Has the roommate thing gotten harder for anyone else (age)

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hypercane3
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11 Aug 2023, 1:46 am

I am a 30 year old man. Up until and including 25, I had no issue living with other people. The things that I got away with then though were not things people would be chill at all now. So I know it isn't a deterioration in me myself, but some sort of change in expectations. For example, when I was 25, I ordered crab, ate it, and then forgot about the empty casings in the fridge for several months. This was when I was in graduate school and living with college students. They just laughed at it threw it away. We are still friends to this day. After 25, things started changing. My cleanliness has greatly improved, but my relationships with roommates has gotten WAY worse. Won't go into too much detail as it will only serve to lengthen the post and decrease the number of responses, but now I am 30 and people aren't putting up with anything. Like I had to make up a story about working remotely due after quitting my job due to burnout (was never given as much as a shoutout while the other guy got promoted to a different city and I'd be doing double work). He doesn't seem to buy it and now treats me like a total deadbeat. We aren't on the same lease so it won't impact him whatsoever if I got evicted (hence why I lied about it). Post school, I have never had the level of rapport with a roommate than I did in college or graduate school. There would be an empty room that he doesn't have to pay for, and that would be it.

No more "lets smoke some weed and chill and forget about it", everything is taken so much more seriously. Still though, I feel people want to rub my misfortunes in my face whereas before they were empathetic. I am not sure if it is just a boomer thing (my roommate is the first boomer I have lived with) or if people just don't give a s**t because I am 30 and while I still look young, I don't look college student young anymore. When I was 25, I still looked college student young.I just get the overall impression in life that people give much less care about me than when I was 20 or 25. They weren't exactly caring then, but at least they left me alone. This has pushed me to my breaking point. I cannot do the roommate thing with neurotypicals who expect me to act like them. Every year it seems to get just a little bit worse. I am starting to seriously consider lying about my age, as creepy as that may sound. Just tell them I am 27 instead of 30.

I pissed in the fridge drunkely in college when I was 21. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life actually. It was bad but we dealt with at roommates and shrugged it off. Yet, somehow run of the mill disagreements with other adults aged 30+ are perceived as exceeding that level of breaking social nuance on a regular basis. I don't understand.



Last edited by hypercane3 on 11 Aug 2023, 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

Sweetleaf
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11 Aug 2023, 2:02 am

The real tragedy is you are 30 years old and having to live with roommates. That freaking sucks like when you are 30 you want to have made the decision to be a parent or not, with me and my boyfrend we choose no parenthood, even so we do not want to live with roommates, we already did for a time but we just want to live together without other people to deal with in our own home. Like it is rough for a 30 year old these days, us millennials did not get a good deal I'll tell you that.

And a bunch of old as*holes calling us entitled just because we are rather dissapointed the things they promised never materialized regardless of how much work we put in.

But I may be baised because I am one of them damn frustersted millenials.


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11 Aug 2023, 3:34 am

i only recently moved out of my parents home so i dont know alot about having roomates.

however i do find for the most part my roomate and i get along. they are adhd and seem to be better able to understand me than my parents did.



rse92
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11 Aug 2023, 6:43 am

You are not in school anymore. The people who you live with are out there working, trying to build their own lives and fortunes. They want to come home, decompress, and get away from work. They frankly do not have time or patience for juvenile baloney. If you make their home a place of aggravation, guess what? They will be aggravated and unhappy and resentful of you.

Sounds like you need to get serious.



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27 Aug 2023, 4:21 pm

I have not lived with roommates for 20 years and probably never again. The main reason was because I had a bad experience with a set of roommates who I was not compatible with. Part of it was that we were not on the same front page on some things. They were also extremely rude and immature.



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28 Aug 2023, 11:37 am

I wanted to add to my experiences with my last set of roommates and also offer some advice.

Living with other people can be really hard as each party often lets their hair down. One of my roommates was a neat freak and also liked things done in a certain order. Otherwise, she would overreact if they were not. Meanwhile, I wasn't a neat freak and wasn't rigid. Now I don't know if she was on the spectrum or not but she was very obsessive-compulsive over the way the house looked. She was also a very difficult person to deal with and especially with other people whom she didn't like.

As I also said, we were not on the same page about our roommate agreement. For one thing, they were a great deal older than I was and had been out of college. To them, the unwritten rule was the 21-year-old rents a room, in exchange for bills and chores. Otherwise, they expected me to treat my bedroom like a dorm situation while sharing the kitchen and the bathroom. Meanwhile, I saw it as I shared just as much of the house as they did. I also moved in there expecting to make some friends and have some new experiences but it didn't work out that way. However, there was no communication about that from the beginning.

Finally, I never disclosed to them that I have an official autism diagnosis and I tried to make and fake it until I made it. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. They picked it up that something about me was off but they never talked to me about it. Honestly, we avoided each other as much as possible so I met people elsewhere.



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12 Sep 2023, 5:02 pm

I never could stand room mates or sharing my space with anyone...even as a child. I could get violent if I couldn't get my alone time.


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c.yaggason
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13 Oct 2023, 8:00 am

i feel like this kind of change happens to alot of people as they age because we just
want and need different things at different times of life.
for me i was a swelling feeling of " im too old for this sh!t " and extended into every area of my life involving other humans.



Summer_Twilight
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24 Oct 2023, 7:43 am

Again, I don't want another roommate after not living up to the expectations of my last two. As an example: When I first moved in, we had rotating chores assigned to us each month. When their last roommate had moved out, I took over bathroom duties since her name was still assigned for that month. Meanwhile, one of my roommates went to mow the lawn after the first week. Well, later that night, she got mad at me for not mowing the lawn and had to do it because I didn't. She also assumed that I was lazy by hinting, "There is a lot to do around here and I hope you know that."



Basiliscus amoratus
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26 Oct 2023, 12:38 am

It's been off and on for me. I've gotten along with some roommates, and not with others. The longer I spent away from my parents' home, the easier it was for me to adjust and coexist with roommates, but Covid upended that a couple years ago and I torpedoed any possible relationship with my roommates at the time. I've gotten along pretty well with my last two roommates though, but keeping up my tolerance to my roommates' idiosyncrasies has always been a chore, and I obviously haven't been an ideal roommate for several of them either.



Summer_Twilight
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26 Oct 2023, 9:16 am

I was not an ideal roommate for my last two as well.