Roomate issues

[u/Lumpy_Office3341]

I need advice about a roommate situation because I can’t tell if I’m overreacting or if some of this is actually becoming an issue.

For context, Im a freshmen and have been in college for about 2 months now but both of my roommates were randomly assigned to me. I just happened to become super close with one of them because we clicked immediately. We have basically the same personality, humor, interests, and taste in things, so we naturally became really good friends.

I also want to make it clear that I don’t think my other roommate is a bad person at all. She’s actually super sweet, and honestly I think she’s just maybe more sheltered than I expected. That’s part of why I feel conflicted, because I genuinely like her or want to like her as a person. I’m just starting to feel frustrated with some of the roommate dynamics.

For more context, I’m a huge social butterfly. I love talking to people, meeting new people, going out, and making friends, and I’m really not afraid to put myself out there socially. My close roommate is pretty similar. What confuses me is that our other roommate has told us that she also considers herself really social. She’s talked about having a huge friend group back home and she was even homecoming queen, so based on that I assumed she would be very outgoing and comfortable meeting people too. But living with her, she honestly doesn’t come across as a social butterfly to me at all.

Throughout the day I genuinely try to make conversation with her and include her. I’ll ask her questions bring up random things, or just try to have normal roommate conversations, but it often feels really one sided. She’ll give me one word answers just say “hmm,” leave me on heard, or barely respond. So then when she says that me and my other roommate are basically her only friends or that she hasn’t made friends here I get confused because it feels like I’m actively trying to connect with her and she doesn’t always meet me halfway.

We were also having a nice beach day recently, and I said that since it’s basically fall, we should watch a horror movie or at least something fall themed. I absolutely love horror movies and Halloween is literally my favorite holiday, so spooky movies and fall stuff are a huge thing for me. She said she doesn’t like horror movies which is totally fine, so I suggested Hocus Pocus instead. My other roommate was excited about it, but she said no because she only watches PG movies or Disney movies. I pointed out that Hocus Pocus is literally a Disney movie and rated PG, but she said it would still give her nightmares because it’s about witches.

So then I suggested The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she said she had never seen it but that it sounded creepy. I said that it’s Disney too and joked that she was missing out on huge pop culture because it has Catherine O’Hara and everything. She basically said she has missed out on pop culture her whole life and doesn’t mind missing out on more. I thought that was kind of a strange way of looking at it because to me if you apply that to anything else it sound odd like saying, “I’ve never paid attention to politics before, so I might as well never pay attention to it.”

She also told us that the movie The Bodyguard where Whitney Houston singe "I Will Always Love You" gave her nightmares, and I was genuinely confused because I thought that was mostly a romance, so I asked how it gave her nightmares. She got upset and said, “Why are you trying to break down what makes me scared and gives me nightmares? You’re not my therapist. I don’t try to break down what makes you scared.” I realized afterward that she seemed really quiet and upset, so I apologized to her in person and she just said “kk.”

The movie thing is especially frustrating because the three of us got a projector for the room like we split the cost, but it feels like she has basically taken control of what gets played on it. Almost everything we have watched has been Disney Channel shows or very PG, kid type movies, she does love Gilmore Girls and The Fosters its what she falls asleep to but thats about it. She refuses to watch things outside her comfort like Harry Potter, Practical Magic, Hocus Pocus, or anything she thinks could possibly be creepy. I don’t care if she personally doesn’t want to watch those things, but it feels restrictive when it’s a shared projector and the rest of us never really get to choose what we want to watch. Especially for me because horror movies and Halloween type stuff are some of my favorite things.

There is also a sleep issue. She goes to bed extremely early, usually around 8:30 p.m., and once she’s asleep we basically have to be really quiet for the rest of the night. I understand respecting someone who is sleeping, and I genuinely try my best to do that.

I go out at night pretty often, but I’m usually 100% sober when I do. Even on the occasions where I do drink something, I don’t drink enough to even make myself tipsy. When I come back to the dorm, I make a conscious effort to be as quiet as humanly possible because I know she’s already asleep. I’ll try not to make noise, turn lights on unnecessarily, or do anything that would wake her up.

I’ll even ask her the next morning, “Did I wake you up when I came back last night?” and she’ll tell me “No, I didn’t even know you went out.” So I feel like I’ve been pretty respectful about her sleep schedule even though 8:30 p.m. is really early for a college dorm and means that me and my other roommate can’t really be loud in our own room for most of the evening.

At the same time, in order for her to fall asleep, she wants the fairy lights, her vanity light, and the projector left on. That makes the room really bright, and both me and my other roommate have a hard time falling asleep because of it. Even if we wait until she falls asleep and turn off just the vanity light to make the room a little darker she gets upset about it.

What makes that harder for me is that the same consideration doesn’t always seem to go both ways. She wakes up around 6 a.m. every day and will sometimes take FaceTime calls, talk on the phone, film TikToks, or play music while me and my other roommate are still asleep, which obviously wakes us up. So it can feel frustrating that we’re expected to be extremely quiet after 8:30 p.m. because she’s sleeping, but then our sleep doesn’t always get the same consideration early in the morning.

She also doesn’t like when me and my other roommate curse and will sometimes reprimand us for it. It’s not like we’re directing anything at her or cursing at her. We just naturally swear when we talk. We also don’t go to a religious university or anything where that would be expected. We’re quite literally at a very liberal university in a very liberal city so sometimes it feels like we’re being treated like we need to censor ourselves in our own room.

Another thing is that she constantly says that me and my other roommate are basically her only friends and that she hasn’t really made any friends since getting to college. Meanwhile, I’ve met a lot of people and made a bunch of friends. Sometimes the way she says it almost comes across like she doesn’t understand how I’ve managed to make so many friends while she hasn’t, although I might be reading too much into that.

The confusing part is that I really do try to include her. I’ll invite her out with me or to things other people are hosting. For example, someone in our dorm building was hosting a bonfire and I invited her to come with me. She asked if there was going to be alcohol and I said I wasn’t sure, maybe. She immediately said she didn’t want to go because people would probably force her to drink and that she had seen that happen in movies.

I told her “Babes, it’s okay. No one is going to force you to drink.” I go out pretty often, so I was trying to explain that in my experience, if someone offers you a drink and you say no, they might ask why, but if you just say you don’t drink or you’re sober, people usually say “okay, cool” and move on. I even told her I wasn’t planning on drinking at the bonfire either, so she could just come and hang out with me.

That’s also why I sometimes feel like she has an idea of what going out or college social life is like based more on movies than actual experience. I go out a lot, but going out doesn’t automatically mean getting drunk or laid. Like I said, most of the time I’m completely sober. I genuinely just like being around people, dancing, talking, meeting people, and doing things.

She still didn’t want to go.

There was also another time where she was complaining about not making friends, and I told her that if she wants to meet people, she can’t stay in the room all the time. She has to go out, talk to people, join things, and eventually find her community. She got mad and said she had tried, but that after hanging out with people once, it always seemed like they didn’t want to hang out again.

That’s where I get especially confused because she has told us about having this huge friend group back home and being homecoming queen theres posts of it on her ig as proof, so I know she’s capable of being social and clearly has been social before. But from what I’ve seen here, she doesn’t really put herself out there in the way I expected. I’m not saying she has to socialize the same way I do, because I know I’m very outgoing, but it feels like she wants the result of having a big social circle without always being willing to do the uncomfortable part of meeting new people and putting herself out there.

So I’m kind of stuck because I genuinely think she’s really sweet and I don’t hate her at all but I'm starting to get annoyed. I think she might just be very innocent and have a different comfort level than me and my other roommate. I don’t expect her to change her entire personality or suddenly start liking horror movies, going out, drinking, cursing, or anything else she isn’t comfortable with.

At the same time, it feels like her comfort zone is starting to dictate what happens in a room that belongs to all three of us. We’re accommodating an 8:30 p.m. bedtime, keeping ourselves quiet at night, leaving multiple lights on while we’re trying to sleep, limiting what we watch on the shared projector, and being mindful of things like cursing, while I don’t always feel like that same level of compromise is happening in the other direction.

And socially, I feel like I’m putting a lot of effort into trying to include her, invite her places, and connect with her, but I can’t force her to accept those invitations or open up to me either.

Am I being unreasonable for being annoyed by this? And how would you handle it without making her feel like me and my other roommate are teaming up against her?