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(03/17/16 2:38am)
In Kanye West’s song “Real Friends,” he raps, “We smile at each other, but how many honest?”
Last Saturday night, I found myself preoccupied with that same question. I stood in a friend’s room on the fourth floor of Stewart and carefully folded a vomit-soaked comforter around itself to keep the mess from getting on my clothes while I walked down to the laundry room. “Stew is a dry dorm” — yeah right.
Later in the night, I was talking to my friend Roger. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately, and the rare opportunity for a heart-to-heart was too good to pass up, even with the specter of daylight saving time staring us down.
It would implicate and possibly embarrass Roger to describe our conversation in full, but it involved his de facto exclusion from the larger group that most of his friends are a part of. We realized that each of his friends has their own image of how he fits into their social jigsaw puzzle — as the too-good-for-us social climber or the introverted eccentric — and that these images keep them from truly letting him in.
My perception that he’s just one of the guys was wrong, too. The gloomy look that filled his eyes as he outlined his experience on the outskirts of the group made that clear enough.
So why does he pretend to be real friends with those who do nothing but pretend back?
Before I answer that, I have another question: Why do we pretend Stew is a dry dorm? If I told someone, “Don’t allow peanuts near me; I’m deathly allergic,” and they did as good of a job of not allowing peanuts near me as Middlebury does at not allowing alcohol in dry dorms, I would be dead two times over. But this lie, as transparent as it is, has benefits — for appearances, to keep the amount of rule-breaking manageable. . . . It is an innocent lie.
In much the same way, Roger lies for others’ benefit.
“How are you?” someone asks him.
I could give you an answer that would actually give you some understanding of how I am, but I won’t, he thinks. “I’m good,” he says, “How’s [single thing we have in common]?” This approach allows his audience to add one more positive social interaction, however insipid it may be, to their list, and feel comfortable that they may be each other’s 16th best friend. On the other side of the room, legitimate best friends are usually spilling their vulnerabilities and overflowing with stories. The dishonesty inherent in small talk becomes clear when contrasted with the interactions of real friends.
But is this dishonesty a bad thing? It’s Monday, and I’m talking to Roger. He tells me he’s been thinking, and now realizes he’s content not fully integrating into the group. He could make an effort to get closer to the others, but he likes his number of friends.
He’s a “quality over quantity” kind of guy, he says. “Being yourself is not something to be bummed about.” His eyes are bright and confident.
(03/03/16 2:29am)
In college, so much socializing occurs in the bedroom. In high school, no one other than my closest friends had reason or desire to be in my bedroom. But suddenly, even acquaintances are granted that privilege. Close friends might bring hangers-on, uninvited, into your private space, where they can see and touch your clothes and your messy desk.
This raises a couple of questions: is the dorm room truly a private space – and does it even need to be?
People answer this question differently. Some value the cleanliness of their sheets and the order of their belongings too highly to let anyone in more than occasionally, while some have picky or curmudgeonly roommates who preclude them from opening their rooms to socializing. Some people are the picky or curmudgeonly roommate.
A few of my female friends will hang out in one of their rooms to start the evening and later migrate to a larger group in a guy’s room. The reverse rarely happens. One friend explained that if they opened up these hangouts, they would miss out on the opportunity to dance ridiculously – and not yet fully dressed, they added enthusiastically – to “really girly music.”
Pregames and other planned hangouts make up only a tiny fraction of bedroom interactions. They are far outnumbered, at least in first-year dorms, by the simple incursions that can feel like anything from breaths of fresh air to panic-inducing invasions. I experience the latter every time I’m woken up from a nap by a somehow-already-drunk-at-6 p.m. face staring at me from a few inches away, which happens surprisingly often. Even typing that has planted the fear in my heart that an inebriated friend may one day choose that same method.
For some, the only source of anxiety surrounding their bedroom is that it won’t be rowdy enough. A pair of roommates on my hall had “an image of college in their mind” when they first arrived, said a close friend of theirs, and it involved “a TV, an XBOX and making the room look sick so people come over.”
Many upperclassmen are able to find a balance. No longer packed into an unflinchingly communal dorm such as Stewart, they don’t have to worry about random incursions. One upperclassmen, who lives in an Atwater suite that often hosts large parties, simply locks his door on those nights “to dissuade people from defiling his bed.”
Positive incursions into the dorm room do exist. They are the friend bursting into your room who is not a bother but a pick-me-up, the surprise appearance of a support system. Some nights, the dull ache of loneliness overwhelmingly outweighs the need for privacy, and you stand at your bedside folding laundry, feeling as though you have no one left awake to text and no sibling’s room to run to for a chat. You don’t even have your dog to hang out with. And in bounds your friend, with no care in the world that in a previous life your bedroom door represented a boundary. He comes in because he’s your friend, and he wants to talk or play pool or do something stupid, and he knew where to find you.
And you couldn’t be happier to see him in your room.
(02/18/16 3:31am)
What’s the weirdest thing about the first year of college? If you answered “having a roommate,” then you agree with me, (sorry to the other contenders, such as eating in dining halls, partying on weeknights and being in class only 30 percent as often as you were in high school). Sure, some first years live in singles, but they’re the exception that proves the rule: Only in college is having your own room suddenly unusual.
Many of my classmates have always had their own room at home, while others still share a bedroom with a sibling or two. I shared with my older brother until late elementary school, when we went our separate ways. Each night, when the lights went out, we would discuss our Neopets (characters in an online game) and wage imaginary battles (“I use a fire spell!” “But my ice wall counters that!” “Nuh uh!”) between our bunk beds. I have yet to hear of a pair of college roommates that interact like that.
My roommate and I are, in many ways, polar opposites. I’m the sensitive type, ready to open up my heart at a moment’s notice. He’d usually rather open up a beer, and has the same number of emotions in a week that I might have in an hour. But when a J. Cole song comes on or we pass out for our afternoon naps, you might swear we’re the same person.
I always have a quick blurb about my roommate holstered in the back of my mind, because “How’s your roommate?” is by far the most common question I get from friends and relatives back home. The freshman year roommate is a cultural icon, and I can see why. Your relationship with your roommate has more power to define your experience than almost anything else, and the range of possibilities is vast: From best friendship at first sight to outright disaster.
“My roommate and I are both gay latinos who love Lady Gaga,” said a sophomore friend of mine. “Long story short it worked out pretty well.” Even so, he lives in a single now and says he values the increased space and privacy.
Many of the students who live on my floor have been equally lucky with their roommates. “We have each other’s backs and we both respect each other in an important way,” my friend said. “We don’t infringe on each other’s space. I trust him as much as anyone, [and] he’s so f*cking reliable.”
Commonalities seem to contribute to friendship between roommates, but factors that people pointed to even more were trust and comfort level. When one or both of those are lacking, the relationship suffers.
One first-year girl, for instance, said she likes her roommate and considers her a friend, but doesn’t always feel comfortable in their room. “We talk a lot at night, but sometimes I’m really tired,” she said. Her roommate will drone on, unaware that her captive audience would really rather go to bed or leave the room through the door she’s been inching toward for the past 20 minutes. Sometimes her roommate realizes she isn’t in the mood to talk, but she said that actually leads to more discomfort and hurt feelings.
When trust and comfort are absent entirely, communication becomes hard, too. And that’s when you get outright disaster. One of my friends did not see eye to eye with his roommate about using illegal substances in their room, and they no longer live together. “[We] just did not communicate enough about what we each wanted from the room,” he told me in a message. “His mood would always be off when I would be around … and he just wasn’t really open to talking about it.”
As I write this, my roommate just sexiled me. Maybe I deserve the revenge for snoozing my alarm clock multiple times each morning. College, man…