I met that good looking guy the exact same way many of you met your first college roommate: by sending him a Facebook message asking him if he had a microwave or a TV. Apparently, I spelled a word wrong in that message, so he thought I was a huge idiot until we actually met. (He might still think that, but he keeps it to himself now).
Despite this initial setback, we are still roommates in what is now the fall of our senior year. So when I refer to my college roommate, it is only one guy. Sure, we’ve had a few other guys live with us in apartments over the years, but I’ve only ever shared a bedroom with one guy.
Some fun facts and stats about my roomie:
- Avid Bigfoot Believer (his Bigfoot call is better than yours)
- ACL Surgeries: 2
- Times nearly died falling out of top bunk reaching for phone: 1
- Cannibal (I’ll explain later it’s not that weird I promise)
- Hours spent trapped inside a Canadian Bathroom: 1.5
- Pets: 4
Times having beat the video game Fallout: A lot
As fun as it would be to write, this is not an article about all of my roommate’s personality quirks. Before I leave the subject of my roommate’s stats alone, I should say that his name is Anthony Ryan Cook, otherwise known as Cook, C-pookie or Cookie Monster, but NOT Tony (unless you’re trying to irritate him, which I am guilty of from time to time). And he really enjoys eating cookies (that’s where the cannibal part comes in) and is on the football team here at Jamestown.
So I’ve lived with the same guy for almost four years now, but I’m writing about why your roommate doesn’t need to be your BFF.
Seems kind of backwards, right? Cook is one of my closest friends here at college. Close in the sense where if there is any serious problem, he is one of the first people I will turn to, and vice versa. There’s a huge level of comfort that grows from living with someone for that long (maybe even too much comfort at times).
What I said is that Cook is one of my closest friends, I did not say that he was my BFF. We are, by all means, friends beyond just existing in the same room. But we’re not BFF’s in the way that I think of the term. Best friends are the "let’s take a bunch of pictures together and have to be together every second around campus and text each other before they do anything!" type of friends. We are not that. Not even a little bit.
We are friends, and we are in the same friend group, but both of us have other people within that friend group that we hang out with more than we do with each other. I am on the side of the friend group with the guys who like going out on a weekend pretty much every weekend.
Cook does come out with us from time to time, but he is not in the party every weekend crowd. Cook is also a townie here in Jamestown. So he has some other friends that he knows from high school, both college students here and people with jobs in town, that he spends time with as well. I join in on that occasionally too, but not all the time. When I most frequently join is when his dad is cooking. Rick Cook is indeed a good cook. Unfortunately, I can’t really say the same thing about Anthony.
What these differences and other friends give us is space. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes freshman roommates will make is that they become completely dependent upon each other for social interactions. What I mean by this is that they end up going everywhere together from eating lunch, to weekend “extracurricular activities,” to studying in the library, they just flat out do not get enough time apart so they get sick of each other eventually, even if they did genuinely hit it off in the beginning.
Is he the perfect roommate? No. He’s kind of messy sometimes. He either has to get up super early for football, so I hear his alarm. Or he wants to sleep in as long as possible, so I have to tip toe around the room until noon some days. To me, these are little problems.
But when it comes to the classic things that cause big roommate fights, what is he like? Does he constantly want to have people over? Not very often at all, and if he does he asks if it’s OK like eight times first. Is he a super mooch and who uses my stuff all the time? Sometimes he uses my toothpaste when his runs out, but that’s about it. Does he nag at me for every little thing when something else puts him in a bad mood? Nope, he usually takes that frustration out on a video game.
The point is, he’s pretty easy to get along with. And we know how to live together. You ever heard of the line, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,”? That’s the basis of our roommateship. Yes, I know that’s a made up word, but I think it’s perfect.
In the end, what are my roommate’s important fun facts and stats:
- He always asks before having people over or using any of my stuff (other than emergency toothpaste)
- When there is something worth celebrating, he will be out with me that night.
- Nights slept in the same room as me: however many it takes to finish college.
- If there is a serious crisis in my life, I can talk to him.
So don’t panic if your roommate doesn’t talk to you every second of every day and actually has other friends (how dare they). It may be for the better. In fact, you may end up looking back at the end of your college experience and realize that it was better that way. So I know how lucky I am to have been paired with a guy as easy to get along with as C-pookie, even if he occasionally leaves an empty fruit snacks bag on the floor or doesn’t go to the bar with me on a Saturday.
Every time I hear somebody else complaining about their roommate I know that I got lucky. But I also think we did it right. Either way it works for us, and in the end that is all that really matters.
