Space Relations: How to Deal With Mean Girls Syndrome

This week’s column is specifically about living with more than one roommate. Now, I understand that there are some people out there who live with multiple roommates and everyone gets along and there’s never any drama. Every day is full of laughter and borrowing each other’s clothes and paying the bills on time. I believe this to be possible. But I also believe it to be rare. So this column is all about those of us who have lived with multiple roommates and not had everything come up sunshine and roses.

For me, this dynamic has occurred in every roommate scenario I’ve ever had with the exception of my freshman dorm (because I only had one roommate). And while I call it the Mean Girls Syndrome, I don’t actually believe that everyone involved in these scenarios is a bona fide Mean Girl (or Boy – no discrimination!). It’s just that living with roommates can bring out the worst in people. Childish grade school antics that you thought you’d left behind years ago suddenly work their way into your relationships, and you find yourself saying and doing things that you’d never admit to anyone outside of your home. Unless of course you want to sound like an immature brat.

I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I vividly recall being so annoyed with one of my roommates in college for letting her newspaper subscription pile up on our lawn that I tied one of the papers to her bedroom door. I waited for her to come home and watched as the newspaper shot across the kitchen and hit the wall when she threw it (thankfully not at me). That was not an inspired moment. But what sucked about it the most was that she was getting to be close friends with our other roommate, and soon it became a “them against me” issue. It’s all fun and games until your roommates share their disdain for you. Before you know it, they’re hanging out all the time, laughing about inside jokes that you’re not a part of and acting like you barely exist.
Years later, this happened at an apartment I shared with a couple of girls I’d met through friends. One of the girls thought I’d been overcharging her for her share of rent, which I hadn’t been doing, and the two girls decided to get even by moving out suddenly when I was at work. They screwed me on $200 worth of bills and, according to a mutual friend who told me months later, dipped my toothbrush and hairbrush in the toilet and then put them back in the medicine cabinet. It wasn’t so much that I cared that I had brushed my hair and teeth with toilet water, but it hurt to know that these girls had pranked me and gotten away with it. We were all 24 years old. I thought those things stopped after a certain age. I learned in that instance that you can’t expect adults to act like adults, especially if you live with them and they’re mad at you. Up until they moved out, the two girls had completely ignored me whenever I came home and would giggle behind my back. It sucked.