure), you could instigate the sunglasses regime in a fun, lively way (“Oh, I read about this super fun thing and wanted to try it out with you.”)? I hope this gets easier. I think Aunt Acid’s use by date idea is genius.
OMG this is genius. Thank you forever.
Have a house meeting SOON. As much as she might be driving you crazy, I bet she has started drafting her own Aunt Acid advice about her terse and mean roommate. Your situation is hard! But I feel like you owe her some way out of “I’m trying to be nice but my roommate obviously hates me and I don’t know why” which is a special kind of hell.
I am sitting here cringing at the idea of crocheting an entire sentence. It would, however, make an inspiring cross-stitched pillow!
Also, I wish my name was Ester Bloom. That is all.
Wait. Can I ask why?? (I spent much time as a child wishing my name were different.)
I’ve always loved less-used Hebrew/Yiddish/Biblical names, and i think spelled without the “h” it looks quite hip & European & minimalist (although that’s actually the more traditional spelling, right?). Bloom is so simple and cheerful, and it all runs together very nicely! Ester Bloom could definitely be the heroine of a novel.
Hope you didn’t find that too creepy! I have a bit of a thing for names–my hyper-feminist parents saddled me with an excessively long hyphenated name, so I’m very jealous of you all with the three-syllable names that fit on ID cards.
This advice is perfect! I want to cross-stitch “Fuck you, voice in your head that tells you which feelings are ‘rational’ and which you should be ashamed of.” on a pillow and put it on my therapy couch. You gotta feel your feelings! They give you important information, and you can’t make decisions about what you really want if you ignore them!
As someone who loves her alone-and-reading time like a shiny, precious thing I really feel you on your need for space- but I’d kind of like to throw in for your room-mate here. It suck breaking up a house that works…but this is kind of a new house. A house that she also lives in. Everyone who sharehouses knows about Dead Beagle Syndrome. The first pet/house-mate/husband/whatever gets idealised. You forget about the initial pain of the getting-to-know-you part and skip right to the BEST OF FRIENDS bit.
She’s doing the thing that you should do, where you put out heaps of good vibes and energy to make a new household work. You gotta meet her halfway here. If there are times when you hate to talk, tell her that. Then find other parts of the day when you have the energy and talk to her then. Make dinner for both of you. If you have way different schedules, try to have a meal together once a week or a fortnight or something. Do you like some of the same movies/tv shows? Shared hatred of something mockable? Love getting trashed on cheap wine and trash-talking historical figures (No? Uh…me neither).
IDK, my house recently got two shiny new housemates and it took a little while and a bit of effort and everyone compromising a bit on how the kitchen’s arranged and how often we clean the bathroom but it’s pretty great! Acknowledge how you feel about your old housemate but figure out how to actually find out if you like the new one.
Edited to add: monster comment is monster! I have many feels on this. Many, many feels.