House-sharing: Friends or Roommates?

House-sharing is the quickest, cheapest and most sustainable solution for you and everybody else who wants to live (and survive) in a metropole.

Recently a friend asked me if it would be better to share an apartment with a friend or with an fairly unknown roommate? I asked her the question whether she had ever been on holiday with a friend. Yes, she had ever done that and she did not like that.

Although I could guess the answer, I asked her what the biggest difficulty had been. She said that she felt she had spent the whole holiday taking her friends’ well-being in to consideration and had given too little attention to her own holiday fun.

Cloak of love
And that was the answer right away! If you are going to share a house with a friend it’s complicated to approach living together in a businesslike way. After all, you also have the friendship and are quickly inclined to cover things with the cloak of love. With this you will shorten yourself and in the long term it will be difficult to successfully share a living space.
Convinced
Of course I talked extensively with my girlfriend about the pros and cons. A friend as roommate is not always the best choice in the long term. A relatively strange roommate gives advantages, see also the blog 'Living together with a stranger'. Because of the difference between interpreting a business deal with a roommate and a friendly relationship, my girlfriend is convinced. In the meantime she is looking for her ideal roommate through Just-Roomies.com.

 

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