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BY YOEL ROTH

In print | Published August 26, 2008 — Updated August 29, 2008 13:25

I operate under the assumption that most people are genuinely good people who genuinely mean well. Nevertheless, I also operate under the assumption that you and your roommate will fight, as have countless pairs of roommates before you.

For the six of you who have found the perfect roommate you can get along with one hundred percent of the time, stop reading now, and try again once the honeymoon has ended in a week or two.
But given it’s a near statistical certainty that you and your roommate will eventually argue about something, it would be a waste of a perfectly good soapbox to write about how to avoid conflict. Instead, I’d like to spend my time taking a good, long look at what happens when cohabiting college students actually do disagree. Once the orientation bonanza has ended and life at Swarthmore actually begins, what do you do when your roommate, inevitably, begins to seem insufferable?

Whether roommate offenses are real or merely stress-induced hallucinations, dorm room disagreements all boil down to questions of aggression. On nearly every scale, aggression is easy to spot.

The microbial world is teeming with bacteria slaughtering each other at the rate of several million per second. (Life is hard as a unicellular organism, it turns out.) The strangler fig grows atop and ultimately kills its host tree in a battle for sunlight and nutrients. Male elephant seals, the largest living carnivores, are known for their vocal and often violent conflicts over females during mating season.

Humans, arguably the most aggressive of all creatures, routinely destroy each other over issues from the right of two men to marry to the right of the country of Georgia to have its own entry in the World Book Atlas. We’ve even developed these fancy things known as Weapons of Mass Destruction to make aggression that much easier and more brutal.

Despite all this, it seems that within the bounds of a college dorm room the standard rules of aggression disintegrate. While Wikipedia tells me that my aggressive tendencies are centered in my hypothalamus and something called the “periaqueductal gray midbrain,” it mentions little about where, exactly, in the human psyche or physiology the tendency to passive-aggressive behavior originates. And given passive-aggression is par for the course in roommate-roommate relations, this seems like a pretty glaring oversight.

One candidate theory is that passive-aggression is a social construction based on the supposition that certain people in the dean’s office would probably be unhappy if students beat up their roommates. By this logic, in lieu of violence and confrontation, Swarthmore students may turn to any of the following tools for keeping their roommate rage in check:

1. Fiery but conspicuously unlabeled LiveJournal entries, which immediately make the rounds on campus faster than a bad viral video.

2. Facebook status updates along the lines of “Yoel is in desperate need of noise-canceling headphones” or “Yoel didn’t come in drunk at 3 a.m. and trip over his bookshelf, unlike someone he knows” or “Yoel’s room smells bad and he doesn’t know why.”

3. Hushed conversations in Sharples and McCabe with anyone but your roommate about your roommate’s latest offense against mankind.

4. Shooting puzzled glances at your roommate’s side of the room every few minutes while writing a paper, as if to say, “You’re actually listening to that without headphones?”

5. Loud, staged conversations with yourself on the subject of “Where did all the granola bars go, since I know I didn’t eat them?”

And so on. Conspicuously absent from this list of conflict suppression methods is the relatively straightforward “have a calm and collected discussion with your roommate and attempt to resolve the issue at hand in a reasonable manner.” Which begs the question: when it comes to our roommates, are we simply incapable of behaving rationally?

Sadly, the answer seems to be “yes.” The single most difficult thing for a Swarthmore student to do is admit that he might be wrong about anything. For an open-minded, progressive campus full of intellectual heavyweights, it’s a not-so-surprising fact that the idea that one might be mistaken on even the most trivial of issues is anathema, ergo the difficulty of resolving disagreements. When no one wants to admit that they’re wrong, problems fester just below the surface, turning a dorm room into the staging ground of a miniature Cold War.

Thus, the first step to resolving a conflict is acknowledging that, just as your roommate’s nail-clipping/pen-tapping/music-listening/phone-calling/video-gaming may be making you insane, you’re probably making them just as irritated with your obnoxious ringtone/strong cologne/late night visitors/rotten food/dirty laundry.

Once you’ve accepted the inevitability that you are just as challenging to live with as your roommate, it becomes infinitely easier to have a substantive discussion with him about your concerns, set boundaries, and actually resolve conflicts. And when it comes to surviving the year without having to bribe the college administration for an emergency single, that critical step of mutually recognizing problems where they exist makes all the difference.

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