4 Nightmare Roommates - And How to Make Them Dream Roommates

Since the start of the Great Recession, the total number of households in the United States has decreased by the thousands, yet the population has increased. The explanation lies in the classic recession maneuver of sharing space when the budget tightens, with homeowners signing a rental lease on that extra bedroom, couples moving in together sooner, and young professionals ditching their pricy one-bedroom apartment in favor of moving into a friend’s spare bedroom. But with this denser cohabitation comes friction, because guess what? Living with other grownups is tough, even under the best of circumstances, and the Great Recession and its aftermath have hardly been easy on Americans. Here are some of the hardest people to live with - and how to deal with them.

Nightmare Roommate: The Rowdy Animal
He can’t help it, he lives to be social, to play his music loud, to have his (many) friends over for a Thursday night beer pong tournament. He’s a nice guy, but sometimes it’s a little much. How to handle him depends on you and your own habits: if you also like to party, if a little less enthusiastically, then often the best approach is to sit down and agree to certain reasonable partying-at-home nights, and certain quiet hours (and be fair – include morning quiet hours when he’s sleeping, too). But if you’re more on the prim, proper, homebody side, it’s not meant to be, so approach him about discontinuing the rental lease amicably.

Nightmare Roommate: The Party Pooper
She’s the antithesis of the party animal described above, and she’s the prim, proper homebody who just can’t live with a party animal. She’s tough to spot beforehand, because she’s actually the perfect tenant, so any landlord-homeowner would be lucky to sign a rental lease with her – just not to live with her. But before jumping to conclusions about her, consider that maybe she just doesn’t like feeling left out of all the fun, and with a little encouragement she might open up and join in having a good time with you.

Nightmare Roommate: The OCD Neat Freak
You can feel her glare drilling into the back of your skull, because a crumb from your sandwich fell on the floor. What’s worse, she’s passive-aggressive about it, shooting your dirty looks when you get home from work and she’s already nearly finished scrubbing the house from basement to attic, and laying on the guilt trip. Well, she’s not going to change, but maybe you two can negotiate a truce, by agreeing to certain household obligations that you each are responsible for, or by paying her a fee for her cleaning efforts.

Nightmare Roommate: The Night Owl
Whether he has insomnia, or works a late shift, or just plain likes to sleep on a different schedule, the problem is you’re sleeping while he’s awake, and he’s sleeping while you’re up and about. The good news is that he’s easy to spot before signing that rental lease: just ask what his sleep and work habits are, and if they’re too drastically different from yours, don’t sign that lease. If it’s too late for that, you can drown each other’s noise by buying a noise machine, fan, air purifier, etc that creates a constant background noise in your room and keeps you from noticing the sound from the television when he’s up at midnight.

Roommates can be a great relationship, that saves money, builds friendships, and allows each of you to live in a nicer home than you would otherwise. But for these advantages, you have to be willing to sacrifice as well, in form of compromise and empathy. Be sure to ask a lot of questions before signing that rental lease with a roommate, to make sure your lifestyles are compatible, before you’re stuck for the next eleven and a half months!

We've all lived with people who just seemed far too different from us to coexist with. But the fact is many "nightmare" rental lease scenarios can be easily converted to happy households, with a little compromise and empathy on both parts.

Brian is both a landlord and a tenant, and has always lived with roommates. He edits content for EZ Landlord Forms, and online service for landlords that offers state-specific rental lease agreements, real estate articles, and hundreds of other rental forms.

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