‘A bad roommate is like a toxic partner’: When sharing an apartment becomes a nightmare

Summer is the peak season for apartment hunting. The holidays offer us the opportunity to slow down and start a new stage in life, or at the very least find the time to get more organized. Many will do so out of obligation, either because work or school is forcing them to move. And some young people, with a mixture of enthusiasm and naivety, will see in emancipation the dream of finally living away from parental control and building an oasis of fun with their friends, with whom they are so in tune, get along so well and have such a wonderful time that, clearly, nothing can go wrong...

The Netflix series Worst Roommate Ever, whose second season has just been released, addresses — as the title promises — the worst-case scenarios. It is a true crime documentary that collects cases that are twisted to the point of tragedy. In its episodes there are scammers, murderers, psychopathic landlords, possessive and alienating roommates, people who don’t talk much and plot in silence, and people who try to get rid of the person next door by playing rap songs too loud. They are unpleasant, terrifying chronicles that leave one with very little desire to trust a stranger again or, even, to completely lower our guard with the acquaintances we live with.

But you don’t have to go to the hyperbolic level to find stories of fear, trauma or simply disillusionment when it comes to living together. Just ask José, a 32-year-old from Madrid, who draws a red line: “I have only lived with one friend and she is no longer my friend. Moving in with a friend is a mistake we only make once. I am not going to sacrifice a friendship again over an apartment share.” He adds that “a person can be a very good friend of yours but then you don’t fit well together, because one may be more fussy and the other more disorganized, or because they have expectations that you can’t meet in terms of plans or lifestyle.” “With a friend, you also feel like you can be more disorganized and messy,” he explains. This theory is confirmed by Rubén, a 27-year-old from Madrid who puts it plainly thus: “My roommate in Hong Kong once shit himself at night because something had made him sick, but I didn’t notice because I came home really drunk and only got up to vomit.”

The fact that there are no friendly relations involved, however, is no guarantee that formalities will be fulfilled. José, who has lived in the same apartment for six years, has been sharing it with a man for four years and with a woman for three years. Of the latter, he says: “I don’t think she’s a bad person, but she’s selfish, inconsiderate, a bad companion and, above all, dirty.” “In the kitchen, she might leave something on the stove, go to the shower or talk on the phone, an hour and a half goes by and when you get back there’s a bunch of bubbles or charred food. Once she left everything covered in soup for hours. You tell her about it, she apologizes, but it’s a Judeo-Christian apology. She’s very Catholic: she doesn’t apologize because she’s actually sorry and is going to try not to do it again,” he explains. “Once we had a strange smell in the house, we didn’t know where it was coming from, and it turned out that she had made some spaghetti two months earlier, had some leftovers, left them in a pot and they turned moldy.”

“I have the feeling that she thinks that she lives alone, she doesn’t have a sense of solidarity, of thinking about others,” he vents. “She uses three pans and doesn’t wash at least one so that you can use it later. She sets a thousand alarms and you have to turn them off for her, because she has gone off to the gym. She likes to throw Halloween parties and on November 15th the decoration is still up.”

A bit weird, but a good price

If José warns that it is not a good idea to move in with friends, another interviewee warns about an even worse choice: tenants living with their landlords. Sara (who asks to use an assumed name), a 32-year-old from northwestern Spain, explains that she and a friend ended up sharing a place in Madrid with a man “in his forties, who said he had been former Prime Minister Aznar’s bodyguard, was a national chess champion and spoke Esperanto”. “He was, in fact, the landlord. The apartment was a bit weird, but the price was good, and he seemed nice at first,” she says.

Both Sara and her friend spent little more than a month there, but it was enough for “a shady escalation” to occur. “Once, while watching a film on TV, he asked me during a sex scene if I was enjoying it. He also told me about what he called the four-minute rule, a trick he said he did to make women cum in four minutes. I didn’t need that information. He also sat around in his underwear and pulled it up to show us his balls, several times,” she says. Before they left, Sara and her friend were visited by a woman, the landlord’s ex-girlfriend, who came in looking like she was “high on something” to collect a bunch of wigs from a cupboard in the hall. In the room that Sara was renting out, they found “some old letters of his, which suggested that he had been in prison.”

“Landlords are always talking about squatters, but tenants are always the most unprotected and the most abused party,” says Sara, who insists on the importance of signing a lease so that minimum conditions will be respected. She speaks from experience: when she was renting a room in the city of Vigo, the landlord walked in with his keys on a Monday morning and went straight to her room, while she was still in bed. “He was the typical 80-year-old man who goes to collect the money in cash. He walked in while I was still in my pajamas, started talking to me about the state of the house, and then put his arm around me and said, as if joking: ‘If you’re short of money, you should know that in order to have sex at my age I have to take a pill.’ I was paralyzed,” she remembers.

Dolores (not her real name), a 33-year-old from Almería in southern Spain, believed when she arrived in Madrid at the age of 20 that it was standard procedure for landlords to go to the door to collect the rent in cash. This was the way in all her first rentals. “I thought: why can’t I make a money transfer to this lady and not have to worry about her coming by for the envelope?” In her case, she emphasizes how the cost of rent forces people to accept living in unsuitable conditions, with people they don’t want to be with, because they have no other choice. She was a tenant in apartments with up to 10 residents, with “tiny common spaces so the landlord could fit more rooms in.” At least one of the landlords owned several such apartments. “When she saw conflicts between the tenants, the landlady would offer: ‘Don’t worry, girls, I have this other place.’ It was €250 or €300 per room, €400 if it had a balcony. They weren’t cheap, although if you compare them to today’s prices, they were. In another place, the landlady owned almost the whole block. One day she told us that we had to leave, I guess she figured she would make more money renting them on Airbnb.”

Dolores explains that although she adapted well, one of her classmates ended up “going ballistic” due to the constant noise and the parties. “When you live in an apartment with so many people, most of them Erasmus students, you assume that you won’t find peace. But not her. One Sunday morning she got up and turned on the washing machine and the blender, and she started talking loudly on the phone to wake everyone up…” In another crowded apartment, Dolores repeatedly lost food and appliances, but the large traffic of people made it nearly impossible to track down the thief. “Afterwards, I became the strange and bad roommate myself,” she admits. “Because of these previous experiences, I was terrified when I moved into new places. When people tried to be my friend, I thought: ‘Yeah, sure, you want to trick me just so you can steal my coffee maker.’”

Shitty mates

In his 2016 book El compañero de piso de mierda: Guía de supervivencia para compartir casa (The Shitty Roommate: A Survival Guide for Sharing a House), author Giuseppe Angelo Fiori laid down three laws: “There’s a shitty roommate in every shared house, a shitty roommate leads to shitty roommate things, and if you don’t have a shitty roommate at home, it’s you.” The text was based on the famous Italian Facebook page Il Coinquilino Di Merda (The Shitty Roommate), which is still active with almost a million followers and a similar profile on Instagram, where users post bizarre images and stories resulting from living together, such as altars dedicated to dead insects, sculptures made from beard remains in the sink, or eggs cooked in coffee makers.

Another testimony comes from Santiago, a 47-year-old from Madrid who lived in Rome when he was 30. “I lived with a girl who was a bit peculiar, who was into heavy metal and was a theology student. She told me that when she went to the bathroom, she used it for hours. I thought she was exaggerating, but no, she was in there for about four hours a day.” Later, a new roommate came in “who must have had some problem,” whom Santiago would sometimes find in the middle of the night staring at the kitchen stove or looking closely at a stain. “He had a bit of a strange behavior. One day, he started to pee in bottles, which he kept. I think it’s tied to the girl in the bathroom, I suppose he needed to go and, seeing that he never could, he did that instead.”

One problem with living in the same space with people you despise is that it’s hard to avoid interacting with them. Alberto, a 24-year-old who resides in Barcelona, lives with a Frenchman who “never shuts up” and who, he says, spends the day arguing with his girlfriend, “saying that he’s going to leave her because she’s a bad person.” “One day I was finishing The Last of Us 2, which is a super dramatic game, I was very excited and half crying. And the guy comes to talk to me about the same thing again. I had to ask him, with tears running down my face, to shut up.”

José, who at the beginning of this article described the hostilities with his roommate, also details, in the manner of a documentary about predators, the strategy for not exchanging words: “She is one of those people who, if she wants to interact, she stares at you. I avoid eye contact as much as I can. If you move, you are lost!” However, he admits that talking, however unpleasant it may be, is the solution. “At first, I tried to keep quiet about things so as not to have a serious conflict. But it is much worse that way. If something bothers you about the person you live with, you have to tell them,” he reflects. “It is like having a toxic partner. Either you set the limit immediately or you are screwed. You set a precedent. If you do not tell someone that he or she is a filthy person, the other person will always abuse you.” In other words: potentially shitty roommates who have just started living together still have time to mend their ways.

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