Two's a Crowd
When Roomies Attack: Why Talk When You Can Vent Endlessly On the Internet?

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2006

Living with college roommates -- especially freshman roommates -- can be the closest most people come to prison life. Close quarters, bad tempers and annoying little habits can cause a heap of trouble, especially nowadays for kids who grow up with their own rooms, their own bathrooms, their own everything.

They're packed into dorm rooms where they can't do anything without seeing, hearing, touching and smelling other students who can be grubby as goats and downright rude. Remember the roommate who ate her supper in a gigantic melamine bowl that she left, unwashed, in the middle of the floor? Or the guy who'd leave his toenail clippings on the bathroom floor where you'd step on them? How about the night you got locked out because your roommate and her partner were getting it on -- or worse, the afternoon you were typing a last-minute term paper at your desk and had to endure moaning from the bunk bed next to you? And let's not forget the vomit in the wastebasket (or worse, not in the wastebasket), the stranger passed out in your bed, and so on.

You let it go for a while and then you can't and you log on to the Internet and get nasty about the person concerned and the whole thing explodes into a mushroom cloud of emotion, gossip and demands.

"We see far more roommate issues than a generation ago," says housing director Jerry Dieringer at Towson University outside Baltimore.

He and his counterparts hear more complaints, deal with more parents and see more roommates calling each other names online. It's not the big issues that rile roommates, like race or religion. It's more often the little things, like an alarm clock that keeps ringing and ringing and ringing.

"Najah is incapable of waking up to her alarm," sighs Vyomika Jairam, a student at George Washington University. She's wrapped in a blanket, sitting in her dorm room in a borrowed desk chair, surrounded by roommates, loft beds, desks, laptops, an ironing board, piles of clothes and a just-opened can of Pringles.

"Well, Vy moved her towel from the bathroom to our closet," Najah El-Bash, one of four roommates, shoots back.

Jairam continues, "How about the time you and Lara made plans to go somewhere and when I asked what you were doing, you blew me off?"

And these are roommates who still like each other, three months into the school year. Other people on their hall aren't so lucky -- like the friend who is now rooming with a young woman who was living several floors below. The late arriver had so many bad habits, such as telling lies and screaming at her mom on the phone, that she was asked to move upstairs.

In another room, all the girls have boyfriends and lock the others out when they're getting it on. In yet another, a girl came back from a weekend at home and discovered the sheets on her bed were messed up. This could mean only one thing: Someone -- female, male or both -- had slept or done whatever in her bed and she didn't know who or what. Ewwww.

"Major personality flaws you can work around," says Jairam. "It's the little habits that take you down."

* * *

Richard Payne, residence life director at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, says, "You've always had the 'She's quiet, I'm noisy' problem, or the early riser versus the student who stays up late at night. But students are arriving here with greater expectations of privacy and fewer skills to solve problems."

Many have never had to share a bedroom or bathroom. As family size has shrunk, houses have grown. More bedrooms, more bathrooms -- since 1988 the size of a new single-family house has grown from 2,000 to 2,400 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders, and a private bath is becoming a de facto entitlement. Gone is the early-morning ritual of pounding on the bathroom door and screaming at a sibling who's about to make you late for the school bus.

In fact, gone is the screaming face-to-face confrontation of any kind, in the age of the computer. This does not necessarily make things better.

At Towson, Dieringer tells a familiar tale about two young women trapped in an 8-by-10 room spitting out nasty instant messages to each other on their computers. Eventually one of them stalked out the door, leaving an "away" message that 200-plus friends on her buddy list could read: "My roommate is a real idiot."

Could this be true?

Dieringer laughs. "It's true and it's told all across the country," he says. It's also true, he says, that females tend to have more conflicts than males.

There are so many places for them to vent: MySpace, Urban Dictionary, Facebook, the Burn Book. Michal-Ann Newman, a junior and resident assistant for 42 young women at Howard University, shakes her head. "That stuff makes my job a whole lot harder," she says. "Last year, two of my girls had an altercation in the kitchen about a boy. One put a message on Facebook calling the other one all kinds of names. So Number 2 posted a message on her Facebook page. Then Number 1 went to Burn Book. . . . They started writing about each other's family issues. . . . As usual, they didn't speak to each other about any of it."

Newman finally heard about the feud from a dean who had been called by a parent of one of the students. "That's female conflict for you," she sighs. "Little things can become big things."

That's partly because unlike guys, who tend to blow up and then be done with it, girls avoid conflict but continue to nurse a grudge that may metastasize into more grudges or even irreconcilable differences.

Sydney Marshall, one of Newman's freshmen this year, confesses to being an avoider. "I'm the really clean one in my room," she says. "But I'll never tell my roommate when she's messy. I'll just fold up the clothes that bother me and put them in the corner."

How nice. But how long does one roommate keep working as maid for the other before it's all over the Web, and the dean is fighting off the complaints?

Dean of Students Ray Adams runs into this form of guerrilla warfare even at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. "IM-ing across the room does happen," he says. He uses Christian sayings when the students come to him with a complaint. "Don't let the sun set on your wrath," and "Let us be reconciled in brotherly love." The Internet, says Adams, does little to encourage reconciliation; it merely prolongs the agony.

So haven't young people learned anything about conflict resolution before they get to college? For some, it is this: Let Mom or Dad handle it. Stephanie Lynch, director of residence life at Georgetown University, says a parent's phone call is frequently the first time she hears that a student is having roommate problems. The problems can start before college does, when students receive their roommate assignments.

Two years ago, housing directors began noticing an increase in the number of calls they'd receive in July or August requesting a room change. Turns out, students -- and their parents -- were searching out the potential roommates on Facebook, where high school and college students post their profiles, photos, likes and dislikes, and comments from friends.

Three times out of four it's the parent calling to request an assignment change, Towson's Dieringer says. Imagine -- the same parents who warned their child to stay away from strangers now have to let that child go live with strangers. No wonder they go bananas when they read on Facebook that the potential roomie loves gangsta rap or lobbies for marijuana reform.

Maybe a Facebook photo reveals an ethnicity that makes a parent or student uncomfortable. Payne at Northern Arizona has even had parents requesting reassignments based on roommates' home telephone exchanges, indicating which part of a city they come from. He usually honors such requests if the parent and student have strong objections; "It shouldn't be the non-Anglo student's responsibility to educate the other student," he says.

Dieringer, however, like many administrators, takes a different approach. To both parent and student he will say: "You come to college to meet new people who are different from you. You need to try to work with the roommate you've been assigned." Most of them, he says, do work things out.

Students today can ask to room with a friend (generally considered a bad idea) or, if they don't have someone in mind, may be offered a chance to choose someone they'd like by filling out forms in early summer, detailing preferences. Room temperature? Sharing toiletries? And the discreetly phrased "How often do you plan on socializing in your room (hosting visitors to hang out there)"?

Housing directors are divided over whether students who have more say picking their roommates experience less conflict. Lynch at Georgetown, which has turned roommate selection into a science, says anecdotal evidence suggests that they do. Payne at Northern Arizona says success and failure rates at his institution don't vary much between those who select their roommates and those whose roommates are arbitrarily assigned.

To further decrease the potential for conflict, roommates often are asked to negotiate contracts with each other.

At George Washington, Jairam, El-Bash and their other two roommates were asked to answer almost 50 questions: Which was most important to them as individuals -- studying, sleeping or social activities? Could lights be on when one of them was sleeping?

What happened to the idea that young people need to experience differences in order to learn problem-solving? As adolescents they are, by definition, absorbed in themselves, but shouldn't they be encouraged to struggle with issues of community as well?

Cathy Small, a cultural anthropologist, spent a year in a freshman dorm at Northern Arizona posing as a returning older student. In her book "My Freshman Year," which she wrote under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, she names several events the dorm sponsored to encourage community spirit, including movie nights and Super Bowl Sunday pizza. None drew more than a half dozen or so people.

Instead, the freshmen hung out in their rooms with four or five carefully chosen friends who were all, according to Small, very much like them. And, presumably, hadn't been insulting each other -- much.