Personal Space and Quiet time:
When living with friends you will not have any privacy or quiet time, and the closer the friends you are the worse it will be. You may not realize it now but you are not always in the mood to be with your friends sometimes you may want to just sit in your room and relax, and if a friend called you up you could say you were busy but if you live with a friend they will be knocking on the door and bothering you all the time, and good friends will often borrow things of yours without asking you. Where as someone you found online will usually leave you alone when your door is closed except for something important.

My old roommate would always go into my room to borrow my things no matter how much I asked her not to, and every time I asked she would get insulted because it was her so it should be ok with me.

Money:
When living with a roommate you found in the news paper or on the internet, the person will be more considerate to you then a friend may be when it comes to paying the bill. A friend may ask you to pay it and they will pay you back in “just a few days”, but a stranger will not burden you with this. They will make sure they have the money to pay the bills.

One of my friends would always spend his rent or bill money in online casinos playing blackjack, or in poker rooms online. I like to play some poker online just as much as anyone else but I always made sure to not gamble in an online casino with my rent money. If I was short on money I would not gamble, but I would never allow myself to not have the money to pay my share of the bills.

Cleaning:
When I have had roommates who were not my friends, they always made sure to clean up after themselves, but friends will leave things around because “it’s cool”, they will get to them eventually.

One friend of mine hated anything being left in the sink for any amount of time and if it was left fore more then an hr or 2 she would complain, so me and my other roommate started cleaning the dishes as soon as we were done with them, only to find that she would leave her dishes sometimes for days and when questioned about it she said that her seeing our dishes bothered her but her dishes did not bother her so it was ok for her to leave them.

Power Consumption:
Unless your roommate has lots of money and lets face it if they had cash they would not need a roommate, then they will be looking to save money and not want to waste money on electricity, and once you agree on things like using the dryer or air conditioning two roommates who meet online or from an add in the paper will usually respect the rules better then two friends will. Friends will usually bend the rules, like leaving the computer on all day or running the ac all night.

The girl I was friends with would always go out and leave her AC on and when I called her to tell her she would just say she forgot and would try to remember, but the next day she would do it again. She would also go into my room and turn on my AC and the one in her room to cool down the rest of the house when she was home watching TV alone.

This article just points out the most common problems I hade when I tried to live with my friends. This is no way means that you can not get a friend who will respect you enough not to do these things or that you will not find a stranger that won’t do all the same things.