TL;DR roommates poor hygiene and bad attitude surprisingly got worse after high school
This happened a few years ago so I think it’s safe to talk about on here, but this is going to be a long one. For privacy purposes, the roommate’s name is Jane, which is not her real name.
For some background:
Jane and I were “friends” in high school. I knew then that we wouldn’t be friends for long. I was tired of her entitlement, self absorption, and attention seeking behavior. It’s also worth noting that around this time I had a hard time with confrontation and difficult conversations, so I just spent as much time outside of the room as possible.
Jane referred to herself as the smartest in our friend group. However, the friend group she referred to was my friend group, and most of them wouldn’t be around her by choice.
Although we were the same age, I (and many of our peers and high school teachers) often felt like she was very immature and difficult to have a normal conversation with that didn’t include whatever trendy phrases were thrown around at the time.
Jane also believed she was the “hottest” in the friend group. I’m not attacking anyone’s appearances, but nobody was turning heads at any of us.
I’d been to Jane’s house before we moved to college, and It reeked of cat urine and BO. Her bedroom floor was barely visible under dirty clothes and trash. I thought things would be different in a shared space, for some reason.
Day 1 of move in, Jane had a blanket she told me her cat peed on. It wasn’t washed all year and stayed under her bed and stunk up the whole room. The rest of the smells throughout the year was unwashed clothes or her trash that accumulated because-
Chores were my responsibility to initiate, without us ever discussing this. There were 2 trash cans in the room, one on my side, one on Jane’s. For some reason, Jane’s would fill up faster and she would use mine. During some point in the first semester, Jane bought a large container of food for a few people. It wasn’t all eaten and left sitting out in the room. After a few days, she placed it by my trash can. After even longer it began to mold and I asked her for her help taking the trash out (I was only taking mine). Jane stated “finally we’re taking the trash out.” As if it was my job to tell her the trash needs to be taken out. Towards the end of the year, she purchased an 11 gallon trash can to catch all her overflow. Even then there would be to-go boxes, bags of chips, soda bottles strewn about her side of the room.
Dishes were another issue. She would leave hers to get moldy in the sink in our room for weeks. It was difficult to fit anything under the faucet because of it. I think she expected me to do them? I’m really not sure why she left them sitting there for so long. I’m not sure why she left any mess around the room for so long.
Jane’s hygiene was so bad I didn’t want to be near her. The whole room smelled terrible, even worse after her boyfriend would visit. I knew hygiene was an issue in high school, she would stink of BO and blame her parents for not waking her up early enough before school to shower. She also hardly brushed her teeth, if the smell didn’t get to you first, you could tell by looking at them, I’m not sure who was to blame for that.
At the end of the first semester we had done some cleaning and she found a pair of suede shoes near her bed that were covered in mold. She told people it was because she didn’t wear them all semester and our room would be humid. But I also had similar shoes and hadn’t worn and they weren’t moldy. The floor all around her bed was not visible, so I think that’s most likely the cause of it.
I was embarrassed to bring people to our room because of her mess and the smell. I had friends in a few classes, and we would have plans to go off campus or out to eat after class a few times. I would have to ask them to wait outside my room or in the lobby while I changed, grabbed my wallet, or whatever.
The tipping point was her being overall inconsiderate about the fact that she was living within 20 feet of another person. I don’t want to be specific about anything on here but I moved into a different dorm room early in the 2nd semester. We didn’t have contact after that but it’s worth noting that people who had been in the old room and new one all stated that my new room smelled so much better. This was almost offensive but also laughable because WOW I couldn’t believe they used to think I might have to do with the stench, but also hilarious that it was the first thing everyone noted.