When two's a crowd

At US universities, it's the norm for students to share bedrooms. But, as a new film explores, what happens when your roommate is mad, bad or downright dangerous?

Imagine the worst flatmate you ever had. The noisy one, the one who stole your things, the one who was rude to your friends. And now imagine how much worse it would have been if that flatmate had slept in the same room with you. For thousands of American university students, it’s a normal way to live. But a way to live that’s decidedly strange.

The Roommate is Hollywood’s latest examination (think The Rules of Attraction, Animal House, even Meadow Soprano’s miserable year at Columbia University in The Sopranos) of the peculiar relationships formed when young adults leave home to live on university campuses...and are forced to share their bedrooms with strangers. In the film, the shiny-haired Rebecca (Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester) appears to be the ideal roommate for Sara, played by the equally shiny-haired Minka Kelly. Indeed, at first it’s all “I always wanted a sister” and sharing shoes and snuggling kittens. Until Rebecca turns psychotic and it’s impossible for Sara to shut the door.

Reviews of The Roommate have not been good – according to the New York Times, director Christian E Christensen “...succeeds only in conjuring monotony”. But the box-office receipts have been massive. It is testimony to how many Americans empathise with the extreme discomfort of sharing a small room with someone who’s neither a relative nor a lover.

Being 18 or 19 and grappling with the challenges of early adulthood while living away from home for the first time is always difficult. So why do universities – fancy private ones and giant public ones alike – make it harder by compelling students to share rooms? Yes, it’s cheaper, for both the universities and the students. But there’s also an ideology at work: housing administrators reckon students who can’t shut the door to everyone are more likely to connect with their peers and less likely to drop out (a major concern, when a third of American students who enrol in university fail to complete their degrees). Occasionally, a roommate pairing is a heaven-made match – the happy gang in Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, for example – but equally often, things go wrong.

It’s arguably a particularly middle-class problem: if you’re lucky enough to live away from home for university, sharing a room should be a small price to pay. Butsomeone making that argument might change their tune if they’d lived with Wendy Goldsmith’s roommate when she was in her freshman year at Colgate University in upstate New York. On her on campus housing application form, Wendy’s roommate claimed to be tidy, quiet, and studious. Unfortunately for Wendy, there was nowhere for the girl she lived with to list her other living habits: inviting over marching band friends for impromptu parties; playing online games all night while wearing lingerie; waking at six in the morning to accommodate a two-hour personal grooming process – “including full blow-dry”, Wendy notes, wearily.

Most awkwardness between roommates stems from the fact there isn’t one of us who doesn’t engage in some slightly off-beat habit when we’re in private. But privacy doesn’t really exist in American university dormitories, unless you are lucky enough to have a roommate who has a boyfriend or girlfriend who lives elsewhere – or you don’t mind spending most of your time in a shower cubicle. (There’s also the drastic solution I took when I left high school in New York: I emigrated to Canada to study at a university where I wouldn’t have to share a room.)

But sometimes the differences run deeper. One friend of mine started university sharing a room with an international student who didn’t speak English and who had never actually lived in a building with electricity. They did not prove compatible. Another friend lived with a girl who claimed her boyfriend was in the Mafia and “killed our goldfish by feeding it Pepsi”.

And then there’s the issue of sex. The fear of being witnessed by a roommate is not often enough to keep hormones at bay. “Obviously,” says Jaclyn Lee, a graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, “[My roommate and I] had to have a code for not walking in on the other person during romantic interludes. We had a standard note we would put on the whiteboard on the door – something like, ‘your aunt called’.” Michael Erwin, a graduate of Fordham University in New York, was less civilised: he admits his roommate was “furious with me once when I had sex with a girl in the opposite bed, in the dark, while he was apparently passed out drunk”.

The most fail-safe approach to having a roommate, it seems, is to pretendthe other person in the room isn’t there when you don’t want them to be – or to diligently nurture your own oddness, so that you become the weird person to be avoided. When Wendy’s roommate went to study abroad, Wendy focused on making herself seem so unappealing that no one else moved in. “I told every potential new roommate my habits were the opposite of whatever they told me about themselves. I lied shamelessly. And I didn’t shower for a week, either,” she says. And so, if you learn nothing else during your degree at an American university, you will come away with an appreciation of the value of a bedroom door you can close – to which no one else has a key.