Rooming with your best friend in college might seem like the best idea ever. After all, it’s your best friend, so it will be a blast, right?

Not necessarily. Just because you’ve shared everything with your pal in the past, from crayons to crushes, doesn’t mean you should share a living space.

Before you decide to move in with your BFF, consider the reasons why rooming with your best friend in college is a bad idea — for you and your friend.

Your social life can take a hit.

When you live with your best friend in the world, it can be hard to push yourself to make new friends. What’s more, the two of you can be an intimidating twosome to new friends who might feel excluded by your inside jokes and shared history.

Living with a new roommate will expand your horizons times two: you get to meet new people on your own, plus you get to meet all your best friend’s roommates and their friends too!

You may miss out on new experiences.

Just as you are less likely to seek out new friendships if you already have a close friend in your own home, you’re less likely to seek out new experiences if you and your best friend can keep to your usual routine.

If you have so much fun together staying in every Friday eating junk food and watching movies, you have less incentive to get out of the dorm and try new extracurricular activities or attend fun social events and mixers that are totally out of the ordinary for you.

Your old habits will be harder to break.

In a similar vein, living with your best friend is likely to keep you in the same old habits, whether it’s what you eat for breakfast or what you watch on television.

The joy of living with new and different people who you don’t know that well is getting to know them – and letting them introduce you to the cool things they like that you might otherwise never try.

Even mundane stuff, like a meal you’ve never tasted that your new roommate likes to cook, can be fun when you’re trying it for the first time.

Your friendship is likely to go downhill.

Dealing with any roommate has its stressful moments. Living with a roommate can result in serious horror stories; it’s tough to share your space, split up chores evenly and always be considerate of everyone’s feelings.

Living with a best friend can be even harder because you’re likely to spend way more time with your best friend than you would with a regular roommate – meaning that you’re likely to get sick of one another.

Plus, do you really want to start fighting with your best friend about whose turn it is to take out the garbage? Wouldn’t you rather be complaining to your best friend about how your stupid roommate refuses to take out the garbage?

Your work ethic (and wallet) is sure to suffer.

Living with a best friend can be extremely fun – maybe even a little too much! I specifically didn’t live with my best friend in college because I knew we would end up partying together every night, spending way too much money and letting schoolwork slip.

She may have been my best friend and the most fun person I knew at school, but I knew that putting the two of us together as roommates was a recipe for disaster. I never regretted my decision not to room with my best friend in college: our friendship didn’t suffer and we’re still best friends today.

Are you living with your best friend? Or did you decide to live with new classmates? Tell us about your college roommate experiences in the comments below!