‘Not to be bitchy, but’: Setting boundaries with your roommate
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
A guide to quiet negotiations, awkward conversations and small boundaries to survive dorm life — A.K.A. the art of speaking up!
Photo by Vernon Demir/The Barnard Bulletin
March 10, 2026
There’s a very specific kind of mental gymnastics that comes with sharing a dorm room with someone you met on Instagram over the summer. You start hopeful, maybe even excited. You buy matching mugs together, draft a roommate agreement, and pretend you’re the kind of people who will have fairy lights, thriving plants, and a perfectly choreographed cleaning schedule.
Then reality kicks in.
Suddenly, you’re negotiating things you’ve never before had to say out loud: the lights being turned on at 6 a.m., the hair shed on the carpet, the friend who’s “just stopping by” and somehow stays for four hours. And because you are polite, every time you want to bring something up you hear yourself start with the same anxious disclaimer:
“Not to be bitchy, but…”
Not to be bitchy, but who are all these people in our room?Not to be bitchy, but your laundry basket has spilled over to my side.
Not to be bitchy, but can we talk about your blender use at dawn?
Students rarely talk about how awkward it actually is to set boundaries with a person you sleep eight feet away from. But everyone is silently doing the same thing you are: swallowing tiny annoyances until they snowball into a screaming match at 11 p.m.
Juliana Chavis (BC ’29) recalled that she spent an entire month pretending she didn’t care that her roommate left piles of clothes everywhere. “I kept telling myself, ‘Oh, like it’s fine, it’s fine,’ until one day I snapped and cleaned the whole room while blasting sad music.” When she finally brought it up — calmly, directly, and without the dramatic soundtrack — her roommate just said, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize.” Problem solved. Months of misery saved.
That’s the thing no one tells you: half of roommate issues aren’t personal. They’re just mismatched expectations. You think the desk is sacred study territory; they think it’s a community gaming center. You assume “quiet at night” meant silence; they assume it meant “no live concerts but Netflix is fine.” Most people aren’t trying to be difficult — they just don’t know your definition of normal.
Then there’s the sleep issue, which every freshman swears they’re fine with until your roommate’s alarm ringtone becomes a new form of PTSD. Sophia Maragos (BC ’29) says she nearly lost her mind: “Every morning, her coffee machine was my alarm. Like we were living in a Blue Bottle!” It took exactly one honest, non-dramatic conversation to fix. No one cried, no one fought, no one transferred.
Guests are an even touchier subject. No one wants to be the villain who says, “Your friend cannot be here,” yet everyone wants to be the person who gets to sleep in their own room without the interruption of loud voices and laughter. The solution, shockingly, is not suffering in silence. It’s just talking about it before it becomes a thing.
If all of this sounds horribly awkward, that’s because it is. But it’s also normal. Every Barnard and Columbia student I have talked to has said the same thing: the moment they actually voiced their boundaries, their roommate dynamic improved instead of worsened. The room felt calmer. They felt less irritated, and the other person felt relieved that they weren’t accidentally annoying someone into oblivion.
Setting boundaries isn’t about being controlling, dramatic, or — yes — bitchy. It’s about protecting the space you both have to live in without slowly starting to resent each other. It’s about choosing honesty over passive-aggressive sticky notes, about remembering that being a good roommate isn’t about never having conflict, and about handling it with clarity instead of chaos.
So the next time you feel that familiar phrase crawling up your throat: “Not to be bitchy, but…”
Take a breath.
Get rid of the disclaimer.
And try: “Hey, can we talk about something real quick?”
It’s softer, healthier, and it’s a whole lot better than Googling “Is it socially acceptable to sleep in Milstein?” at 2 a.m.