A reader writes:
I am moving to college.
I was planning to get a room with my roomate at the dorm. One of my friends was getting an apartment and asking us to move in with him. His girlfriend got assigned to a dorm to far away so he decided to move in with my friend and bring her along. I gotten random roomates the past two years and it has not been a fun experience, so I decided to move into the four bedroom apartment with them.
I signed the lease after much thought, or rather after trying to put it out of my head, but I started thinking about it again.
The apartment is a four bedroom four bathroom apartment, everyone’s is seperate. There is a communal eating, cooking, and sitting area. The couple will have seperate rooms, but they will most likely have sex. I am friends with both of them and I have made it very clear to them that I don’t like them having premarital sex. They are my good friends though and I love them both and spend a lot of time with them both.
Will living there be approving of those actions in what I do, even though I have said differently? I have talked to several of my friends and they claim it wouldn’t appear to them like I would be approving of their sex, but they are just college students, what do they know? The price of rent will not change for them if I move out, so I am not assisting in them living together.
I talked with a representative of the landlord and she said that it would not be a fee to chagne roomates for the next 11 days, but I would be stuck with three random people rather than just one random person.
Would living there be a sin, or will I have to change where I will live?
I talked with a representative of the landlord and she said that it would not be a fee to chagne roomates for the next 11 days, but I would be stuck with three random people rather than just one random person.Would living there be a sin, or will I have to change where I will live?
I don’t think that under these circumstances you would be signalling your approval of behavior they may or may not be engaging in. You’re not financially subsidizing their behavior, and you’ve made it clear that you don’t approve of their behavior. Consequently, I don’t think that you would be sinning by living there or that you would have to change where you live.
The individuals have separate bed rooms and even separate bathrooms. Physically, they are part of the same apartment only in the sense that they join a common living, dining, and cooking area.
Suppose that the landlord changed his rental policy and said, "Okay, now we’re going to consider each bedroom-bath unit a separate apartment, which will be rented separately to whoever wants to rent them. They’ll be advertised in the paper as separate apartments, and each apartment has access to the common living/dining/cooking area."
In that case could you rent one of the four apartments? Even if you knew that the inhabitants of two of the others were engaging in non-marital sex or some other immoral activity?
It seems to me that you could. If you live in an apartment complex, you have little control over what others in the complex do along these lines, and your presence is not taken as an endorsement of their behavior.
But that’s precisely the situation we’re talking about in your case, only with the semantic lines redrawn.
There is also the consideration that you’d be taking a significant chance with three random roommates. The random roommates (being typical college students) is also significantly likely to engage in sex or other immoral behavior.
I know all about how the random roomate chance can go. When I was living in the dorms in college, I had
three roommates, one of whom was a dud (and wanted to use the dorm room
for immoral behavior), one of whom was crazy (and who threatened violence, promting me to insist on being assigned to a new dorm room), and the last of whom (a friend) was fine. In other words: The two random roommates I had in the dorms were bad experiences and it wasn’t until I moved in with a friend that the situation evened out.
You’re not talking about the dorms at this point, but you are talking about random roommates, and that’s a significant risk that may not improve anything and that, in fact, might land you in a worse situation.
At least with your friends you have reason to believe that you can live peaceably with them, even if two of them are engaging in behavior that they shouldn’t. If you switch to three random college students, at least two of them are likely to be engaging in comparable immoral behavior.
All things considered, I therefore don’t think that you are morally obligated to insist on switching and getting new roommates.
20
Ah, memories of college life. I was fortunate in my roomate assignments my freshman and early sophomore years. After that a room opened up in the fraternity house and I was able to room with one of my best friends for my last two years.