If you decide not to live with friends when room draw rolls around, your remaining options are: live with an enemy, live with a rando or live alone. The first two options are obviously not great. Sharing a room with someone you don't know is a gamble, and things can get awkward when you don't know someone's habits and preferences or when you don't like them. Living alone can be relaxing and regenerative, but it is usually never described as "fun." At Dartmouth, I have lived exclusively with friends, and you could say my culminating experience in this area is the 10-person off-campus house I'm sharing this year with nine friends and the occasional squirrel. Maybe I'm overcompensating for my childhood as a "lonely only" whose primary playmates were her cat and mother, but I think that living with friends is the only way to live in college for the following reasons:
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You can see your friends without making an effort. If you live with one friend or a couple of friends, there is automatically less coordination involved in getting together, since you know you'll see each other in the room/house. Keeping up with friends can be difficult at Dartmouth. Maybe you don't see each other over the summer, or you have a different D-Plan or conflicting schedules during a term. Living together makes it easy to rekindle that flame or just keep it burning strong. Often some of the best conversations and dance parties arise organically when you're just hanging out in your room, which brings me to my next reason...
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Pillow talk. Pillow talk isn't just a lovers' pastime. It's a sacrosanct pre-bedtime ritual with your roomies, useful for hashing out your hopes (for good muffins at Collis tomorrow), dreams (that one day, senior girls will live in a world without the existence of the Dartmouth X) and fears (rush). When you and your friend are both stretched out on your twin XL beds on the edge of your dream worlds, the talk gets real.
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Honesty. Hopefully your friendship is built on honesty, and this honesty is very useful when it comes to your living situation. You and your friend can be honest with each other about when the room is too messy or the music is too loud without having to tiptoe through the politics of compromise with someone you don't know. A lack of honesty is what makes rooming situations unpleasant.
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Parties. If you're living with a friend, the two of you probably have lots of mutual friends. Yay! You can have them over for a party!
Some people say that living with a good friend is an easy way to ruin the friendship. However, with all the sharing you'll do during pillow talk, you and your friend(s) will grow closer than ever before, even if your living styles are different. Besides, who really wants to live alone, or with a stranger? Did you ever watch those previews for "The Roommate?"
