Is it as bad as it sounds?

Hosting someone at your house is not always easy. It’s easy if they’re only staying at your house a couple of days, and they’re generally low-maintenance. I have never had a problem with my college friends crashing on my couch for a weekend, and that’s probably because they’re chill and young enough to not have back pain yet. Any longer arrangement can come with some baggage. If my parents came to my apartment for a week, I couldn’t just stick them on the couch and expect them to be happy with it. Different people have different needs.

If you’re housing someone in a particularly vulnerable place in their life, there are a lot of things you have to take into consideration. A woman who has just been divorced might feel kind of degraded if she has to sleep on a cot on the floor for months. Your brother who just lost his job might be too upset to do anything, let alone start a job search. I don’t mean to make excuses for people who aren’t pulling their weight when their family members have given them free housing. A lot of people believe that beggars can’t be choosers, and in many cases, that is true. 

A brother who let his divorced sister stay at his house recently posted on the r/PickAorB subreddit to figure out whether he was wrong for offering her a dog bed to sleep on during her stay.