If you’re sharing a home and you split every cost 50/50, shouldn’t you also get a say before someone else moves in?

Let me answer that for you: of course you have a say in that!

Living with roommates can get very tricky from time to time, and it requires a lot of patience when it comes to sharing a house with someone who’s nothing but a stranger. Although it can work fine and maybe you’ll end up with a very good friend, sometimes it can be the other way around and turn out to be the worst thing ever.

Because, let’s face it: we’re talking about living together. That’s the deepest form of privacy and intimacy someone has, and suddently start living with a random person can get weird. We all come from different backgrounds, and we all have been raised differently, so it’s normal to have some friction from time to time. There’s nothing that can’t be sorted out by talking calmly.

That being said… There’s a huge problem with the roommate’s attitude shared in the story posted in r/badroommates.

One thing is to have a problem caused by sharing a common space, cleaning disputes, maybe eating each other’s food… those things come from living together, and setting up a few rules usually fixes the issue. Now, moving someone new into the apartment and never consulting the other roommates about it, it’s a whole other game. 

If everyone is paying the same amount of money to live in that house, everyone has a say when it comes to letting someone new move in, or things like that. But deciding that your mother is going to be taking the only empty room that is used by everyone is not okay. I understand why the couple feels disrespected, especially because they are understanding, and if they had been presented with the mother’s situation, maybe they could’ve agreed to let her stay for a while… but they suddenly found out that someone new is moving in, and they all have to make room for her.