I bought a lesbian wedding-cake topper to annoy my roommates.
Yes, I displayed it on the tallest kitchen counter.
Yes, I still have it.
No, I don’t regret it.
I knew the horror stories about random-roommate matching.
Tales of roomies locking each other out in the middle of the night swam through my mind as I went apartment hunting. I heard everything from close friends breaking up to those random matches destroying personal property.
My best friend and I listened to all of these stories and batted our eyes. No way would that happen to us. We pushed aside all of those far-fetched fabrications and signed our leases. We committed ourselves to a four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment just south of the University of Florida campus.
After filling out our personality forms for the matching process, we excitedly handed all the paperwork in. We prayed to the roommate–gods above to please, please give us easygoing people. Just a nice pair of girls. Please.
And we did get a nice pair of girls as our roommates. We smiled at each other as we all lugged in boxes full of clothes and new plates into the common area. Our parents made small talk as we helped each other unpack all of our things. They were nice.
Most bad roommate stories are a horror show from the get-go. You move in, and they immediately lick all your plates at night or ‘accidentally’ eat the leftover Chinese food that you’d been saving in the fridge and looking forward to all day. Their bad personalities hang around them like a bad smell, and you know your new roomies will be problematic before you can even hang up the drapes. This wasn’t like that.
Like I said, we did get nice roommates.
But they were only nice to our faces.
Passive aggressive messages in the apartment group chat? Check. Our food disappearing from the fridge? Check. Tension so tangible in the living area when we’re all together that you can reach out and feel the anxiety? Check, check and check.
My best friend and I are bleeding–heart liberals. We like to make jokes about being each others’ wives, and it’s very clear who we voted for in the 2016 election. It’s also very clear who our two other roommates voted for.
So, I bought the lesbian cake topper. I also debated buying rainbow streamers and a pride flag, but the topper would suffice. I know it was as equally passive aggressive as their snarky texts and annoying notes. What can I say?
They used to hide the wedding cake topper from us when they had friends over. We’d come home and find the two brides behind the TV or in the kitchen cabinets. But that wasn’t all.
Sometimes, they tried to erase our existence altogether. They crumpled up our cute good morning notes to each other and threw them in the trash. They erased our plans from the apartment calendar.
Of course, I know my friend and I weren’t innocent either. We stayed up late and joked obnoxiously in the common area, and we did buy apartment decor for the sole purpose of annoying them. We did wrong, too.
Those two girls moved out last spring. I hope they forgive my friend and me for our immaturity. We’ve become better roommates now as we enter our sophomore year. You can’t get along with everyone. Sometimes you just have to buy a lesbian cake topper to scare them away, and then forgive them later.
