A walk up a couple flights of stairs leads to a cozy third floor apartment, quiet as can be and decorated modestly in a style mixing classic hippie culture with modern understatements. Two black and white kittens scurry about playfully, while a small tortoise keeps his ground in a well-lit tank.
This is the home of Tufts junior Roxanne Samer. While the size of her apartment is standard for most off-campus student residences, its slightly longer distance from campus and its sheer silence lead one to question whether Samer is indeed still in school.
Her living arrangement, in which she lives with her boyfriend of one-and-a-half years, adds to the doubts. Samer has skipped the intermediate stage of living in a house with her friends and moved straight from dorms into a shared apartment with her significant other.
"We did the long distance thing for most of sophomore year," Samer said, "and it just wasn't working. It was a serious enough relationship that we wanted to move in together."
So, last spring, Samer went home and returned a week later in a moving truck with her boyfriend, John Strickland.
Now that they are together, Samer said they are happy. "We're definitely pleased with the arrangement," she said.
Samer and Strickland met in their hometown of Eugene, Ore., while she was in middle school and he was in high school. Both were members of the same chess team, and they also saw each other every Saturday.
"There's this really cute caf´ in Eugene," she said. "There was a young feel to it, and he was in an older group of kids, and I was in a younger, and it wasn't organized at all, but we would hang out together."
Strickland, 25, is five years older than Samer. He attended the University of Oregon, which is in Eugene, while Samer was in high school. The two remained just friends during that time, however, and did not speak regularly until her freshman year at Tufts, when they had nightly phone conversations. Samer said that they officially began dating on the first day she returned home from freshman year.
Samer said that both she and Strickland view their decision to cohabit as a development in their relationship, but that they are not in any rush to move on to marriage. "We are very open and communicative," she said. "We both view this as a stage in our relationship, but we are both young and plan to stay at this stage for a while."
Luke Stillman (LA '06) and Jillian Rennie (LA '06) are another couple who shared the same house last year while they were seniors at Tufts. The two started dating in late fall of their freshman year.
Rennie, like Samer, viewed their decision to cohabit as a stage in her relationship. "I don't think of it as accelerating our relationship, [but] more of a natural progression," she said.
For Stillman and Rennie, the decision to live together was also a move of convenience. "We chose to live together because junior year we stayed in apartments on opposite sides of campus, and frequently with our busy schedules we wouldn't see each other as frequently as we'd like. [Moving in together] made things easy," Stillman said.
Rennie added, "We had two empty bedrooms in my apartment, and he [Luke] and his remaining roommate moved into them. I was also sick of walking all the way back to Bromfield [Rd.] from his Capen St. apartment in the middle of the night."
Not all Tufts students, however, place a high priority on the convenience of living with their significant others.
Junior Jennifer Brier said that she was satisfied with living in a separate house from her boyfriend of just over a year. "I can go there when I want to, and he can come here if he wants to," she said.
Rennie said that although she and Stillman moved into the same house, they still maintained some breathing room. "We kept separate bedrooms because we both like to have private space to work in and retreat to," she said.
Brier said she would not consider moving in with her boyfriend while she is still in college. "For me it would not be a good idea right now," she said.
Brier explained that if she lived with her boyfriend, she would be tempted to spend all of her time with him and neglect other parts of her life, such as schoolwork.
"It would be a distraction to some extent," she said. "I wouldn't get a lot done."
Samer, though, said she has performed better in her classes and felt less school-related stress since she started sharing her apartment with Strickland.
"My grades have significantly improved. I [am] a lot less stressed," she said.
"[Strickland] understands when I need to study," she added.
Rennie also said her decision to live with Stillman boosted her quality of life as well as the health of their relationship.
"I think it was a definite positive for our relationship because we got to share a lot more of the day, and it was never stressful to find time to spend with each other," she said.
A study titled "Living Together in College: Implications for Courtship" released in the Feb. 1981 issue of the "Journal of Marriage and Family" (little academic literature on the subject released after the 1980s exists) concluded that college students who cohabit "tend to be less religious than other college students ... and more liberal."
"I have a slight religious background," Samer said. "I attended Christian school for middle school, but neither of us is that religious. We [were not] told that we're not allowed to live together ... We don't have pastors or priests or rabbis telling us what to do."
Samer also said her parents approved of her and Strickland's decision.
"We both have very open-minded liberal parents who approve, or at least allow us to make our own decisions," she said.
The study also reported that college students who cohabit are less committed to maintaining their relationship than married couples who live together.
"I've read that too," Rennie said. "I think it's impossible to generalize."
