5 Tips for Living With Your Friends

1. Set Dating Rules

Unless your best friend is also the person you’re dating, chances are one of you will be bringing over a significant other from time to time. No one wants to get between a couple, which is why roommates should respect each other’s intimacy. At the same time, the people who don’t pay rent shouldn’t be spending more time in your apartment than the people who do. If you have a friend who always has a date in the house, approach him or her early on about what’s an acceptable amount of time for visitors. Leaving issues to fester can lead to blow-ups, and people are extra sensitive about their romantic partners. And if you’re the lucky one who’s always on dates, be mindful of not crowding out your roommates. Clemson student housing is packed with luxury amenities that can help you divide your date time between the apartment and places like the pool, lounge area, or the fitness center if you’re a sporty couple.

2. Pay Your Fair Share

Money is at the center of many friend-on-friend disputes. What’s nice about furnished off campus student housing is that furnishings are provided. There’s no buying furniture or subscribing to Internet services because these things are already incorporated into your apartment. The individual contracts also mean residents needn’t bother with dividing rent — each merely pays his or her share. Yet, while the design of student housing eliminates most money-sharing problems, you may still confront them.

Say your roommates and you head to the Walmart Neighborhood Market off West Main Street to shop for home goods for the apartment. If one of you pays for the bulk of the items, yet everyone uses them later, is that a problem? Actually, it is. And the same goes for movie tickets, campus parking fees, fast food items, and weekend party refreshments.

Disproportionate spending between roommates is like an incubator for infighting. Financial tensions aren’t immediately felt in most cases, but they almost always come to a head and disrupt the group dynamic. The easiest solution to money matters is to always chip in your fair share (and have your friends to do the same) when you make a group purchase. And if you can’t all equally afford something, don’t buy it.

3. Be Accepting Of Others

Knowing someone as a friend is not quite the same as knowing them as a roommate. In fact, they’re very different situations. When friends join up for a few hours, they have fun, study, or do other extroverted activities. Afterward, they return to their private lives. Some continue to live an extroverted lifestyle; others switch into an introverted mode and spend time by themselves. As roommates, you should learn each other’s tendencies. Outside of school, you have all day to spend together, but that doesn’t mean you have to be together.

Find a balance between enjoying the living room, kitchen, and communal areas as friends and, if need be, spending time in other places as individuals. Off campus apartments near Clemson have private bedrooms, which are convenient spaces to grab some alone time to study or just decompress after a long day.

4. Create A Cleaning Chart

What does clean mean to you? No matter your answer, it’s probably different from your friends’ responses. Perhaps to you, a dirty pair of socks on the floor adds character to the room. But your ultra-neat friend might perceive it as a declaration of war and chase you around with a bottle of disinfectant as punishment.

It’s best to avoid armed conflict with cleaning supplies by establishing ground rules about cleaning responsibilities. One way is a chore wheel. Divvy up the tasks — dishes, vacuuming, scrubbing the tub — and write them on pie-shaped slices on a cardboard wheel. Fasten the wheel to a piece of paper, draw an arrow, and let everyone take a spin, sealing their fate for the week. (Whether or not you want to allow chore-swapping after the spins is up to you.)

Clemson University isn’t only an institution of higher learning. It’s also a place where students often make lots of new friendships in the course of just a few years. The trick is to maintain those relationships when you move off campus and into student housing as roommates.

The Ridge Clemson offers private rooms, on-site amenities, individual housing contracts, and other details that make it easier to live together as friends. To ensure you don’t miss out, contact us to schedule a tour of off campus apartments.

5. Set Food Rules

Nothing makes a person ornery like an empty belly. So when several people are living together, there need to be rules for sharing food. Does everyone buy his or her groceries and hide them in designated kitchen cupboards? Or do you take group shopping trips followed by a free-for-all scavenger hunt for snacks? Honestly, neither choice is right or wrong. But regardless of the approach you take, make sure you’re in agreement about it. Few things dissolve a friendship faster than one friend eating another’s last packet of ramen noodles.