Unfiltered Story #253169

(This takes place around 2002.
Since I didn’t meet anybody I wanted to room with during 1st year in college, I’m assigned to a stranger as my 2nd year roommate. I later find out that this is because she “broke up” with her best friend only weeks before move-in day and they had to urgently request room reassignments. This is how living with her goes:)

Roommate: *Has multiple alarms going off between 6 and 7 am. Every. Freaking. Day. She takes 1-2 minutes to turn off each of them.*

Me: *Politely suffering in silence while being deprived of hours of sleep. I know she’s got 8 am classes or volunteering; I don’t want to make life difficult for another person.*

(I have a significantly different schedule and biological clock than her. This should have been taken into account when assigning roommates, but because of the above situation, I seem to have been extremely unlucky.)

Roommate: *Takes multiple phone calls every morning between 6:30 and 8 am from her entire family, in between her alarms. The room phone is very loud.*

Me: *Politely suffering in silence while being deprived of hours of sleep. I’m afraid of being that terribly rude person who dares to try to limit her contact with her family.*

Roommate: *Slams every door in our room on a regular basis.*

Me: *Always makes extra effort to close the doors quietly when she’s asleep.*

Roommate: *Spends hours upon hours nearly every afternoon/evening on the phone with her parents and older brother, whining to them about every single minute problem she has just living a regular college student’s life, telling them about every item she ate at every meal, asking for directions about planning every part of her schedule & volunteering choices, etc., and even having them provide her detailed homework help.*

Me: *Unwillingly listening in exasperation at the endless whinging, as well as sheer amazement that this is a grown woman in university; while doing my own classwork and planning my education and life all on my own.*

Roommate: *Urgently knocks on bathroom door while I’ve just taken off my clothes to shower.*

Me: *quickly puts on bathrobe and opens door*

Roommate: *Casually* “Hey, can my boyfriend come over sometimes to stay here?”

Me: *Not thinking much of it; one of my previous roommates did this sometimes and it wasn’t a big deal.* “Um, well… I guess it’d be okay…”

Roommate: *Still very casually.* “Okay, thanks.”

*Roommate’s boyfriend proceeds to come over and stay nearly every single weekend for 2-3 days, and even longer on school holidays. [Boyfriend] turns out to snore all night as loudly as 15 bears put together. I cannot sleep a minute in my own dorm room. I try for several weeks to find a place to sleep in the dorm common room (no dice), and to use increasingly thicker earplugs (I get a very painful ear infection).
Ironically, I couldn’t help but notice that when awake, [Boyfriend] was a great deal nicer and more considerate of a human being than [Roommate], and I wasn’t really sure why he seemed so attached to her, since he was privy to most of her unpleasant and spoiled behavior. Coincidentally though, she happened to be very pretty.
No amount of niceness, however, negates the increasing intolerableness of his presence at night. I resort to slamming a wooden dresser drawer extremely loudly when he starts; a brief interruption of a person’s sleep cycle seems to reset their breathing pattern. The noise usually stops for a while, but I have to do this at least several times a night. I finally get overwhelmingly sleep deprived and desperate, and one day when [Boyfriend] isn’t there I say very carefully:*

Me: *Politely* “Hey, [Roommate], I just wanted to let you know that… umm… [Boyfriend] seems to snore very loudly, every night, and, um, well, unfortunately it’s interrupting my sleep, very often, whenever he’s here, so…”

Roommate: *Blank faced and stony-voiced, like she’s never in her life heard anything that is less relevant to her.* “So. What do you want me to do about it?”

Me: *Shocked* “…”

*And so on. And so forth. For the rest of that school year of hell. Despite everything she does, I make it a point to never do anything loud myself, and turn off the light and tiptoe around whenever she’s asleep. I don’t take phone calls in our room, and even try to type extra quietly at night. My hope that she’ll take a hint from my behavior is completely futile. It is a miracle that I don’t fail my classes due to sleep deprivation that year.

Finally, on move-out weekend, the last time I see her:*

Roommate: *Sweetly smiling* “It was really great living with you this year, [My Name]! I hope I didn’t do anything to bother you too much!” *offhandedly* “But I’m sorry in case I did! It *was* great being roommates, right? I hope we get to meet again! ”

Me: *Absolutely unable to make my face stop cringing or squeeze out any nice words in response.* “Uh-huh, sure… um… yeah… whatever….”

(Yeah, I realized later that I should have told her off multiple times, and forbidden her from having her boyfriend over to stay with us at night anymore, and really just requested a roommate change. My only excuse is I was young and naïve and was brainwashed my entire childhood to be very afraid of confrontation and of bothering other people in any way. This is really just a rather trivial example of how persistent childhood abuse leaves you psychologically a victim for a very long time into adulthood.)