#1428: How do I convince my sister that I don’t want to be roommates?
Ahoy, Captain! My sister and I best friends, absolutely. We get along great and rarely have real fights. She's looking to buy a house or a condo or a co-op or whatever she can afford. We live in a VHCOL area and she's not having any luck. She's sugges…
My sister and I best friends, absolutely. We get along great and rarely have real fights. She's looking to buy a house or a condo or a co-op or whatever she can afford. We live in a VHCOL area and she's not having any luck.
She's suggested we go in for a place together. I don't want to for a couple of reasons. First, I want my own space without any family; if that means roommates, so be it. Second, she's super private and wouldn't want people visiting. I'd want to be able to invite friends and lovers (which is currently an issue anyway!) over to host and hang out and be a real space for community. Third, she absolutely wants to stay near the family home and I absolutely don't want that. I don't even want to stay in the area long term, but even if I did, I'd want to be further from home.
She's starting to kind of push the idea. she thinks I'm silly for not putting down roots. She thinks it's not practical to rent ever. she doesn't believe that I'll really leave home ever and I'm just delaying the inevitable, especially since i make a little more money and together, we might get an okay place.
how do I make her realize that I really, really, really do not want to move in together? An apartment might be okay, but she wants a forever home and I am not ready for anything forever right now.
Yours truly, A Sister, Not A Roommate
Dear Sister Not Roommate,
I have good news: You don't ever have to convince your sister that you don't want to be roommates or that your reasons are good enough. So long as you don't actually buy property together or become roommates, you get to win this argument forever. The boundary isn't where you convinced her it was, it's where you decided to put it. As long as your actions maintain it, it will hold.
Bad news, I know you want to get your sister to a point where she understands and agrees with your point of view so that she'll stop pressuring you, but I'm not sure how realistic that is based on her behavior so far. You haven't been ambiguous or unclear, and she's still going strong.
From now on, if you can stop her before she gets going, do it. "Let me interrupt you right there. I already said no and I don't want to rehash this again. New topic!"
If you can't successfully divert her, be blunt, boring and consistent in your replies. Stop giving reasons or arguing your case. It didn't work, and now the answer to why you don't want to be roommates is because you don't want to be roommates.
"But we'd be able to afford so much more if we pooled our funds." "But I don't want to."
"But renting is silly when you could just buy something!" "But I don't want to live with you or buy real estate right now."
"But come on, you're not really gonna leave home, are you? You'll end up living with me eventually, so why not just do it now?" "Because I don't want to."
"But you know this is a great idea! Why are you being like this?" "Because I don't want to live with you. What is unclear about that?"
"But we're best friends!" "That doesn't mean I want to live with you. We can be close friends who don't live together."
"Why are you being like this?" "Why are you pushing me to do something you already know that I don't want to do?"
Try changing the subject again once you shut her down. If you try a couple of times and she won't let you, cut the conversation short. It will feel very awkward and mean to cut a call or visit short without achieving some kind of resolution. It's also already extremely awkward to deal with someone who doesn't believe you about your plans for your own life and forces you to keep having the same argument again and again! There's no removing awkwardness here, just redistributing it more equitably.
Pro-tip: Delete any real estate listings she sends you on sight, without responding. If you do this, she's probably gonna pout and claim that she just wants your opinion or for you to see how cute some place is. Don't fall for it. People who avidly want to move in with you tend to "just" spam you with adorable real estate listings the same way Jane Austen's Emma "just" yeeted all the single people in her town at each other's faces and I "just" sent Mr. Awkward photo after photo of adoptable kittens the summer we adopted Daniel and Henrietta: We're hoping you'll fall in love. There's no talking to people when they're in this frame of mind unless you're willing to fall in love with whatever they're in love with, be it an affordable place built for two with a decent Walk Score or the idea of love or a kitten named Daniel Striped Tiger with a little watch Photoshopped onto his wrist. If you say "I like the kitchen in that one" or deploy a thumbs up emoji, she'll assume you meant "so that's the one I'd rather live in with you like I promised I would, let's get rolling on the paperwork" and you'll have to have the whole argument again from the beginning.
If at any point, she says, "Fine, I'll just stop sending you stuff since you obviously don't care!" that is a victory. Let her flounce! Do not snatch defeat from its jaws by relaxing your filters! You care about her, but she's made it so that you can't safely care about her housing search without a lot of friction for you. Hold the line and trust that she can find someone else to go Zillowing with.
The kittens in our old downstairs bathroom the first night we brought them home. SO TINY.
If she really won't let up, you are probably going to have to fight about it. That fight won't be about whether you should live together, because that's already been settled. You told her no, and you don't want to, so you won't. The end. No, the eventual fight will be about how you gave her an answer and she kept trying to coerce you into getting her way. Sometimes that fight requires raised voices, cutting conversations short, and taking breaks from interacting. If the hundredth time you say "Oh, thanks, but I don't want to be roommates" doesn't make it through her wishful thinking field and on the 101st try you snap and yell at her to fucking drop it already? Get ready for your sister and any bystanders she can recruit from the rest of your family to treat you like you were the one who caused the conflict and then escalated it unforgivably.
If that happens, please know, it's not because you did a bad job of explaining yourself and should have found different words. It's because you consistently explained yourself just fine and the other person consistently decided to override your consent. Anger is a reasonable, logical response to someone who treats your consent like a passing inconvenience. I hope it doesn't get to that point, but if it does, you can offer your sister a choice: There's no universe where you end up living together, so does she want to live in the one where you live separately but stay close and enjoy your friendship, or the one where you keep having the same stupid fight over and over until you'd rather miss out on seeing her than have it even one more time? Let's hope she makes good choices.
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