Lazy housemates will always be better than uptight ones

Before you actually try and do it, picking your housemates seems like one of those necessary if dull tasks you can just do on autopilot. The right shout to make seems obvious. Yes, I will live with the squad. Yes, please put the bills in the name of the self-anointed flat mum. Yes, I’d rather you didn’t tell Mad Barry the address.

You’re hundreds of miles away from the satisfying order and familiar boundaries of home. Surely you won’t be driven to insanity by the well-kept, the softly-spoken, the hardworking? Wrong: cliches don’t become cliches by accident. It literally is always the quiet ones who turn out to be a little bit Norman Bates, a little bit Gillian McKeith, a little bit “I’ve just buried your Jack Russell under the patio because you didn’t take the bins out”. Lazy housemates may seem like a nightmare – after all, they never do any washing up and wear the same outfit for weeks at a time – but if it’s a choice between someone never sure of the day of the week and a domineering neat freak then you’ve always got to pick the former. Why?

Because you can have parties whenever you like

But who is going to clean up after?

Someone whose life consists of watching badly-subtitled YouTube documentaries about 9/11 is, naturally, much more receptive to the idea of fifty people absolutely off their cake having the run of your house for the night than someone who still owns a pencil case at 21. Spontaneity is the soul of a decent party, but it’s also the enemy of the anally retentive.

While you’re imagining a room alive with people you’ve never met, £1 tins of Polish lager and the Soundcloud favourites of someone’s fit cousin, the uptight housemate pictures a room empty but for a table with half a big bag of Kettle Chips crisps in a plastic bowl, several two litre bottles of Tango and George Ezra playing on a laptop. By contrast, if it took your housemate getting a court summons before they paid their council tax, then you’ll have the run of the place – and they’ll be grateful for never having to plan anything.

They won’t care if you start sleeping with a mutual friend

The more uptight someone is, the more hysterical their fixation on maintaining the sanctity of their friendship circle. They love keeping their mates close – all the better for honing their sociopathic approach to human relationships with. If you end up in a seminar or working with their fit mate, forget it. The long-awaited club pull will almost immediately give way to the weepy bedside intervention from your housemate as they leave the next morning and a bitter propaganda war. Your reputation will disappear in a cloud of rumour, innuendo and spin as they desperately try to ward you off a coursemate they don’t even like that much.

On the other hand, your lazy housemate will deal with having to hear your dirty, arrythmic rutting in the same way they deal with every other awkward situation life has thrown their way: they won’t. There’ll be no agonising mid-microwave chat about whether you’ve had an STI check, no confrontations about leading people on, no uncomfortable lingering awkwardness when you eventually fuck up. They probably won’t even notice.

You won’t drown in passive aggressive post-it notes

Mmmm fetid x

It starts innocently enough, the post-it above the fetid sink getting up in your grill with annoying justification. “HI ALL,” barks its scratched, strangulated prose. “THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. AS ADULTS, *PLEASE* CAN YOU HAVE THE DECENCY TO WASH STUFF AS SOON AS IT IS USED. THIS IS SO UNHYGIENIC! I WILL DRAW UP A ROTA IF I HAVE TO. THX, JEN”.

But this is just the beginning: Jen’s matronly diktat leaves a harrowing trail of passive aggression in its wake. “TOBY’S MILK, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”  wails the weirdly neat Sharpie tattoo on the four-pinter you’re drinking straight out of. Soon the bin gets wallpapered with post-its: “ANYONE. FANCY. EMPTYING. ME?. :-)”, a message written with a grubbily flirtatious tone you hadn’t thought Liam – Liam the geographer, Liam who wore a pair of walking boots to the freshers’ ball, Liam who likes the music of John Denver and only the music of John Denver – capable of.

You’ll never get this grinding, pastel-coloured autocracy with a lazy housemate. If they haven’t had the energy to put their sixth form leavers’ hoodie into the washing machine since 2014, then they definitely won’t have enough in the locker to sustain a bitter war of attrition over the washing up. They won’t even own a pen. Sure, they might eat rotisserie chicken straight out the bag, but at least it means they don’t care about the state of the sink.

It’s perfect preparation for living on your own

Surely someone else will clean it

Having an uptight bore as your personal jailor means being straitjacketed into someone else’s routine, though it at least gives you the security of being annoyed consistently and at regular intervals. Everything will be done, usually for you or by you, in the same excruciatingly safe way and at the same impossibly sluggish pace.

Don’t expect this hands-on approach from a lazy housemate. Your landlord won’t be on speed-dial, nobody will know your statutory rights and anything and everything that goes wrong – be it a broken toaster, bust lightbulb or dripping tap – will initially be apocalyptic. And you’re the only one who’s going to step up and fix it. You’ll have to learn how to handle these problems sooner or later, so may as well get a head-start now.

You’ll never have to act like a civilised human being

Choose forgetting to take your bins out until you’ve got mice. Choose getting a Domino’s five nights a week. Choose staying in bed ’til 4pm without having your door knocked on. Choose not having to live with people who insist on shopping, cooking and eating together. Choose not getting into shouting matches over fridge space. Choose rotting away with a 2:2 at the end of it all. Choose doing whatever the hell you want.