My housemate, who was a friend of mine for a number of years, moved out recently and although we talked about her moving not affecting our friendship, it has in a number of ways.
A little background info first.
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I was already in the house. I had moved here with my best friend and we were living here for a year before BF lost her job and a lot of her confidence. She wanted to move to Holland and I encouraged her to go. She's been there since and still talks on a regular basis to both of us.
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Housemate (we'll call her T) wanted to move in so she could be closer to college. She had no job and her parents were paying her rent for her, but she intended to find a job and pay her own way. To reduce the strain on her budget, I offered to pay part of her rent in exchange for her cleaning the house. She assured me that she was a neat freak so she'd do it easily.
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I'm mildly disabled, I have a job that accommodates my special needs but I find certain things difficult. I spend a lot of time, sometimes the entire day, in bed and I've had to be helped off of chairs or escorted to the doctors on bad days. This is why I asked if she could do the housework, though I'd always do some myself.
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I have a lot of stuff, I have been called a hoarder on occasion but I'm more of a clutterbug. I do a big clearout every now and then and despite the clutter, I can't stand dirt. I'm very bleach-happy.
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The house is very small, it's a very old Coronation Streetish two-up-two-down job. The heating system is great and it's a matter of minutes from the city centre, plus there's local shops and the like close by.
Everything was okay at first, we got along very well. We'd do yoga in front of the TV, we cooked for each other, we'd go out to the cinema. But after a while, some of T's issues started coming to the surface. She's quite severely overweight and has badly thinning hair, which led me to suspect she had a thyroid problem. As I see doctors on a regular basis, I firmly believe that if you have a problem that could be sorted out with medication or therapy you should go for it. But when I talked to her about it, she got defensive and stormed off to sulk. She has yet to see a doctor about it but her hair and weight situation has not improved and she hates the way she looks.
The cleaning, which we had agreed on was not getting done. She said she felt bad about it and it was due to being busy with college, so I let it go. She never paid any bills but ran up our electricity by leaving lights and computers on all night and turning on the heat for hours when she was staying in one room that had a storage heater. She burned the bottoms out of some of my cookware due to not being able to cook pasta or rice properly, and when she did clean it was generally pretty half-assed. A lot of it was just tidying stuff away, including a lot of craft materials that I would have been currently using. She never dusted or mopped. She also threw out things that I was using without consulting me, ate my food and sometimes cleaned the bathroom (right next door to my bedroom) in the wee hours of the morning when I was in bed. She had a tendency to call me to ask a question when i was either asleep or trying to fall asleep.
As time went on, her behavior got more worrying. I strongly suspect that she was taking some of my medication for her period pains, which she always told me were excruciating (but not to the point that you should need the stuff I was taking). Her room seemed to have a lot of fruit flies in it which she blamed on the window in her room she always kept open (with the light on all the time, I can see it attracting moths but not fruit flies). Once or twice I went in there and found rotted pieces of fruit or mugs half-full of stagnant liquid. I don't think anyone who has rotten food in their bedrooms can call themselves a neat freak. She asked me if she could adopt a cat because my cat was nervous in her presence and she wanted her own pet. I agreed if she took total responsibility for it, which lasted all of five minutes when she got it. The cat gravitated towards me because she was away so much and ignored it. One day she got so angry about this that while I was lying in bed nursing a bad flare-up she was walking around the house shouting about being second-best.
Finally, it all came to a head when she decided to move out. She had arranged to view a place and move in the following week before she decided to tell me about this. It came on the back of us getting three very big bills and me asking for her to contribute to them since she'd been using the utilities just as much as me. She seemed to get this idea that she could live in a bigger place but pay less money if she moved in with her other friends. It was a very unrealistic goal, but whenever she discussed it she kept slamming the house we were living in, and talking about how much better somewhere else would be.
In the end, it fell through. Her friend moved in somewhere behind her back and after all the awkwardness T decided to move back in with her parents, where she is now miserable. She also has a new boyfriend who gives me the creeps big time. She took her cat with her when she left but she had dropped hints about me keeping him before and is now trying to get me to take him back. I'm currently living in the house by myself and much happier for it, but it's difficult managing my illness without the extra help.
My BF has talked to her since she moved out, and is really angry with her on my behalf. Apparently T complained that she found the house impossible to clean (she didn't say too much more, because she knew BF would take my side) but I've had no problems keeping it clean. It takes me six hours more than the average person to clean it, but I still do it. Also, she left her bedroom in the most hideous, foul-smelling state.
Even writing this, I feel like I'm being hard on her and I know I'm not that easy to live with. But I just feel angry with T and really want nothing to do with her anymore, even though I assured her we could stay friends afterwards. So, am I being unreasonable?