Choosing the right roommate can make or break your college experience. Whether it’s your high school best friend or someone you’ve never met, college is hard enough by itself without the added pressure of roommate drama.
Juniors Riley Hicks, Ally Lawrence and Mallory Meade have been best friends since their freshman year at Texas A&M. After countless parties, morning debriefs and arguments, these girls have cracked the roommate code on how to stay best friends when living within feet of each other.
When Meade and Hicks moved into their freshman apartment with a mutual friend, the girls hit it off. After their mutual friend moved away from College Station, Lawrence was the best fit to their new home.
“[Lawrence] spent a lot of time with us over the years, and we all decided with our friendship that we wanted to have a house together,” Hicks said.
Because the girls were such great friends, no strict boundaries were ever set in place, but communication was the most important factor in their success.
“Any awkwardness — or anything we’ve been through — is just completely miscommunication, and once you sit down and talk with each other, [you] get over it, right?” Meade said. “Just being open with each other [helps us work through things].”
When best friends become roommates, it can be easy for them to each other’s whole lives without reasons to separate.
“We each have our things that we do outside of each other and things that we do with each other,” Meade said. “Having distance and time without each other, and then spending time with each other, and not having everything as one.”
In order to keep things balanced, they work together on cleanliness and household tasks.
“Let’s say someone cooks dinner … we’ll clean the kitchen after they cook,” Lawrence said. “It’s more like just kind of keeping things clean as you go.”
Hicks said she loves their close relationship compared to other friends she knows who don’t talk with their roommates. Putting their friendship first has allowed them to not lose their special bond.
“It’s not, ‘These are my roommates, these are my friends,’ it’s really just coming in as a group of friends,” Lawrence said. “And yeah, there could be drama sometimes due to that, but everybody has the respect to at some point talk about it. With random roommates, it piles up because there’s not that friendship bond.”
With such close quarters, it’s hard to not see new sides of people.
“We’ve all seen the best parts of each other and the worst parts of each other,” Hicks said. “So, there’s no insecurities or worries when it comes to living together. We’re all very open about how we are and how we work together.”
Meade said being honest about who you are but also being thoughtful to others around you is important.
“Take into consideration that it’s not just you, there’s other people that you’re living with too,” Meade said. “Taking their feelings and their needs into consideration and not just thinking about yourself.”
Lawrence said to really get to know someone before signing a lease, especially when meeting on social media first because you never know when people are being authentic.
“I went into freshman year getting a random roommate, and it went downhill really fast,” Lawrence said. “It’s important to talk to them before, almost like an interview — kind of like online dating, and it’s okay to look at multiple different people. Don’t be scared to hurt someone’s feelings if their views on what they want [or] when they want to live with you don’t align — you could get stuck with it for two years.”
After years of living together, the girls have developed life-long memories. But through it all, their friendship has been able to become stronger.
“We’re more friends than roommates,” Hicks said. “It’s almost like a sister bond that we have.”
