Confronting Sarah: Learning the power of establishing mutual agreements in a friendship

I took some time on how I was feeling and looked at the feedback I had received from my first blog post and decided to have a conversation with Sarah. I learned in my family studies class about the importance of rules in friendship, and realized even though we are roommates, Sarah and I had never actually come to an agreement on what we would like from one another as friends, but as two girls sharing an apartment. 

I decided before I communicated with her to ensure I was levelheaded to avoid any unnecessary drama and wrote out a list of what I was hoping we could work together to improve our friendship. That list included learning about how we both grew up, what chores we both love and hate, and how we should find solutions to our tension. 

When I first asked Sarah to talk, she was hesitant, which was fair considering how I had been treating her for the last while. I decided to go to her room to make her most comfortable and started to express how I felt our differences in living were tearing us apart. She had a look of relief on her face though when I continued talking and agreed that she saw how the tension was rising. I decided to go into how I was raised and how I was sued to everyone being forced to contribute towards keeping a clean space, which led to her admitting she grew up with a maid who took care of a lot of small chores, and she often forgot that she had to do those tasks now that we all shared a space. 

We ended up talking for a long time about how we grew up and the differences, but also all the similarities we shared. This led us to come up with the idea of creating a chore chart that we could bring up Eva and Sofia where we all could alternate between the easy and the more gross chores and avoid any more mindless altercations building up over easy to fix problems.

In the end I was grateful I decided to have this conversation with Sarah, as it allowed us to talk more about what we need from one another, and how vital communication is when you are friends with someone, but also when you are sharing a living space.