At school they always tell you that you should never flat with your friends. Whether or not that was the only parting advice my school offered, I'm not sure, but it seems to be the only thing that stuck.
Never flat with your friends; and that includes girl friends and boy friends. The theory goes that if you flat with your friends, then all of their irritating habits will rear their ugly heads and you will slowly but surely come to resent one another.
Having lived with both strangers and friends, I feel like I can say with some certainty that there is not a person on this earth who is not annoying to live with in some way or another.
I can also assert I am no more likely to tell a stranger that the way they turn the shower off every morning is driving me insane than I am to tell my friend that the chopping board doesn't belong in the knife drawer.
If you're prone to passive aggression, then living in a herd is probably not the thing for you anyway and it won't make an ounce of difference if you live with your friends or an elderly couple recently moved down from Timaru.
That said, I do wish my high school had warned me about open plan living quarters.
I lived with friends last year and I am living with friends again this year. I like my friends; my friends are fine and they put up with my most grating attributes.
For example, last night I took my jeans off in the middle of the living room and left them there until this evening and no one cried. Last year I put washing out to dry on a clothes rack and didn't put it away until we moved house four months later.
My only problem now is I feel as though I am literally never going to leave the house for anything but food and work ever again.
While I was living with most of the same people last year (people I enjoy spending the majority of my time with, anyway), the living room and kitchen in our flat were so horrible and isolated that we all spent almost every afternoon and evening alone in our rooms.
The living space in our new flat is so spacious and lovely that I am genuinely concerned I spent a lot of time decorating a room that I am never going to spend any time in.
My social life might as well be over.
Since we moved in we have spent every evening sitting in the living room watching documentaries and yoga DVDs and making collages.
Never before in my flatting life have I felt such a strong compulsion to sit doing arts and crafts. Never before have I considered an evening spent with a beer and a glue stick to be more entertaining than active socialising.
Our living arrangement is so good I feel as though I am falling off the face of the earth. I have other friends but unless they are willing to see me exclusively in my home, then I'm afraid we might lose touch.
We've joked about doing away with bedrooms altogether and designating each of the five rooms a specific activity.
This concept is worrying and a little creepy but to my eyes less disturbing than the idea that we all get matching yoga leotards and convert to an entirely kale based diet.
Perhaps it is only a matter of time before we all lose it completely and take to locking each other in our rooms.
Maybe we will provide teachers with the first example of why you should never live with your friends in an open and welcoming environment. It is highly likely, after all, that such a living arrangement is altogether too enjoyable.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
