Strong Bonds of Friendship Between Roommates Overcome Initial
Barriers of Misconceptions
By Janae Brewster

Personal Essay

Notes from Pat Benetar's Love Is A Battlefield began flooding my dorm room. Instead of carefully climbing off the top bunk bed to join my roommate Sara Phillips in dance, I tried to just slide off. My foot missed the bottom bunk, and I landed in a laughing heap on the floor. Still giggling, I ran to the bathroom. Meeting me outside the stall was Sara, looking at me and then down at the wet stain on her pants.

Our shared pants-peeing experiences are just some of the memories that Sara and I have built over a year that began with misconceptions and prejudgments. Our relationship began when Whitworth notified us that we would be roommates for our freshmen year of college. To make matters more interesting, we were going to be squeezed into a single in The Village.

Even though I was less than thrilled at being placed in a dorm that was not one of my top choices, I was anxious to find out more about the girl that would be living with me for nine months. Unbeknownst to me, over the course of the next year I would learn more about Sara, but in different ways than expected.

As I read her e-mail, I wondered how the housing department quiz had placed me with Sara. She was from California; I was from Idaho. She was a vegetarian; I ate meat. She made spelling and grammatical errors; I was planning to major in English. She liked pink; I liked blue. After reading her emails, our mutual love of chocolate was the only interest we shared.

And then as an odd glitch, we didn't even end up as roommates. The housing department had done some room rearranging, and I would no longer be sharing a room with Sara. We were both put in single rooms, but we would be in the same dorm.

Part of the dorm experience is meeting a variety of fellow students, and fast friendships formed amongst me and a few of the other girls in my dorm. Of course, one of the people I met during that time was Sara. We were nice to each other, but didn't click instantly as best friends. We came from different backgrounds and did not share many of the same interests or hobbies.

However, over the next few months, our relationship grew as we laid aside the stereotypes that hindered our friendship. She no longer hated me because I was in student government in high school, and I no longer thought she was a crazy and egotistical Californian. We began to understand why we held the beliefs and morals that we did, instead of letting our differences divide us.

Spring semester came, as did the stress of choosing roommates for our sophomore year in college. By then, the idea of Sara and I being roommates seemed almost natural. Maybe opposites don't attract, but they can live together.