More Than Half Of Women & 3/4 Of Men Would Date Their Roommate—Would You?

While living with roommates into your late twenties and thirties isn’t really ideal, it is a necessity for millions of people living in expensive cities where rent on single-occupancy apartments or houses is too damn high. But what makes an ideal housemate? A new study by AreaVibes delved into the issue to find out.

1. A lot of people live with roommates. As of 2017, a whopping 79 million adults (that’s about 32% of the world’s population, just to put that in perspective) lived with roommates. Compared to 2004, when 27% lived with roommates, that’s a pretty significant increase.
2. Most people would rather live with someone of the opposite sex. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, 68% of men and 63% of women admitted that they’d rather live with someone of the opposite sex. Whether it’s because they wanted to avoid drama or mess, co-ed cohabitation seems to be pretty popular.
3. Women are pretty desirable housemates for guys for some hilarious reasons. More than half of men (57%) said that living with a woman was advantageous because the house was guaranteed to smell better, while 74% love when women who cook leave them leftovers. They also enjoy watching TV/movies and listening to music together as well as having female roommates who bring their friends over. Not hard to understand that bit! Incidentally, women’s most popular reason for wanting a guy roommate are the same—they like leftovers, a clean house, and someone to binge watch Netflix with!
4. Guy roommates do get on women’s nerves, of course. The biggest offenses/annoyances of male roommates according to the women surveyed include not cleaning up after themselves (87% for the kitchen, 84% for the bathroom), finding their hairs in the bathroom (72-74%), and leaving the toilet seat up (66%). Men have the same complaints on similar levels about female roommates, just for the record.
5. More men than women would get romantic with an opposite-sex roommate. For guys, 74% find their female roommates attractive. For women, that number drops to a still considerable 57%. One out of three people said they’d gotten sexual with their roommate, which kinda seems like bad news to me, but oh well.