Not-so-perfect strangers - Psychotherapy and Life Coaching

STUDENT ISSUE
Disconnect? ‘There’s a false sense that you’re going to be besties’ as soon as you move in, says one residence manager; women are especially susceptible
RESIDENCE
Not-so-perfect strangers
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHAD HIPOLITO
Your roommate in first-year residence could be your polar opposite in personality.
How do you get along with someone sleeping three feet away from you?
A decade ago, which might as well be a
century in technology years, Michelle Titus
was like many first-year university students:
away from home, stuck in a “teeny tiny, horrible” room, and living with a complete stranger she couldn’t stand.
In her defence, it was a bad match from
the start. Titus was popular and outgoing,
the soon-to-be relationship columnist at the
University of Waterloo’s student paper. Her
roommate was an introvert who’d wishfully
described herself on her application as a
“social butterfly.” “On paper, we should have
been the best of friends,” says Titus, now 30.
In real life, following some drama worthy of
Mean Girls, they were estranged by the end
of the year.
But that was using the old questionnaire
model, which is increasingly unreliable when
matching university students in residence. “I
like to think people answer honestly,” explains
Kati Kilfoil, assistant director of residence life
at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, “but 19
years of experience tells me that the person
who shows up on the first day isn’t always the
person on paper. People imagine who they’d
like to be, not who they actually are.”
There is also a problem with nosy helicopMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE
ter parents overseeing the application process. “We do ask questions—Are you a night
owl? Do you drink alcohol?—but when students don’t fill out the applications on their
own, they sometimes don’t answer truthfully,”
says Cate Morrison, residence life manager
at the University of British Columbia.
Because the forms aren’t helpful, many
universities take a hands-off approach, inquiring about age, gender, academic year and
little else. Haylee Drew, 19, a freshman studying sports management at Brock University,
could have had a room to herself, but decided
she wanted a roommate for the full univer47
STUDENT ISSUE
48
relocated just three students this year. But
that’s not to say everyone else is getting along
just fine—Kilfoil estimates a full 20 per cent of
the thousand students in her residence never
want to see each other again after first year.
It could be the old roommate system just
doesn’t work anymore, and as such, Saint
Mary’s is on the cusp of a change. While slowly
converting double rooms into singles, they’re
making an even bigger concession to the new
cohort: “We’re about to roll out an online application where students can view another stu-
Alyson Mischel, a psychotherapist and
life coach in Los Angeles, was teaching lifeskills classes to sororities and fraternities
when she began focusing on roommate
relationships in 2008. “There are all kinds
of alternative-relationship counselling—
friends, writing partners—so it’s completely
natural that therapy is extending to living
partners,” she says.
Mischel’s best advice almost feels too easy:
“Set up guidelines at the very beginning. I’m
a proponent of making an actual business
Keep the peace: Early on, agree on house rules for chores, noise and when lights go on and off
dent’s profile and select their own roommates.”
The University of Toronto developed and
launched a similar service, Roommate Finder,
for off-campus students in 2010. “It’s similar
to Facebook in that they can showcase themselves and their interests, only with much
higher security standards,” says Jennifer Radley, manager of the housing service. “We provide avatars, so you don’t need to upload
pictures, and an internal inbox system so that
they can message each other without actually
providing personal email addresses.”
Also on Roommate Finder are a series of
questions much more intimate and detailed
than your traditional residence application,
she says. “For example, do you pay the bills
as soon as they come in or do you wait a month?
Do you do your dishes right after you finish
eating or do you wait until they have mould
on them? Are you open to sharing things or
should your roommate always ask first?”
Roommate issues have stayed largely the
same over the years. Schedules, cleanliness,
noise and overnight guests top the complaints
list, and most schools train their residence
assistants to help resolve these conflicts. But
for anyone seeking professional intervention,
roommate counselling is available.
FEBRUARY 20, 2012
plan, with all the variants laid out,” she says.
Roommate pre-nups may seem extreme,
but they’re already popping up on campuses
across the country. At the University of Victoria, residence life coordinator Karla Carreras says they call them roommate agreements, “and we’re looking at making them
a mandatory part of the community.”
Residents in each apartment-style dorm
(four bedrooms with everything else common
space) are encouraged to discuss and agree on
house rules. Chores, noise and when lights go
on or off are included. It is not intended to be
a legally binding document, but if students
break the rules in their mandatory residence
contract they can be kicked out.
“We run into problems when the students
are already friends and so ignore the roommate
agreement. In two months, the honeymoon
period wears off and they haven’t had that
discussion they should have,” says Carreras.
For the Net generation, despite all their
innovations, a basic model of respect and
communication may work best when it comes
to getting along with your roommate. And
if not, good news: much like your iPhone, by
next season you’ll probably have a new one
anyway. ROSEMARY COUNTER
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHAD HIPOLITO
sity experience. Other than checking off that
box, the matching “was just random.” The
roommates-to-be connected on Facebook
first, where “all her pictures were so emo it
was making me nervous,” she says.
On move-in day, Drew discovered her roomie
was a sheltered only child who clung to her.
“She was like my little puppy; wherever I went,
she’d ask if she could come, too,” says Drew.
Part of the problem, says UBC’s residence
life manager, is the media’s portrayal of roommates as inseparable friends forever. “There’s
a false sense that you’re going to be besties
as soon as you get here,” Morrison says.
Women are especially susceptible, she adds.
“Females prefer, and sometimes expect, to
be really good friends. Men seem more okay
just doing their own thing.”
A greater influence than gender, however,
may be Generation Y itself, according to Kilfoil at Saint Mary’s University. “The millennials have grown up in large, private spaces,
whereas our residences were all built 40 years
ago when the family dynamic had most people
sharing rooms.” At the same time, there are
now culture clashes to deal with when your
roommate turns out to be from another country, which is increasingly common. “Over a
third of our students are international now,
so there’s a very good chance that every room
will have a student from another country,”
Kilfoil says. At UBC, Morrison recalls a particularly awkward culture clash where one
student wanted her boyfriend to sleep over,
but the other roommate’s religion did not
permit her to sleep in the same room as a
man. In the end they agreed on a compromise: the religious roomie bunked with a female
friend when the boyfriend visited.
There is also a decreased level of interpersonal skills in an age when social media
make it easy for students to chat with their
parents or friends at home about roomie
issues, “but somehow they can’t communicate with the person who sleeps three feet
from them,” says Kilfoil.
Which is exactly how it happened with
Haylee Drew and her roommate: “I know
she didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t
want to be mean. So I’d just sneak away,” she
says. Eventually, fed up, Drew and another
girl unofficially switched rooms without telling anybody.
A room change, however tempting, is considered a worst-case scenario. To prevent them,
a gamut of roommate resources—from carefully selected pairings to formal mediation
services—are available at most schools. “We
focus on working on problems rather than taking the easy way out,” says Morrison, who’s