How roommates are like Hell's Kitchen

The other night while watching Hell’s Kitchen I began to think about how much this show (which I am a big fan of) was sort of like the roommate experience for some students. For those unfamiliar with the show, it is a reality TV program where 18 aspiring chefs live and work together in hopes of being the one chef left at the end. The winning chef is given $250,000 and a job by Chef Gordon Ramsey.   There are of course many other elements to the show, but the basic drama of the show rests on how complete strangers are thrown into a living and working situation and having to perform in very stressful situations. This stress leads to multiple arguments and lots of drama between the aspiring chefs.  Small things, like how someone looks at another person, or if someone does not answer back fast enough, often lead to name calling and back stabbing. From a rational point of view this is all way over the top, however, I am confident for the people in Hell’s Kitchen these are very real feelings and their decision (and it is a decision) to scream and fight with one another is really the only way they feel they can be heard in this pressure cooker (pun intended) of a reality show.

I can see some striking parallels between this show and how some people react to roommate conflicts. While not all, in fact very few, roommates end up with some kind of major conflict, they do occur. In many cases, just like on Hell’s Kitchen, the issue is more about how someone responded to some action or that person’s perception of being disrespected than the specific action that started the entire problem. This is a major point, because the offending roommate will often claim they don’t understand what the big deal is. For example I worked with roommates who fought when one roommate used the other person’s cell phone to make a call. The roommate whose phone was used was very upset that her roommate had disrespected her by just assuming she could use her phone. The roommate who made the call could not understand (at least that is what she claimed) why this was such a big deal because the call did not cost anything and she did not mean to upset the other roommate. In the end the roommate who made the call failed to grasp the issue was not the phone call at all, it was the assumption by her that she could just use her roommate's stuff without the courtesy of asking first.  Just like Hell’s Kitchen, the roommates were fighting not over the original issue, but over the issue of being respected. This inability to agree on what the conflict was about became the most frustrating part of the conflict for both of them.

If there is any advice I can give people when planning on being roommates, it is to be respectful. This means you have to respect that while you are individuals, just like the 18 chefs in Hell’s Kitchen, you are interdependent with your roommate (suitemates). This interdependence requires you to at times think beyond just yourself and recognize your actions have an impact on someone else. You have the choice of what kind of impact this will be. If you end up in a fight with your roommate, first stop to make sure you are both fighting over the same thing. While you think the issue might be the phone call, your roommate is really upset that you did not respect her enough to ask before using her things. 

Ok James…. Let’s open Hell’s Kitchen.