A:
(cont.)
Have a meeting where everyone – you, the official roommate,
the unofficial roommate -- can get their concerns out in the
air. Explain your position as clearly as you can, while doing
your best to listen to both the boyfriend’s and her feelings
as well. Be kind, be understanding; tell them you realize that
it’s difficult for them to find somewhere other than your
apartment to spend their nights, given the fact that she lives
with her parents. Be so nice and so sympathetic that they
won’t have any choice but to really listen to your side of
things as well. And then be firm. Let them know that you feel
that a guest, by definition, is someone who only stays over from
time to time, or for a short period of time, and that given the
fact that she sleeps there every single night – and is often
hanging out at the apartment even when her boyfriend isn’t –
you feel she’s much more a permanent resident than an
occasional visitor. While she may not require an extra bed, her
presence does use up other shared resources in the apartment:
communal living spaces like the kitchen and the living room, as
well as utilities and groceries. The dishes pile up in the sink
a little sooner, the mess accumulates in the living room a
little more quickly, the bathroom needs cleaning a little more
often. It’s not just that her presence means your water bill
is a little higher – it also means that sometimes, you
can’t, say, use the bathroom when you need to because she
happens to be in there … a fact which in and of itself,
doesn’t bother you, because you genuinely like having her
around, but does make you feel a little like you’re getting
the short end of the stick when you realize that you’re
shelling out $750 a month to have that there bathroom available
for your use, and she’s not contributing a dime.
You might also want to
take a good look at you lease, and see whether there’s
anything there that says that the only people living in the
apartment are supposed to be the people who are on the lease. If
that’s the case, and it ought to be, you can always use the
whole legality issue as an excuse for getting them to do
something to rectify the situation – in which case, she and
the boyfriend would need to do some talking on their own to
decide whether they’re ready to officially live together. Let
them know that you understand that it’s a big decision for
them, but that if she’s not willing to co-sign the lease, then
you just don’t feel comfortable with violating the terms of
the lease yourself, and that you’d like her to only be in the
apartment when her boyfriend is present, and preferably
not be sleeping over every single night. Personally, I’m
thinking it’s not going to go over well with either her or the
boyfriend if you flat-out make a rule that she can only sleep
over on weekends; as a not-always-reasonable, stubborn-as-a-mule
sort myself, I know that my first reaction to anyone telling me
that I can’t do something is “Screw that. Nobody tells me
what to do!” Rational? No, but sadly, sort of human nature.
In the end, of course,
you may just have to accept that either you’ll have to kick
the roommate out, bummer though that might be, or suck it up and
live with the inequities. Ultimately, though, I’d worry less
about being right, and concentrate instead on doing whatever is
going to turn out to be the least stressful solution for you. No
one should be uncomfortable and unhappy in their own home.
o
read
more etiquette
q+a
|