On paper, living with your best friend feels like the obvious move. You already know each other, you have the same jokes, and it seems safer than a stranger. But in shared housing, who you like is not the same as how you live. Confusing the two is how a lot of students lose both a home and a friendship in the same year.
Friendship Compatibility vs. Living Compatibility
Friendship is built on shared experiences, humour, and emotional safety. Living compatibility is built on routines, boundaries, and tiny habits. You can adore someone's personality and still struggle with their lifestyle.
Research on roommate relationships consistently shows that conflict usually stems from misaligned expectations around privacy, cleanliness, and noise rather than "personality clashes" (e.g., see housing conflict summaries in American college counselling reports; American Psychological Association, 2019). In other words, it is the system of your shared life that cracks first, not the friendship itself.
Examples of where this difference shows up:
- You love your friend's chaotic "always down" energy - until it is 1:30 a.m. and they are still talking on speaker while you have an exam.
- You bond over not being "fussy" - until you realise their definition of "not dirty" includes plates sitting in the sink for three days.
- You both say you are "chill" - but one of you needs alone time after class while the other wants the door open and the music on.
How Tiny Habits Quietly Ruin Good Friendships
Most roommate breakups do not start with a huge betrayal. They start with micro-frictions:
- They "forget" to take the bin out again.
- Their partner is over four nights a week, unspoken.
- They snooze five alarms every morning while you lie there, awake and furious, pretending you are fine.
Over time, your brain stops reading those things as "habits" and starts reading them as messages: my time is less valuable, my sleep does not matter, they do not respect me. That shift is where resentment lives.
Because you are friends, you might wait longer to say something. You laugh it off, then vent to other people, then explode over a cereal bowl that is not really about the cereal bowl at all.
The Conversation Most Friends Skip (And Regret)
If you are even thinking about living with a close friend, you need one honest conversation that is not about decor, neighbourhoods, or who gets which wardrobe. You need to talk about:
- Sleep: Typical bed and wake times, alarms, noise tolerance, and exam-season expectations.
- Cleanliness: How long dishes sit in the sink, how often bathrooms are cleaned, and what "messy" actually means to each of you.
- Guests: How often friends and partners stay over, and how you feel about unplanned sleepovers.
- Study vs. social: Whether home is more of a study base or a social hub.
If that feels awkward to bring up, you are not alone - but awkward is cheaper than a broken lease or a broken friendship.
Using Domu Match to "Interview" Your Best Friend
Instead of trying to invent all the hard questions yourself, you can let Domu Match do the heavy lifting. Our questionnaire is built around behaviours, not labels. Rather than asking, "Are you clean?" or "Are you chill?" we ask:
- "How long do dishes usually stay in your sink?"
- "How many nights per week are you comfortable with overnight guests?"
- "What time do you typically go to bed on weekdays?"
- "When you are stressed, do you prefer company or space?"
Here is one simple way to reality-check your friendship as a living situation:
- Both of you create profiles on Domu Match. Answer as if you were matching with a stranger. No "aspirational" answers.
- Compare your compatibility report together. Look at where you align - and where you really do not.
- Talk about the gaps. Could you actually compromise on those, or would that compromise make one of you quietly miserable?
- Decide from the data, not from guilt. If the report shows major clashes on sleep, guests, or cleanliness, it might be kinder to each other to stay friends, not roommates.
Our explainable matching makes this easier: you can see why you are a strong or weak match across multiple categories, instead of staring at one mysterious score. Learn more about how that works on our how it works page.
If You Decide Not to Live Together
Saying, "I love you, but I do not think we should live together" can feel brutal in the moment. But in the long term, it is usually an act of care.
One helpful script:
"I really value our friendship, and I do not want to put it under pressure. When I filled in my Domu Match profile I realised I need really strict quiet hours and fewer guests than you enjoy. I would rather keep enjoying living with you during the day than risk resenting you at night."
You are not rejecting the person. You are respecting the reality that your nervous systems, study needs, and living habits might not be compatible in one small space.
Friendship First, Housing Second
Your home is infrastructure for your wellbeing and your degree. Your friends are infrastructure for your sanity. Protecting one by sacrificing the other is not a smart trade.
If you are planning next year's housing right now:
- Use Domu Match to test compatibility with your closest people, not just strangers.
- Let the questionnaire give you neutral language for difficult topics.
- Choose arrangements that protect your sleep, your grades, and your relationships.
You can explore compatible options - with friends or with new matches - on our matching page. You do not have to gamble your favourite friendship on guesswork.
References
American Psychological Association. (2019). College mental health: The costs of depression, anxiety and stress. In Monitor on Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/09/cover-college-mental-health