How to Decide to Live With Your Best Friend or Not

By Alicia Geigel

Figuring out who to live with for the duration of your academic year can be tough. On one hand, you don’t want to jump right in to living with someone random, but you also don’t want to spend forever searching for someone and let time waste. One option to consider is living with your best friend if they are around and are looking for a roommate as well.

Having your best friend as your roommate sounds like a dream, and sometimes it can be! However, there are a few things to consider and discuss beforehand to avoid a World War III-type disaster. Are you looking for a roommate? Thinking about asking your best friend to be your roommate? Be sure to read these four things to discuss with your bestie before moving in together!

Things to Discuss Beforehand:

1. Having Guests Over: One important thing to discuss with your BFF before diving into being roommates is how each other feels about having guests over. You may be on the conservative side and not prefer to have guests over more than once a week, with appropriate notice. Your best friend, on the other hand, might be more open about inviting people over and enjoy doing so spontaneously. This is important to discuss as it pertains to you and your potential roommate’s comfortability with privacy. Krista Diamond of StorageFront.com writes, “Figure out what works for both of you when it comes to having significant others over, hosting parties and inviting family members to crash when they’re in town.”
2. Cleanliness: A major point of contention for roommates, best friends or not, is cleanliness. Everyone has different lifestyle choices and how they do things, and this doesn’t exclude cleaning. You and your best friend obviously don’t live together (yet) so there would be no way for you to know if you could tolerate their level of cleanliness. You might be more on the laidback side and don’t worry about a few dishes in the sick, while your best friend might be a clean freak. Establishing each others levels of cleanliness is super important in establishing whether or not you two should move in together.
3. Sharing Items: Some people love sharing every aspect of their possessions, whether it be shampoo or a bag of Cheetos. Another important thing to discuss with your best friend before moving in together is how you both are in terms of sharing things. You might not care about sharing all of your things with your best friend, even down to a pillow off your bed or your leftover pizza. Your friend might be more possessive about their things, and there’s nothing wrong with that! However, you and your potential roommate should be aware of these things that could cause a problem sometime in the future.
4. Budget: One super important element about living with someone is figuring out how to split up living expenses like rent/amenities/cable & internet. Taking on adult responsibilities and figuring out how to effectively split bills can be difficult but it will definitely save you any kind of money-related trouble in the future. If your bestie likes to splurge on grub hub every day and is forgetful about paying bills on time, that would be something important to discuss before moving in together. Likewise, if you have trouble balancing payments, you should talk to your potential roomie about this. Leslie Tayne of Credit.com notes, “A major key for keeping the peace is making sure bills are organized. Figure out when and how bills will be collected and split each month, how they will be paid, and who is responsible for paying what amount. While this may sound obvious, too many times roommates will wait until the last minute, causing stress, tension and possibly late bills.”

How to Keep the Peace:

1. Communicate: You have probably heard about keeping the doors of communication open over and over again in your life, but I can promise you that this is incredibly important, not only in roommate relationships but in all relationships- especially with your best friend. No matter what, you want to make sure that you and your best friend are communicating effectively. There is nothing worse than having a problem with your roommate, aka your closest friend, and just letting their actions get under your skin. It is infinitely more beneficial to confront your roommate with your problems than let the tension build for no reason.
2. Schedule a Roommie Date: You and your potential roommate were best friends prior to moving in together, and it should stay that way while you’re living together. Between endless papers, labs, extracurricular activities, and jobs it’s hard to maintain a strong social life in college without driving yourself crazy! It’s especially hard to find time to actually hang out with your roommate because you’re so used to seeing them all the time. As a way to keep the vibes good in your living situation and stay close with your bestie, set up a day or night for you two to hang out.

Image via Pexels

Moving in with your best friend can be a blessing or a curse. Depending on how well you two get along and how well your lifestyle choices go together, you guys might thrive together or burn each other into the ground. Before moving in together, make sure to discuss important things like having guests over, cleanliness, sharing items an