When Mark Rubino was a freshman, his roommate had ‘odd habits.’ He would go to bed around 9 a.m., only to wake up in the middle of the night. Living in an open double made the situation worse. Rubino said he had to fall asleep with the lights on because his roommate was awake. But that wasn’t all. The roommate would never do his laundry, which made the room smell.

‘He’d leave the room and I’d take a bottle of Oust or Lysol and spray everywhere,’ the sophomore advertising major said. ‘Every problem you could think of happened, I guess.’

Freshmen living in residence halls sometimes find themselves in the same kind of situations as Rubino. Problems between roommates can be common, but they are most likely avoidable. Living with a roommate requires compromise and communication, according to Syracuse University’s Office of Residence Life.

Most of the problems that turn into full-scale conflicts start out as small issues, said Rebecca Daniels, communications manager at ORL, in an e-mail interview.

‘Sometimes it’s over one person being too messy, someone stays up too late, one roommate has friends over at all hours or uses the other’s things without asking,’ she said. ‘All of these things may seem boring, but if students can’t sit down and talk over their issues to reach compromise, the emotions behind them can get heated at times.’

Early action when dealing with problems is key to any living situation, Daniels said.

‘In the residence halls, the (resident advisor) staffs work with roommate pairs or groups to fill out living agreements to help with the process of creating some ground rules,’ she said.

The living agreements go through several points of interest between roommates, including study habits, cultural differences and having friends over. Roommates create their own boundaries and can show how flexible they are with those limits.

Rubino said he never brought up the problems he had with his roommate’s habits in fear of being rude. Had he talked with his roommate when the issues first started, he said his experience might have been a positive one.

SU’s Program for Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration specifically use communication skills to work out problems between roommates, said PARCC director Catherine Gerard.

One technique the program teaches is to separate the emotion from the actual issue.

‘Conflict is always about high emotion as well as some sort of issue,’ Gerard said. ‘If you’re in a roommate conflict, the first thing to do is to pull back from the emotion piece. If you don’t, you can go very quickly from the issue to blaming, name-calling, stereotyping, that kind of stuff.’

PARCC also trains students to make ‘positive assertion statements,’ that pinpoint the annoying behavior and the emotions felt by both parties. This helps bring issues out in the open without unconstructive criticism, she said.

If talking to a roommate one-on-one doesn’t work, a mediator is a good second step to make, Daniels said. A neutral party can help make conversation flow.  PARCC also teaches residential advisors the skills to become effective mediators, Gerard said.

Rubino never talked to an RA about his roommate’s habits because he didn’t think they were severe enough to involve someone else.

‘It wasn’t really that serious. We weren’t fighting, but he was just someone I couldn’t live with,’ he said.

Rubino ended up moving out of his room in Shaw Hall after the fall semester, thinking that cutting himself off from his former roommate would solve his problems.

Submitting a relocation application to move out of one’s room in the middle of a school year should be a last resort, Gerard said.

‘Our experience is that the vast majority of these things people can work out either themselves or with a little help,’ she said.

Daniels admitted that every experience depends on the individual. ‘Every situation is different and no two roommate pairs are ever alike, so there is no one clear solution if talking through it isn’t getting somewhere.’

smtracey@syr.edu

 

Published on August 24, 2010 at 12:00 pm