Hey, everybody, it's Marielle.
Okay, so what I'm about to admit, I'm not saying I'm proud of it, but I'm not not proud of it.
When I was a bit younger, in one of my early roommate situations, I had a roommate who would constantly forget to pay me back for shared expenses.
And I tried telling her, but things never changed.
So I, um.
I started using her shampoo.
I told myself I was gonna recoup my losses one hair wash at a time.
I mean, yeah, okay, passive aggressive.
But it did make me feel better.
The truth is, living with other people, sometimes it just gets under your skin.
You know, it's the way they do dishes or don't do dishes.
It's the heavy handed rules they've imposed.
Like the toothpaste tube must go in the cabinet, not on the sink.
A little bit inflexible, if you ask me, but we're all different, and we have different standards of cleanliness and ideas of how we want our homes to feel.
I should say having roommates can also be a blessing.
Not just financially, but mentally, emotionally.
You know, it can be nice knowing you're not alone, that you're not coming home to an empty house, that you have people to sit around and watch the game with on Sundays.
The point is, though, if you're gonna have roommates, you wanna try to be on the same page as much as possible and to figure out your needs and boundaries before you sign that lease or move in together.
On this episode of Life Kit, NPR's education desk producer Janet Oojung Lee is gonna walk us through how to do all that.
To come up with your non negotiables and communicate about them, to assess what you actually want from a roommate situation and to work through conflict.