Whose boxes are these?!
When I was in college I had a roommate–and she’s still a friend, believe it or not–who took a long, long, loooong time unpacking her boxes when we moved into our off-campus house. It bugged me. Since I was only about 20 years old (this was a great long time ago), I decided to try a passive-aggressive approach: I’d see the boxes in the kitchen and call out to no one in particular, “Whose boxes are these?!”
It didn’t work. My roommate saw what was going on and responded in a very healthy way to my maneuver: she slowed down her unpacking and let the boxes sit in the kitchen far longer than she had first intended.
Now that I’m a little older and wiser, I think I know the answer to my question about the boxes: whose boxes are these? Mine. They’re mine. They weren’t bothering my roommate. They were bothering me. To her they physically were boxes, but they didn’t make much difference to her. She’d get to them eventually. So they’re mine–mine in the sense that I’m the one getting angry about them, I’m the one trying to manipulate my roommate, and I’m the one who needs to figure out a more effective way to ask for what I want.
If you find yourself doing this kind of thing, I hope this story reassures you that it’s common. Most of us resort to passive-aggressive games from time to time. (Especially when we’re talking about college roommates.) But the answer to your questions, your maneuvers, your use of sarcasm or subtlety or sarcastic hints to get what you want–the answer is you. It is up to you to think through what you want from others, own up to your own behavior, and be the better roommate, or partner, or friend.
I could have just told my roommate the boxes were getting underfoot, and ask if it’s OK for me to move them into her room. Now, wouldn’t that have been a lot easier?!
December 29th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
I love this post! We really do need to own up to what we want, don’t we? Now how do I work through the fact that my partner is always on the computer?