TOOLBAG TUESDAY

Both sexes can be judgmental about where someone they’re dating lives.

In my experience, it can either be the best, most comforting place in the world with the most comfortable couch ever, or make your skin crawl with its black fuzz growing in the toilet and fossilized dog shit on the floor and I’ve been scared to walk around barefoot before.

But cleanliness isn’t the only thing people judge your habitat on:

They judge you on your living circumstances as well.

“Wait, you have SIX roommates???”

“I have to pay a dollar for the toll bridge every time I want to go over to your house?”

Or, the most common, yet most hated-on circumstance:

“You live with your parents??”

There are lots of reasons why people in their 20s and 30s still live with their parents.

They could be broke, or don’t want to be broke. They could be paying off their credit card(s) or be filming a public access show in the basement (Wayne Campbell.)

They could be living there temporarily because they were living with their significant other and that bitch kept the apartment.

Or escaping to their parents’ because their roommate turned out to be crazy and they’re waiting out their lease.

Or, maybe they live with their parents because they just moved back to New Orleans from South Carolina and still needed to pay mortgage on the house they own with their twin sister in South Carolina until she found a suitable roommate. (For example.)

This is why it’s important to ask someone you’re dating why they live with their parents, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Because while you may think they’re being a huge baby by raiding mom and dad’s fridge every night, you could be wrong.

Jonathan was wrong about my friend Elisa.

They dated for just a few weeks and despite the fact that he spent the night already, she wasn’t that into him.

Which made it even more annoying that HE ended things with HER.

But it wasn’t so much the fact that he ended things, it was his reasoning:

“Because you live with your mom.”

“WHAT?” Elisa said. “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”

If Jonathan had bothered to ask, Elisa would have told him that she was living with her mom and little brother because her mom couldn’t cover the mortgage by herself.

She would have explained that she paid her mom rent — not even a discounted rent — for her room and bathroom because if she didn’t, her mom would have to get a stranger/roommate to move in and that’s not something you put a high school boy through.

...that she put off dreams of having her own apartment and being closer to work because she’s committed to helping her family and is super effing selfless.

OK, ASSHOLE???

Yet, Elisa sat in silence on the phone and never explained her living situation. She was suddenly embarrassed and wanted to hang up immediately.

But Jonathan continued to talk.

“Yea, the other night when I spent the night I was TOTALLY freaked out knowing your MOM was upstairs...” he said.

If he had bothered to ask about that, too, Elisa would have told him how her mom was one of those young moms who doesn’t care that her gentlemen friends spend the night, gives her all the privacy in the world and is actually way cooler than most roommates. And he didn't even meet her!

But Jonathan continued on with his speech.

“Because, see, I need someone who has their own place...”

Elisa rolled her eyes.

Was he somehow better than she was with HIS own place, despite the fact that it was boy-scuzzy with whisker hairs on the sink, well-read magazines with curling pages on the bathroom floor and an oddball roommate who exclusively drank vodka and sprite while watching Braveheart on loop?

Who is this person that speaks to me as though I needed his advice?

But she didn’t say anything.

“Ok, well, sorry,” she said. And hung up.

But she wasn’t sorry about anything.

Sorry I’m a good person by helping my mom and brother out? Sorry my family is counting on me to pitch in during a shitty economy?

Perhaps it was a sorry to Jonathan.

Sorry your toilet is covered in black fuzz.

Enjoy your roommate.

-Jenny