Friendship not the only criterion for roommate compatibility

I arrived home to the apartment, probably around noon. A near-empty bottle of Smirnoff… I arrived home to the apartment, probably around noon. A near-empty bottle of Smirnoff stood on the kitchen table. Maggie was puking in the bathroom. I retired to my room, where I checked my mail and tried to weigh out the proper moral quantity of sympathy to show toward the source of the hacking sounds I heard behind me.

I rested on what I deemed to be my minimal responsibilities as a decent person. When she went back to her bed, I asked if she was all right, if she needed anything. She said that she’d be fine, and I headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. In the kitchen, I soon realized that all the pots and pans and various other types of kitchenware had disappeared. Back in Maggie’s room, I asked if I was no longer allowed to use her pots and pans. She said that they were hers and that she was tired of me leaving them in the sink. I announced that she was crazy, went back to the kitchen and threw away the eggs I had broken.

Now, that was more than two weeks ago, and the pots and pans I used for more than seven months are still neatly stacked in my roommate’s closet. Maggie’s and my friendship had been eroding for a while. We haven’t spoken at all since “the incident.” I said “Hi” the other day, and she looked at me as if I had just bought Boardwalk and declared it a national park to prevent it from being defaced by tall hotels: “You don’t know how to play this game, do you?”

A few days before that, she and her boyfriend had made spaghetti and left the strainer in its former place in the kitchen. Upon realizing that I was making spaghetti with it, she sent her boyfriend into the kitchen to take it while I stood at the stove.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen many a friendship flower and fade away, and it’s always sad to realize a worthwhile person has disappeared from your life or that you and a childhood friend have changed and no longer have anything to talk about except the past. But when the friend in question lives down the hall, that sort of contemplative sadness gets replaced by a much more acute feeling of annoyance.

Maggie and I should have never moved in together. When we did, we had a fair amount in common and some shared interests. But it was all things about our hometown that we had in common. And our shared interests were all fairly abstract. We had mutual friends back home that neither of us ever saw anymore. She had dated my best friend. I had dated her best friend. We both liked literature and philosophy. To talk about, we had home, books and our exes. We had very little about Pittsburgh in common.

As our ties with home faded, so did our ties with each other, and we began to set our new, Pittsburgh roots in different places: hers in her boyfriend, with whom I never got along; mine in my friends, whom she never came out to meet. We drifted apart, and soon, each other’s presence in a room went from comfortable to annoying. Her passive-aggressive tendencies turned to habit. My apathy grew to resemble stubbornness. Hell, we don’t even like the same books anymore.

Maggie and I were friends at one point, but we weren’t the type of friends who could live together. Our hometown gave us people to talk about and philosophy gave us things to discuss, but fundamentally, we each always knew that we were very different people. She’s particular and clean and often content to stay in and drink with her boyfriend on weekends. I am generally indifferent about my surroundings and like to go out. She has a tendency to try to keep things in her control. I welcome randomness and understand that accidents happen.

We should have realized that good lunch conversations and a person to call about your ex mean little in regard to real compatibility; that a shared take on Descartes or even on Joe from back home, will do little in regard to settling a discussion about a broken dish.

Questions, comments, insights or suggestions? Wam3@pitt.edu.