My roommate and I were paired up randomly for our freshman year housing. We had a lot in common, which shocked me. Both of us cleaned regularly, we enjoyed our studies and each of us had siblings. We started off our freshman year of college with awkward conversations, trying to lay down the foundation for living together for the next four years. We quickly built a friendship because we basically only had each other at the beginning of the semester.
Little did I know that this would quickly change: My roommate deserted me.
My roommate and I slowly formed a routine living in harmony. We didn’t hang out much because she constantly studied. I spent a lot of time with my boyfriend. However, we still managed to hang out occasionally and carry deep conversations in our dorm room at night. I learned a lot about her life and family, and she learned about mine.
Sometimes when her family visited and took me out for ice cream. Only later did I realized that this could have been perceived as a formality.
Fall semester came and went. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Years. We texted one another for each holiday, wishing the other well. Everything went rather smoothly—until spring semester arrived.
We saw each other in mid-January when we returned to campus. It felt normal and everything seemed to go well. My roommate formed her own friend group, spending time with them most weekends. This didn’t make me jealous, but rather happy that she finally found her place since she previously spent so much time constantly worrying about school.
During the spring semester, students start worrying about housing situations for the upcoming academic year. My roommate and I talked about rooming together for the next three years. We had it all planned out with an eight-man suite in the building we wanted, as well as some suite-mates to share it with.
The Friday before Sarah went on a weekend trip with “the girls” to Maine, I got a text from one of our mutual friends. My friend asked if I wanted to join her housing group. I sent her a text back asking if she had left our predetermined eight-man housing group.
Apparently, a few days prior to this situation, my roommate told my friend that she removed my friend, my friend’s roommate and myself out of the housing group. She said that the original group found a different set of girls to share a room with and Sarah decided to join them, essentially deserting us.
You could imagine my shock reading this. I immediately told myself that this couldn’t happen. My roommate would have told me. I mean, she lived with me for crying out loud. I told my friend that I would think about it. I wanted to talk to my roommate to get to the bottom of this.
I put my phone away and get dressed for school. As I start to head for the door, Sarah, just waking up, groggily reaffirmed everything my friend had just told me. I walked out of the door and didn’t see her until Sunday night when she came back from Maine with “the girls.” I didn’t feel angry so much as I felt hurt and, quite frankly, disappointed.
I felt hurt because I had to find out about this from someone else, feeling like an idiot for not knowing what others had already known for a few days. Also, my roommate and I had discussed plans for our future room and the different types of decorations we could use. I began to wonder whether she already knew that she wouldn’t room with me when we had those conversations.
I later found out that my friend asked for my phone number from my roommate immediately after my roommate told her that she would kick me out of the group as well. This meant that my roommate possibly had days to tell me this news. Instead, she waited until the last possible second when she knew she wouldn’t see me for a couple of days. She might have thought that I would need to cool off.
It became awkward after that. The tension in the room became tangible. In the end, I tried to lighten the mood because, at the end of the day, it happened. I could do nothing but accept the situation and move on.
