By Leigh Bond
Kat B., I have a confession: remember that time freshman year when you went home early and my boyfriend was in town so we stayed out late? We came home thankful you happened to fall asleep with music on, and that beds on cinder blocks don’t squeak. Because even though you were only a few feet away, and you could have woken up at any time … no big surprise, but we were doing it.
You were probably already clued in, as evidenced by the sheepish smiles we shot one another over our Saturday-morning dining-hall waffles. But guess what? We all got through it. Then two weeks later, when you invited an entire band to crash in our room during the fall music festival, I went with it, gladly offering up extra pillows to scrawny boys in tighty whities. Because let’s face it: (1) they were pretty cute, and (2) I owed you big. You let me being a tacky lush slide and I let you live out your indie-band groupie dreams, no strings attached.
In other words, we worked it out on our own like budding grown-ups because isn’t that the point of having a college roommate?
Apparently though, if I were a student this year at Tufts University, my late-night bad manners would be not only mine and Kat’s weird, blush-inducing problem, but the resident adviser's, the dorm's, and the school's: a new regulation prohibits students in dorms from having sex while their roommate is in the room.
On the surface, it's a good rule: it goes without question that having sex while your roommate desperately cranks up the iPod in the bunk above you is gross and inconsiderate. At the same time, learning to handle the situation is a vital part of growing up into a personally accountable adult. Having a surrogate parental crutch (à la the poor RA) around to finagle the situation for you equals passive immaturity at its most detrimental.
According to CNN.com, the handbook's rules on overnight guests directs students to "not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room. And sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time." (In other words, no "sexiling.")
That’s not unreasonable, but is it really necessary? Why not just buck up and grow up? Learn roommate ground rules early. Don’t be routinely inappropriate, and don't expect your roommate to be a paragon of moral virtue. If it becomes a recurrent, life-altering roommate problem, then address it—by calling your roommate out on her behavior and setting up a twin-bed tango schedule, not calling the campus police. Getting the university involved seems so opposite of what college is supposed to teach you: how to handle reality without a protective shield. If you can’t learn to live with quiet, awkward sex from your roommate in college, how do you deal with loud, floor-banging sex from your roommates in apartments postgrad? (It happens.)
Knowing how to stand up for yourself is an integral part of transitioning to adulthood, where even more difficult and uncomfortable situations inevitably arise. Learning when to let things slide versus when to confront a legitimate problem—while recognizing that you still have to interact every day with the source of said problem—is a skill vital to social and professional experience. Your RA can’t get you a raise when you feel you deserve one, your mom won’t be there to tell future roommates to pay for the shoes their dog ate, and your college handbook won’t have tips on how to dump your sweet-but-clingy boyfriend.
Tuft’s giggle-inducing rule isn’t even really about sex. It’s about life—stepping up to it, preparing for it, experiencing it, and creating a personal threshold of the acceptable and the intolerable. In other words, finding your own voice and using it with legitimacy, and knowing when to tell your roommate "Dude, inappropriate!" or "Girl, you owe me," or simply thinking "Hey, that’s gonna make for a funny story over breakfast tomorrow."
College is chock-full of awkward, problematic moments and weighty issues. As far as roommate relations go, if they're not having sex while you're in the room, they're probably downloading music on your computer without asking, eating your food, helping themselves to your closet, or using your toothpaste. People overstepping their bounds, taking what's yours, and thinking of their pleasure instead of your rights happens—in college, at work, in marriage, and throughout life.
The good news: no matter how tricky the problems of the real world, if you make it through dorm living, you’ll probably never have to share a narrow room with a near stranger ever again. The bad news: if you don’t learn to deal with/laugh at/change the problems that this living situation creates, if you never learn how to assert yourself, you’ll find yourself getting screwed in an entirely different way after graduation.
Kat B., I owe ya.
BOND is a student at NYU, a NEWSWEEK intern, and an occasional tacky lush.
