64 Toxic Roommates That Are The Reason Lease Agreements Should Come With A Personality Clause

Shared living is considerably more common than most people would voluntarily admit to at a dinner party. Nearly one in three American adults (approximately 79 million people) currently live in a "doubled-up" household, meaning they share a space with another adult who is not their spouse, partner, or a college student they can blame it on.

While young adults have historically dominated the roommate demographic, the fastest-growing group now adopting shared living arrangements is older adults, which means that the passive-aggressive note left on the fridge about the clearly labelled yoghurt is no longer exclusively a twenty-something problem. It has become, quietly and without fanfare, everyone's problem.

Only 31% of people living with one roommate describe themselves as genuinely happy with the arrangement. Drop in a second roommate, and that figure falls to 25%. Add a third, and it crawls back to 26%, which suggests that by the time you reach three roommates, you have either hit a new low or simply run out of the emotional bandwidth required to register dissatisfaction.

The takeaway is not subtle. Shared living is a compromise wrapped in a lease agreement, and the sooner everyone walks in knowing that, the better prepared they will be when someone eats the yoghurt.

A National Student Accommodation survey has done the important work of formally documenting what anyone who has ever shared a kitchen already knows in their bones. The single most complained-about roommate habit, cited by 62% of respondents, is leaving dirty dishes out. Not for an hour. Not by accident. Out. Lingering. Ageing. Becoming something else entirely.

Not helping with cleaning came in at 50%, followed by being too loud at 46%, leaving lights and appliances on at 38%. And the one that truly separates the merely annoying from the genuinely unforgivable is leaving food to rot, also at 38%. These are not edgy or unusual findings. They are a portrait of the same argument being had simultaneously in shared kitchens across the entire world, every single day, forever.

And then there is the question that no one wants to be the first person to bring up in the house meeting, but absolutely everyone is thinking: if someone's partner is essentially living here, should they be contributing to the bills? According to surveys, 36% of renters believe the answer is yes.

A partner who sleeps over enough to have a dedicated drawer and a preferred shelf in the fridge has, at some point, crossed a line from guest into de facto housemate and should be treated accordingly. The other 64% have either not thought about it, decided it's not worth the argument, or are themselves the partner with the dedicated drawer and a strong personal interest in the current arrangement continuing unchanged.

Cracked's list of the best fictional roommates includes Buster Bluth, the king of not being seen or heard, Buffy Summers, for her muscles and the home security aspect, Charlie Harper, who employs both a maid and a cook, and Molly Weasley, who cleans and cooks and asks for nothing in return, which is frankly unrealistic.

Our own list would add Chandler Bing, who pays his half on time and compensates for everything else with humour, Jessica Day from New Girl, who is chaotic but well-meaning and would absolutely remember to buy washing up liquid, and Samwise Gamgee, who cooks, gardens, asks for very little, and would follow you into a volcano without being asked twice.

Every list has a ceiling, and for the title of worst roommate in recorded history, the ceiling belongs to Dorothea Puente. Operating a Sacramento boarding house in the 1980s, Puente presented herself as a warm, grandmotherly landlady who took in vulnerable elderly tenants and cared for them with apparent devotion. What she was actually doing was sedating them, offing them, burying them in the backyard.

She then continued to cash their Social Security checks. At least seven tenants met this fate before authorities eventually dug up her garden and put the pieces together. Puente was convicted of three of these acts in 1993. The lesson here, if one is needed, is that "seemed really nice at the viewing" has historically been a limited screening process, and perhaps further questions are warranted.