Why Can’t We Be Friends?

In college, so much socializing occurs in the bedroom. In high school, no one other than my closest friends had reason or desire to be in my bedroom. But suddenly, even acquaintances are granted that privilege. Close friends might bring hangers-on, uninvited, into your private space, where they can see and touch your clothes and your messy desk.

This raises a couple of questions: is the dorm room truly a private space – and does it even need to be?
People answer this question differently. Some value the cleanliness of their sheets and the order of their belongings too highly to let anyone in more than occasionally, while some have picky or curmudgeonly roommates who preclude them from opening their rooms to socializing. Some people are the picky or curmudgeonly roommate.

A few of my female friends will hang out in one of their rooms to start the evening and later migrate to a larger group in a guy’s room. The reverse rarely happens. One friend explained that if they opened up these hangouts, they would miss out on the opportunity to dance ridiculously – and not yet fully dressed, they added enthusiastically – to “really girly music.”

Pregames and other planned hangouts make up only a tiny fraction of bedroom interactions. They are far outnumbered, at least in first-year dorms, by the simple incursions that can feel like anything from breaths of fresh air to panic-inducing invasions. I experience the latter every time I’m woken up from a nap by a somehow-already-drunk-at-6 p.m. face staring at me from a few inches away, which happens surprisingly often. Even typing that has planted the fear in my heart that an inebriated friend may one day choose that same method.

For some, the only source of anxiety surrounding their bedroom is that it won’t be rowdy enough. A pair of roommates on my hall had “an image of college in their mind” when they first arrived, said a close friend of theirs, and it involved “a TV, an XBOX and making the room look sick so people come over.”

Many upperclassmen are able to find a balance. No longer packed into an unflinchingly communal dorm such as Stewart, they don’t have to worry about random incursions. One upperclassmen, who lives in an Atwater suite that often hosts large parties, simply locks his door on those nights “to dissuade people from defiling his bed.”

Positive incursions into the dorm room do exist. They are the friend bursting into your room who is not a bother but a pick-me-up, the surprise appearance of a support system. Some nights, the dull ache of loneliness overwhelmingly outweighs the need for privacy, and you stand at your bedside folding laundry, feeling as though you have no one left awake to text and no sibling’s room to run to for a chat. You don’t even have your dog to hang out with. And in bounds your friend, with no care in the world that in a previous life your bedroom door represented a boundary. He comes in because he’s your friend, and he wants to talk or play pool or do something stupid, and he knew where to find you.
And you couldn’t be happier to see him in your room.